School district leaders are grappling with the possibility that they’ll see less money from the federal government in the coming years, and they’re worried about the ramifications for students from low-income families, students with disabilities, and others who need special support.
The incoming Trump administration has circulated proposals for a sweeping reduction in federal spending that could include shrinking, consolidating, or outright eliminating funding streams for K-12 schools. The president-elect himself has said he wants to be able to refuse to spend federal money authorized by Congress, and would be willing to argue as much before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Those proposals are still taking shape and will likely face political resistance in Congress. Even so, district leaders are reluctant to assume the status quo will hold.
State education officials in New Jersey have been warning district leaders there to brace for potential federal funding cuts next spring, said Lisa Della Vecchia, superintendent of the Delran school district in the Garden State.
“It’s just so unknown right now,” she said. “It’s alarming.”
Each year, the federal government supplies 8 to 10 percent of the money spent nationwide on public schools. The overwhelming majority of funding comes from state and local sources.
But that small percentage doesn’t tell the full story of the federal government’s fiscal role in K-12 education. Some of the nation’s 13,000 districts rely on federal funding far more than others. Even for districts whose federal aid makes up a tiny fraction of their annual budget, cuts could have dramatic ripple effects.
Nearly every school district benefits to some degree from federal programs geared toward children who need extra support, including Title I for students from low-income families, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for students with disabilities, Title III for English learners, and the McKinney-Vento program for students experiencing homelessness.
Districts also get annual allocations of federal aid if they’re located on federal land and can’t raise sufficient property taxes, or if they’re located in rural areas where they also have difficulty raising enough in property taxes.
Many districts use federal dollars to pay for services they otherwise couldn’t afford.
The 830-student Schoharie school district in upstate New York uses roughly $250,000 in Title I funds to pay the salaries for four reading and math intervention teachers. Another $20,000 in Title IV money for academic enrichment and school climate improvements covers part of the compensation for the district’s school resource officer. Close to $300,000 from the IDEA funding program pays for special education teachers.
All told, roughly half a million dollars, or roughly 2 percent of the district’s annual spending, comes from the federal government. Without that money, Superintendent David Blanchard said, key programs and staff members would disappear.
“We’re a small rural district with just over 800 students and half of the families in the community live below the poverty level,” Blanchard said. “There are no other funding sources that can make up the difference in our budget.”
Even small cuts could have big effects
There’s no guarantee that Trump’s rhetorical promises to defer federal responsibility for education will translate to significant funding cuts for existing programs, said David Knight, a professor of education finance at the University of Washington.
Lawmakers from both parties would face backlash from constituents if they vote to slash aid for students with disabilities, he said. During Trump’s first administration, funding for the five biggest pots of federal aid for schools stayed roughly flat, Knight said, even as Trump proposed major funding cuts in every budget request.
And some Republican lawmakers who favor eliminating the U.S. Department of Education—which would fulfill a Trump campaign pledge—have said they want federal funding for schools to remain.
But that’s not entirely reassuring for the thousands of district leaders who are accustomed to cobbling together budgets from disparate and often-insufficient streams of funding.
The Flemington-Raritan district in New Jersey last year received $450,000 in Title I funds from the federal government. That’s a miniscule share of the district’s annual $72 million operating budget—but it’s crucial all the same, said Kari McGann, the district’s superintendent.
“We strategically use that funding for things that we couldn’t otherwise afford,” she said.
This past year, her team prioritized field trips to places students might not otherwise be able to afford to visit, like the zoo and a pumpkin farm. They also started a regular social event program designed to help parents and students form closer bonds with teachers in an informal setting. (A body of research has shown that students with close connections to their teachers and engaged parents are more likely to perform well academically.)
One elementary school in the district has a growing population of students from low-income households, in large part because of new apartment complexes built to fulfill court-ordered mandates for affordable housing in every New Jersey municipality. Next school year, for the first time, more than 40 percent of that school’s student population will come from low-income families.
As a result, that school will earn a full Title I designation, which means the district can spend the money it receives through that program to support all students.
“Now we can invite [to the social events with teachers] other students and their families who might also need that service who are very close to being economically disadvantaged but aren’t quite there,” McGann said.
The district also uses federal money to offer English learners three weeks of school during the summer before they start kindergarten. “When they walk in on the first day with their English-speaking peers, they have more of a leg up,” McGann said.
Without funding from the federal Title III program, which funds supplemental services for English learners, the district would likely have to cut that opportunity, as well as after-school programming geared toward English learners, McGann said.
State and local conditions will also shape the effect of federal funding cuts
Federal funding cuts wouldn’t happen in a vacuum. They would be another factor for districts to consider alongside shifting aid priorities from their states, local appetites for tax increases, and broader economic conditions over which they have little control.
The Flemington-Raritan district applied earlier this year for a federal grant to support its investment in bilingual counseling services. But the application was rejected.
Instead, the district will ask voters this March to approve a local tax increase to cover growing costs.
“Because the eggs were in that basket, now we’ve got to regroup and try something else,” McGann said.
In West Virginia, schools are now required to have an instructional aide in every classroom for students in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades. But districts have to pay for those positions with their own money because the state didn’t offer any supplemental aid when it passed the new requirement.
In the state’s Pocahontas County school district, special education aides have flocked to fill those roles, leaving openings the district must fill to meet its legal obligations for providing special education services, said Sherry Radcliff, the district’s treasurer.
At the same time, enrollment trends are also straining the district’s budget, as the amount of state aid it receives is based largely on how many students are enrolled. The district has lost 300 students in the last decade, and now enrolls slightly fewer than 900 students. The percentage of students with disabilities, meanwhile, has grown over the same period, from 16 percent to 20 percent.
With no state funding increases on the horizon, and no local appetite to raise taxes, Radcliff has no choice but to operate on razor-thin margins.
She even feels the effects of budget strain in her own understaffed office.
“It’s nothing for me to work for 16 hours a day,” she said. “I’ve been here since 2013, and the magnitude of the workload that they have put on us treasurers keeps increasing, with no more staffing.”
Ripple effects from reduced funding can persist for years
Even before Republicans won control of Congress and Trump won the presidency, districts were already preparing for fiscal turbulence in the upcoming school years. Federal pandemic relief aid has dried up, leaving many districts to scale back services.
That’s just one factor of many keeping district leaders up at night, though.
The Delran school district for the last seven years has received supplemental funding from the state to make up for cuts that resulted from New Jersey’s broader K-12 funding formula adjustments. Next school year, the district will no longer get that state aid.
As a result, for the first time in a decade, the district is drafting an operating budget for next year with flat funding across the board.
“Nobody can ask for anything unless it’s related to the health and safety of our students,” said Della Vecchia, the district’s superintendent.
Della Vecchia is already gaming out the potential ripple effects from losing federal funds. Districts could face more lawsuits from parents alleging that schools aren’t meeting their legal obligations to accommodate their children with disabilities. They could then face compounding financial distress as legal fees pile up and administrative staff are stretched thin.
What worries Della Vecchia most, though, is experiencing a repeat of what happened in her state in the years following the 2008 recession. Dozens of jobs for non-tenured teachers were casualties of then-Gov. Chris Christie’s sweeping austerity push.
“It was really hard,” Della Vecchia said. “It took another three to five years to rebuild after that.”
