Electric school bus purchases. School-based composting programs. Education programs for aspiring teachers. Services for students with disabilities transitioning out of high school.
These are a few of the activities affecting K-12 schools that remain paused or have been halted as President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to freeze spending and cancel scores of contracts backed by funding appropriated by Congress.
The administration in the last month has moved to terminate grants, excise contracts, and freeze funding streams worth billions of dollars for efforts that don’t align with its priorities—defying decades of constitutional precedent and prompting multiple court orders from federal judges demanding the funds continue to flow.
Even as announcements of executive orders and new policies pass through the news cycle, schools are continuing to feel the impacts of the Trump administration’s crackdown on federal spending in a wide variety of ways.
The freezes have hit plans to make school buildings more energy-efficient, initiatives to replace diesel buses with clean-energy alternatives, early childhood education providers, efforts to boost pedestrian safety near school campuses, services for helping high school students with disabilities transition to adulthood, and mental health supports for middle schoolers. Services outside the school context, including food banks, housing agencies, and wildfire reduction, have also been affected.
The school district in Little Rock, Ark., last May ordered 25 electric school buses that were set to transport students with disabilities to and from school beginning this coming fall. The district worked with a contractor late last year to destroy 25 of its diesel buses in order to follow the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rules for the district’s $8.6 million rebate on the purchase of new electric buses.
Being short 25 school buses for the second half of the school year was already going to be a challenge, said Linda Young, the district’s director of grants. Now the district faces the possibility that it trashed 25 diesel buses for nothing, and won’t get any federal help replacing them.
District leaders were excited that the new buses don’t emit as many toxic fumes as their diesel predecessors. Many of the district’s students with disabilities struggle with asthma, Young said.
“Getting them a clean ride to school is really a boon to their health, and helps them get their day started off on the right foot to have a good day academically,” Young said.
Some school-based efforts that federal money was set to cover were just days from getting underway. In southern California, the environmental nonprofit Sustainable Claremont was preparing to start work on constructing 10 rain gardens, 10 native plant gardens, and 10 on-site composting programs at public schools in the San Gabriel district.
But since late January, the $2 million grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fueling these efforts has been frozen. If the money doesn’t come through soon, the nonprofit will have no choice but to move on to other projects.
“These are places that really need the support, and were super on board to get things going,” said Stuart Wood, executive director of Sustainable Claremont.
But, Wood said, “I don’t have three or five more months of payroll in the bank account to work on something if we don’t know if we’re going to be reimbursed.”
Efforts to cut spending began as the administration took office
The Trump administration has taken several steps to slash federal spending during its first month in office—each prompting political uproar and a slew of court challenges.
On Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order aiming to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” tied to climate-focused spending packages approved by Congress during the Biden administration.
A week later, the federal Office of Management and Budget announced that all federal grant funding across the government would be suspended, and then two days later announced that it would reverse that plan.
Two federal judges, in separate cases, have ordered the administration to keep all federal funds flowing. District Judge John McConnell Jr. issued another order on Feb. 10 saying that the Trump administration wasn’t complying with his original order to temporarily halt the spending freeze.
Eight days later, that is still the case. Even after OMB announced it was rescinding the Jan. 27 freeze memo, a wide range of funding recipients have said they’ve struggled to regain access to the federal money they’re owed.
Representatives for the Education Department and the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t answer requests for comment in time for publication.
Some of the key federal funding streams for schools haven’t been disrupted so far, including Title I for districts with large populations of students from low-income households, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for services for students with disabilities, and the National School Lunch program for student meals. Schools get most of their operating money from state and local sources, which are entirely separate.
Even so, district leaders across the country are scrambling to take stock of how federal money fits into their budgets and bracing for further disruption to come. Some state education departments are urging districts to ramp up advocacy for additional resources, and to safeguard the federal money they’re already owed.
Districts “are strongly encouraged to make timely reimbursement requests, preferably monthly and at least quarterly,” the Minnesota education department wrote to district leaders on Feb. 13. Districts often wait until the end of the school year to submit one federal reimbursement request for the entire year’s worth of expenses covered by federal grants, said Sam Snuggerud, the agency’s director of communications.
“The goal is to encourage accounting best practices and mitigate financial harm should there be another sudden stop or shift in the flow of federal dollars to schools,” Snuggerud told Education Week.
Federally funded school buses may never arrive
The spending freezes for funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act have directly touched money for schools, including the Clean School Bus program and the Renew America’s Schools grants for upgrading energy systems in school facilities.
In 2022, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded $15 million to a coalition of 13 Illinois school districts. The project plan included investments in electric school buses, solar panels, and microgrids for energy storage—all of which can help districts save on energy costs in the long term and enable school buildings to serve as emergency shelters during local power outages.
Some participating districts have already paid tens of thousands of dollars for design and planning work and were looking to soon be reimbursed with the federal grant money, said Tim Farquer, superintendent of the Mercer County district. Others haven’t yet paid the contractors they hired, and won’t be able to if the federal grant doesn’t come through.
“They’re proof of concept,” Farquer said. “If you put these mechanisms in place, and the market continues to mature, then three to five years down the road, school districts would be able to do it without the incentives. That’s what we’re trying to portray.”
Districts in many states are now wondering whether their electric school bus plans will be put on hold. The same is true for some bus manufacturers and school transportation contractors, including the nationwide provider First Student, that received EPA grant and rebate awards, to ramp up electric bus production and distribution.
Districts that were expecting federal grants to improve energy efficiency might have to cancel their in-progress efforts until the market matures enough for projects like these to become affordable within districts’ finite means, Farquer said.
Without government incentives, though, that may never happen, Farquer said. “The innovation just stops,” he said.
Spending freezes and stoppages—which now include hundreds of millions of dollars in terminated U.S. Department of Education contracts for research and programming—have ripple effects on other areas of school operations.
The Ritenour district in St. Louis budgets $330,000 a year to replace diesel buses that have fallen into disrepair. Chris Kilbride, the district’s superintendent, had hoped the 21 new fuel-efficient buses the district ordered would generate enough long-term savings that he could get rid of that budget line item and shift that money to “teacher salaries and student materials to support learning in the classroom.”
But for more than three weeks, the district’s chief financial officer has been locked out of the portal that would allow him to pull down the $8 million EPA grant that was set to cover the purchase.
“We’re committed to not using local taxpayer dollars for this project,” Kilbride said. “There was a commitment to federal funding, and that’s the way we want to keep it.”
2025-02-18 21:49:33
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