Half of the staff has been fired and sweeping cuts have been made to programs and research
By Amy Feiereisel, Community Engagement Reporter for NCPR
One of President Donald Trump’s big campaign promises was to eliminate the federal Department of Education.
Since coming into his second term, he’s been trying to make good on that promise.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
His administration has fired roughly half of the department’s staff and made sweeping cuts to programs and research. On March 20, Trump signed an executive order calling for the US Department of Education to be dismantled.
Here’s what that means for New York schools and North Country districts.
What kind of federal funding do New York and North Country districts receive?
All North Country districts receive some amount of federal funding each year, and it usually represents between 2 and 8% of school budgets.
That money is earmarked for things like teacher trainings and to hire people to support English language learners.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
But the biggest pots of federal funding are to support children with physical and learning disabilities, and for schools that are rural and/or low-income. The North Country has a lot of those.
“Schools that are identified as high poverty receive title money to support those high poverty students,” said Lee Kyler, the Elementary School Principal for Elizabethtown’s Boquet Valley Central School District and former Special Education teacher.
He said title funding is what districts use to hire reading teachers and fund behavior intervention programs positions. It’s how they provide “services for our most needy students,” said Kyler. “That’s how we close the literacy gap for our students, how we support students with behaviors who may or may not have an IEP.”
It’s those students that Kyler worries about he hears calls for the U.S. Department of Education to be shuttered.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
That possibility feels a lot closer than it ever has before.
Trump’s attacks on the US Department of Education
On March 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order telling his Secretary of Education to dismantle the department to the best of her abilities.
His administration has made DEEP cuts to department staff, programs, and research.
It’s demanded school districts certify they’ve removed any programs that fall under the Diversity-Equity-Inclusion umbrella, under threat of having funding pulled.
The Adirondack Explorer thanks its advertising partners. Become one of them.
And it’s gutted the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which Kyler says protects the rights of students with physical or educational disabilities, essentially giving parents the ability to file federal complaints if they have concerns about the services their child is receiving, or if they think their child has been discriminated against.
“As a parent of a child with disabilities and as an administrator, I know that’s an important right that we often highlight to families,” said Kyler. “It really is parents being afforded rights for their children.”
With few staff to look into parents’ claims, or that function relegated to another federal department with less stringent rules, disability advocates worry families will have no real recourse.
The Office for Civil Rights office handled almost 23,000 claims in 2024.
“There’s a big question of if that if that office ceases to exist, who’s going to be responsible for looking at those claims?” said Bianca Fortis, a reporter for NY Focus. She’s reported on the potential impacts of shuttering the federal education department.
“And certainly states that are more progressive, like New York, might they might be willing to take that on,” said Fortis. “But other states that are a little more conservative, where civil rights is less of a priority, we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
A longtime goal for Republican presidents, but a new pathway of getting there
This is part of what Trump and other Republican leaders say that they want: to return all power over education to the states, ie. If a state doesn’t want to investigate discrimination claims, it shouldn’t have to.
That’s not a new desire, said Fortis.
“Trump is not the first Republican president who has pushed the idea that we should close the the Department of Education, but he’s probably the one who’s pushed it the most,” she said.
The reason why no one has done it is simple; The US Department of Education was created by an act of Congress in 1979. That means it can only be closed by an act of Congress.
That stymied President Trump in his first term, when Betsy DeVos, his education secretary, submitted budget after budget that slashed funding for the department. “She had to defend this in front of Congress. And those proposals were repeatedly rejected by Congress,” said Fortis.
In his second term, it seems Trump is trying to effect the change he wants through executive orders, and by ordering the closing of programs and firing staff.
Many of those actions are being challenged as unconstitutional in the courts. But in the meantime, there are fewer people still employed to do the same amount of work.
Federal chaos has impacts on local districts
That concerns educators like Boquet Valley Elementary Principal Lee Kyler, who wonders: who will answer the phones? Process funding applications? Answer questions from state education departments?
“That’s a worry that I have is the turn around for things like applications for title or for IDEA funding,” he said. “Literally, who’s opening the mail and answering the emails?”
Brandon Pelkey is the Superintendent of Malone Central School District. He says dismantling the federal education department isn’t something to take lightly or do without an articulated plan, because of the stakes.
“It’s a slippery slope to be on when you don’t know what kind of oversight will be provided,” said Pelkey. “I just worry that things will fall through the cracks and it’s going to be the kids that are going to be detrimentally impacted by this.”
When asked about who will manage huge programs and amounts of money, including student loans, the Trump administration has said that those functions will be given to other agencies better suited to manage them.
President Trump himself has said he’ll move already said he is moving the “student loan portfolio” to the Small Business Administration and programs for students with disabilities to the Department of Health and Human Services “immediately,” although no action has been taken since that statement.
Pelkey has doubts moving functions can be done effectively, or at all, in the current efforts to drastically shrink the federal workforce. He pointed to the work of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.
“They’re dismantling everything,” he said. “So you know, if you say you’re gonna take something out of the federal education department, and you’re dismantling another department…you may not have a place to actually put it anymore.”
For example, Trump promised that programs for students with disabilities will be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services. Less than two weeks later, his administration announced mass layoffs at the HHS, which will axe roughly a quarter of the department’s workforce.
Worries about school meal funding
It’s important to note that schools are not reporting that they are feeling the impacts of layoffs and changes in the federal education department yet. They say it will take time for federal disfuction to trickle down to their daily work.
What they are they starting to seriously worry about is the lunchroom, specifically school meal funding, which is actually managed through the USDA.
“There is a lot of funding from the federal government that flows into our child nutrition programs locally,” said Dale Breault, the Superintendent of the Franklin-Essex-Hamilton BOCES.
One of the first programs cut after Trump took office was a Biden-era purchasing program, which gave schools money to buy local food. $660 million dollars, which was announced last October, has been rescinded, even though many schools had already signed purchasing agreements with farmers and ranchers.
A program the USDA operates that is used in essentially all North Country schools is the Community Eligibility Program, or CEP, which reimburses high-poverty schools for providing free breakfast and lunch for their students.
A Republican Congressman in Texas has introduced a bill to cut that program by 12 billion dollars, by making fewer schools eligible for the funding.
Breault says that would include many North Country schools. “So that a lot of the universal free meal programs that have been put into place in our school districts, they may change the rules midstream,” he said, “and a lot of the schools that put that into place will now be forced to either fund them locally or not be able to offer them any longer.”
Lee Kyler, from Bouquet Valley Central School District, says his district has provided free breakfast and lunch since 2019, and it makes a big difference for its students. The district wouldn’t qualify under the proposed new rules.
“And that that is a huge impact that is…that is unknown,” said Kyler.
Kyler is optimistic that even if all their federal funding disappeared, and free meals were no longer free, North Country districts would take care of their students. But he says they would have to find other places to reduce costs.
He says he and other administrators are fielding questions from a lot of worried families right now, and it’s hard to have to say: we don’t know. “Which doesn’t feel good. Because we’re supposed to have the answers,” he said. “We are supposed to know what’s happening.”
Kyler says it’s certainly making budget season a bit more fraught.
Districts will propose budgets to their communities soon, while hoping that funding they previously relied still exists in the next school year.
Leave a Reply