Vermont schools should soon be able to access roughly $6.5 million in summer and afterschool funding after the Trump administration announced Friday it would release $1.3 billion in previously withheld education money nationwide.
The news will come as welcome relief to working parents who rely on the programming — and school districts that had banked on the money when they built their budgets for the current year. But it leaves over $18 million in congressionally-approved federal funding for Vermont school districts still in limbo, and it underscores the chaotic landscape schools find themselves in under the second Trump administration. This is the second time federal officials have frozen funds to schools with little notice — and then reversed themselves.
On June 30, the U.S. Department of Education abruptly announced that it had decided to hold back nearly $7 billion in education funding pending review. The news came with little explanation — and just weeks before the start of the new school year.
The federal Office of Management and Budget, which is scrutinizing the funds, has told the press it believes schools are using the money to promote a "radical leftwing agenda."
The pause impacted six federal grant programs which pay for migrant education, teacher training, services to English-language learners, mental health supports, afterschool and summer school, and literacy programming.
Twenty-four states, including Vermont, have sued to restore the funding, and argue the move was unconstitutional. But while the lawsuit was led by all Democratic attorneys general and governors, the freeze had earned the president a rare rebuke from the GOP as well. Ten Republican senators wrote to the OMB earlier this week to ask that the money be reinstated.
In Vermont, the money released on Friday supports almost 100 afterschool and summer programs that serve 11,000 students, according to a statement from the office of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Sanders, the ranking member on the influential Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, celebrated Friday's news and demanded Trump officials release the rest of the money.
“The Trump administration is still illegally withholding nearly $5.5 billion in funding,” Sanders wrote. “Congress clearly and unambiguously passed this education funding and the president signed it into law. The Trump administration has no right to withhold or impound it.”
