Nearly 50 Sacramento-area students remain trapped in Afghanistan. When will they be rescued?

Sacramento-area school districts are still identifying more students stranded in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, weeks after the U.S. completed its withdrawal from the country.

San Juan Unified School District officials on Monday said 41 students were trapped in Afghanistan — a sharp increase from the two-dozen-or-so the district had previously identified. Of the 41 kids, three were evacuated over the weekend from the war-torn country but remain overseas, district officials said.

Sacramento City Unified officials on Monday said eight students are stranded in Afghanistan. Initially, they’d identified just one family who The Sacramento Bee interviewed. Attendance records as the school year has progressed showed more students were missing, and staff traced their whereabouts to the country.

Principal Nate McGill of Ethel I. Baker Elementary school has been involved in getting the students out. He texts with family members and has been coordinating staff members who are trying to cobble together a plan.

But, he said, progress has been slow. Sometimes it feels nonexistent.

There were two options on the table at the start of last week. The first involved paying about $2,500 to get the family a flight from Kabul to Islamabad, across the border in Pakistan. That fell through because the family didn’t qualify for visas into that country at the time, McGill said.

Then, later in the week, another option was under discussion. A person from a third-party group that has connections to the country read The Bee’s reporting. Reporters put them in touch with McGill. The group has since been in contact with the family and is working to get them out. If they can get across the border, McGill said he and a handful of others from the Sacramento area will pay for the flight to get them back to the U.S.

“This is like a back-up, sort of secret-ops plan,” McGill said.

It’s unclear if that plan is still on the table or when they might be given a green light.

When will kids get out of Afghanistan?

In the chaotic month since the Taliban stormed into Kabul, uncertainty has increased by the day, both for Sacramento families who remain in Afghanistan and those on the ground here trying to get them out. Some families were turned away from evacuation flights, and others were near the blast at the Kabul airport, where Sacramento-area students witnessed violence, gunfire and bombings that killed scores of people, according to Sacramento City Unified officials.

School districts have emerged as the primary purveyor of information about the missing kids. The problem? They too are caught in a lurch, scrambling for piecemeal details — about family trees and travel itineraries and international diplomacy.

School districts in Sacramento reported having about 1,500 students with direct connections to Afghanistan enrolled at the start of this year. While some of those relatives might be U.S. citizens, many are not. For years, students have traveled from Sacramento to Kabul to visit loved ones, including grandparents, aunts and uncles.

Now, schools are relying on attendance records to identify who might be missing.

“It really needs to be a coordinated effort by the government because these families are in danger,” Kent Kern, superintendent of San Juan Unified, said Monday in an interview with Capital Public Radio. “We promised them when they were supporting our country, that we would be there to help them.”

Absent a focused government extraction effort, Kern said it would fall on third-party groups and potentially risky plans that involve smuggling students and their families into neighboring countries and evading hostile security forces.

“Until we see a concerted effort from the government, any means necessary to get these folks home is really what we want to see happen.”

Officials say they are in contact with families, coordinating with the State Department and pressuring Afghanistan’s new leaders.

“If the new Afghan government, the Taliban, want to have any hopes of working with the United States, they better work with us to let those students out, as well as other American citizens,” U.S. Rep. Ami Bera, D-Elk Grove, told The Bee earlier this month.

Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, likewise said in a statement that getting the students back was “of utmost importance.”

“We are in communication with families regularly and continue to fiercely advocate daily on their behalf in our communications with the Department of State and federal partners,” she said. “We are hopeful for the safe return of these students and their families as the Department of State continues their efforts.”