In many cases, rhetoric from the election had transformed in the children’s minds into doomsday scenarios. “Are we going to be sent back to the places we were born tomorrow?” one 8-year-old reportedly asked Angela B., a music teacher at a school in southwest Philadelphia. Angela is white, but virtually all of her students are children of color, and many fear Trump’s election means instant deportation or worse. “I’m going to die today,” a first-grader at her school said as he got out of his family’s car Wednesday morning. He’d heard that as president, Trump would push a button and send a bomb that would blow everyone up. Aly A., who teaches science at a high-poverty and predominantly black middle school in Miami, said two students on separate occasions asked her whether the new presidential administration would reinstate slavery.

At Dolores T. Aaron Academy on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, the music teacher Andy Bower’s morning started with a question from a student that was hard to answer. “Can you keep me safe?” a fifth-grade black girl reportedly asked Bower, a white man. “I saw the news this morning.” He gave her a hug and tried to reassure her.

“They see the speeches and they hear the sound bites and they don’t necessarily have a ton of context for how the political process works,” Bower said. “So to a kid, if someone says ‘I’m going to deport people’ and then they win the presidency, they don’t necessarily understand what sort of steps would have to be taken to do that.”

“They are upset, and they think that somehow this new president can change things right away,” said Angela, the Philadelphia teacher. “But as educators and people they trust, we need to keep reminding them that they are cared for and protected and, as much as we can, we’re going to stick up for them.”

Many students, of course, didn’t need to be convinced that the election would turn out all right. “I’m happy Trump won,” was a sentiment whispered in Karissa Devore’s first-grade classroom at an international school in Denver full of multilingual, multicultural kids who she said mostly felt scared. How could she prevent kids who shared that sentiment from being ostracized, while reassuring the others? “The general sense of disbelief that was pervading among adults was affecting them and making them feel uncertain,” Devore said, “and with little kids, that’s not a good thing for them to feel.”

Patricia Farley, a middle-school English teacher in Phoenix, said she explained to her students that “Donald Trump’s vision is to unite America and make it strong again. I believe that he can, and will, do that. But only if people come together.” Emphasizing that all her students, including some who are undocumented, are “her babies,” Farley, a former Marine, said she’s used Trump’s campaign as an opportunity to talk with them about immigration policy. The president-elect, she said, doesn’t hate Mexicans; he simply believes that “people need to go through the proper channels to legally immigrate.” That conversation led to discussions in her classroom about the definition of “illegal” as well as the immigration policies in other countries.