'Trump Effect' Leading to Fear, Bullying in Schools: Report

The 2016 presidential campaign is "producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color" in classrooms nationwide, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit civil rights organization.

The report is based off responses from 2,000 teachers to an unscientific online survey created by the SPLC's Teaching Tolerance project, the SPLC wrote in a news release on Wednesday.

Teachers across the U.S. "reported an increase in the bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates," the release said.

Titled "The Trump Effect: The impact of the presidential campaign on our nation's schools," the report found that GOP front-runner Donald Trump was of particular concern to scores of teachers who cited his comments about deporting undocumented immigrants, building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and banning all Muslims from entering the country.

Out of 5,000 total comments in the survey, more than 1,000 mentioned Trump, though the survey did not identify any of the candidates by name in its questions, the report said. In comparison, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were named fewer than 200 times together, according to the report.

More than two-thirds of teachers said students -- mainly immigrants, children of immigrants and Muslims -- "expressed concerns or fears about what might happen to them or their families after the election."

"My students are terrified of Donald Trump," said one teacher from a middle school with a large population of African-American Muslims, according to the report. "They think that if he's elected, all black people will get sent back to Africa."

Another teacher said that a Latino child in her kindergarten class has been asking every day "Is the wall here yet?" after being told by classmates he would be deported and blocked from returning by a wall.

The report also noted that more than a third of the teachers who responded "observed an increase in anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiment."

A number of teachers said Muslim students were being called "terrorists" or "ISIS," and one teacher noted that a fifth grader told a Muslim student "that he was supporting Donald Trump because he was going to kill all of the Muslims if he became president!"

Another problem instructors noted was that this kind of rhetoric isn't just coming from other students at school but also from social media, TV, radio, newspapers and rallies, so the sources of kids' "fear" and "anxiety" are coming from many different directions.

Meanwhile, educators have been left unsure about how to respond to such incidents and how to teach about the presidential campaign, if they choose to do so at all, according to Maureen Costello, the report's lead author and director of Teaching Tolerance.

"It's a difficult situation where if they act completely neutral nonpartisan, they look like they're supporting bullying, but if they denounce it, they're in danger of looking like they're in favor of or against a candidate," Costello told ABC News today. "In elementary school, half of teachers have decided to avoid it, and in middle and high schools, we're seeing more who have decided, for the first time, not to be neutral.

Costello said while she's "certainly worried on one hand," she's also encouraged by the fact that "most teachers said they haven't seen students this interested and engaged in a presidential election in years."

"We can take advantage of this as teachers and invite important discussions such as how a president should behave and what's fair and what's not," Costello said. "These kinds of important dialogue just may get more young people voting in the future."

The Trump campaign has not responded to ABC News' request for comment.