Ever since the Trump administration announced a few weeks ago that it was withholding billions in congressionally-approved funding from schools nationwide, Beth Chambers has been in a mad scramble.
Her mission: preserve the North Country Supervisory Union’s after-school program, which serves 1,100 children in Newport and surrounding towns. Nearly 70% are low-income, and a quarter are on special education plans. Families in the district’s working-class communities badly need the after-school care to get to work, she said.
The state has been able to help schools by offering them carry-over funds to plug some of the gaps, but the NCSU still had to find $220,000 to make up the remaining shortfall. So it shifted money from other sources, including Medicaid and a grant funded by cannabis taxes. But this plan still requires sign-offs from the state — and federal cash the district is counting on to stop evaporating.
“We are hoping that the school year will look like full programming, but the funding sources are almost all amorphous at this point,” Chambers said.
And salvaging one program will require sacrifices elsewhere. The district will probably have to axe after-school care on early release days, Chambers said, as well as the food and child care it had planned to fund on Town Meeting Day.
By and large, local school officials report that they’ve been able to shield summer programming from the impact of the freeze. But what’s in store for the upcoming school year is harder to predict.
In Barre, School Superintendent JoAn Canning said the ever-changing information about what money will or won’t arrive from Washington is almost as bad as the underlying loss of funding.
“You don't understand what the next step is going to be, right? It's hard to plan,” she said.
Vermont has been disproportionately impacted by this latest Trump administration freeze. Nearly 21% of its federal K-12 funding is tied up in the grants that the government is withholding, according to an analysis by the Learning Policy Institute, a national think tank. All told, state officials say Vermont schools stand to lose about $26 million.
In Vermont, the single largest tranche of funding caught up in the freeze is roughly $10.8 million for teacher training. And while such a loss may not be as immediately visible to students and families as program and staff cuts, local officials say that money does matter — particularly as Vermont attempts to prop up sagging test scores.
“The research is clear. The biggest effect on student learning is the skills and knowledge and effectiveness of the teacher in the classroom with them,” Maple Run Superintendent Bill Kimball said Thursday.
But program cuts are also on the table in Maple Run, particularly for its after-school program in St. Albans City. Because parents rely on that service to be able to go to work, Kimball said the district will prioritize coverage over variety. Parents should be able to count on the same amount of hours in after-school care — but their children might have fewer program options when they get there.
The freeze is subject to pending litigation. Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, alongside 23 other states, filed suit Monday against the Trump administration to restore the funding. It was the 22nd lawsuit the state has joined against the president since he resumed office in January.
“Once again, the President wishes to unconstitutionally undo appropriations made by Congress. The President does not have the power to freeze these funds — funds that Vermont schools are counting on,” Clark said in a statement.
To honor employment contracts that were signed in the spring, Winooski Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria said he may ask his school board in a special meeting to raid the district’s already depleted reserves. The hundreds of thousands of dollars at risk in Winooski, the only majority-minority district in the state, are braided into a host of the district’s programs, including multilingual supports, an on-site food pantry and tutoring.
“Do we keep tutoring and cancel a literacy coach, or do we keep the coach and cancel tutoring?” he said. “You can see the wonderful choice I have in my hands.”
He’s hopeful that maybe the state’s lawsuit will bear fruit. (A separate pot of federal education money was unfrozen last month following litigation.) But he also thinks the state needs to stand at the ready to help schools financially if this funding isn’t restored — or more is withheld.
And Chavarria worries that the decision the governor and Legislature made to spend $118 million in surplus dollars just a few months ago to buy down the property tax rate will leave the state less able to absorb federal cuts.
“Our options are more limited now, but I think the state still has a responsibility,” he said.
