The Trump administration last week terminated more than $2 billion in federal pandemic relief grants that had been allocated to schools across the country, including $106 million that Massachusetts had yet to spend before the deadline.
Twenty districts were affected by the cuts, along with agencies and two private schools. Springfield Public Schools face the biggest loss, losing more than $47 million in unspent federal education grants. New Bedford schools follow, losing about $16 million, according to the Boston Globe .
“It’s unfortunate,” Paul Reville, the state’s former education secretary, told Boston Public Radio on Thursday. “These are some districts that, I think, wisely chose to spread out their investments.”
Most of the funds were being used for capital investments like installing new HVAC systems, improving security, emergency response systems and, in New Bedford, building an on-campus health clinic. It’s unclear how school districts will navigate outstanding payments to contractors who are still making these improvements, Reville said.
Beyond unspent pandemic relief monies, other funds at risk are categorical grants from the Department of Education, Reville said. These grants are directed to a specific population. For example, Title I grants are specifically for helping districts educate low-income youth, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act gives money for special education.
“The Republican Party wants to make these block grants, which means take off all the provisions, simply give that federal money to the governor. And whatever [the governor] want[s] to spend it on, in education, they can go ahead and do,” Reville said.
Recently, governors in Iowa and Oklahoma have asked the Education Department to consolidate their federal aid into a block grant with few spending requirements, according to the Associated Press . The goal of block grants is to increase local control of how education funds are spent.
However, the Trump administration could not do this alone — Congress would have to vote to change the targets of these grants, Reville said. It’s “ironic,” he said, because while the GOP wants to increase local control, the Trump administration is also dictating schools’ decisions are diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and transgender athletes, and are threatening to withhold funding if states don’t comply.
“All of these things that were supposed to be local prerogatives, suddenly the federal government feels they know better than locals. At the same time, they’re saying, ‘Well, let’s give the money over to locals and let them do it their way.’ So that’s a conflict that needs to be resolved,” Reville said.
Enforcing these mandates could be difficult, Reville noted, because staffing at the Education Department was reduced by half last month. Staffing cuts could also affect families with special needs students, who may use the Office for Civil Rights to address inequities at the local level, Reville said.
More broadly, Reville said he’s disturbed by what higher education cuts mean for the larger economy.
“At a time when virtually every developed nation in the world is investing in higher education and trying to make higher education more accessible and affordable because they see it as critical to the development of their economy, we’re sending a signal that higher education isn’t even important enough to meet the national interest and merit a cabinet seat,” he said.
