Classrooms with as few as four or five students. Others doubling up for lack of students. A quiet lunchroom.

Those were the scenes in late January at Skillin Elementary School in South Portland, where more than 28% of students were absent some days at the height of the recent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Maine.

“The only word that I can use to describe it was ‘somber,'” Kristie Scribner said.

Scribner, the school nurse at Skillin, was in the middle of conducting mandatory vision screenings for all students at the K-4 school when the ICE surge began. That process was ultimately delayed more than a week because so many students were absent. Most of those missing school were multilingual.

“We started to hear kids talking amongst themselves, about why they haven’t seen their friend or what they saw in their neighborhood,” she said. “Asking really good and tough questions.”

Daily attendance data during the January ICE enforcement operation, gathered through public records requests by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, shows that more than 4,000 students a day missed school at the height of the operation across some of the state’s largest and most diverse school districts.

Maine school districts do not collect data on student immigration status. But absentee rates for multilingual students — those who are not yet proficient in English — show starkly elevated absences.

More than half of all multilingual students in South Portland, and nearly half in Portland, were absent on some of the most affected days. Between Jan. 20 and 28, Black and Hispanic students in Portland missed school at a rate 30 percentage points higher than their white peers.

Absence rates varied on a school-by-school basis: In Portland, one elementary school was missing as many as 34% of students some days, while others were missing less than 10%. At Biddeford’s PreK-2 school, 23% of all students — and 58% of multilingual students — missed school one especially stark day during the second week of the operation.

David Hilton, a seventh grade social studies teacher at Lyman Moore Middle School in Portland, said the dip in attendance began as teachers and students started hearing about ICE presence in the community — at a nearby apartment complex, at local businesses and up and down Washington Avenue.

“It was very, very scary and, as a result, very quickly, we started to see our attendance drop,” he said. “It just doesn’t feel right when a big chunk of your community is not there.”

Hilton said he was constantly checking on the two students in his advisory — a homeroom-style group of a dozen students — who stopped attending school. In regular classes, he said teachers tried to send laptops with some kids, but not everyone had internet access at home. Some missed the end of their basketball or volleyball seasons.

“It just felt weird and bad and empty,” Hilton said. “Half-empty, I guess. And it felt like we were teaching some of our students, but not others.”

Portland’s school board took up a potential remote learning plan in an emergency meeting on Jan. 29, but board members decided against implementing it because Sen. Susan Collins had announced that morning that ICE’s elevated operations in Maine would end and because attendance rates had already begun to rise.

Since Jan. 28, data show attendance has mostly rebounded, with the exception of Jan. 30, when many students skipped school as part of the nationwide shutdown in protest of ICE.

But school employees say the effects have lingered in the days after Collins’ announcement and into this week. Scribner, in South Portland, has seen an uptick in students with somatic symptoms who are worried about what might happen to their families.

“Our politicians are saying it’s done in Maine but, I think for some children, what they’ve shared is that that they’re afraid it could happen again at any time,” she said.

In her district, teachers continued to provide at-home learning options online through Friday, Superintendent George Entwistle announced in a letter to families. Staff were also asked to reach out to families and figure out what support might be needed for students to return to school.

Portland’s school board directed staff to keep developing the remote learning plan and decided that, if districtwide absences reached 20% again, an emergency meeting would be triggered to revisit the plan.

“I think there’s a great deal of uncertainty amongst all of us,” Hilton said. “Parents and kids and all of us working at school — we don’t know what to expect, so it’s really hard to plan for it.”