This article has been updated to include additional information about IDEA funds and to correct an incorrect quote.
It’s a national issue with a broad local impact: With half of the U.S. Department of Education’s staff cut, what does that mean for Brevard students?
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that about half the DOE workforce would be slashed, with the Federal Student Aid Office and Office for Civil Rights being most impacted. The Federal Student Aid Office handles student loan and financial aid distribution, while the Office for Civil Rights protects students and teachers from discrimination.
The move was part of the Trump administration’s goal to shut down the agency to cut federal bureaucracy, a mission Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has vowed to carry out.
“We have a dream. And you know what the dream is? We’re going to move the Department of Education,” Trump said during a bilateral meeting with Ireland Prime Minister Michael Martin Wednesday. “We’re going to move education into the states, so that the states — instead of bureaucrats working in Washington — can run education.”
But some see major risks with the effort, which has potential to affect everything from VPK programs to how Brevard students receive, or pay, student loans.
That’s because the Department of Education handles funds that go to districts, students and universities for numerous purposes, such as providing equal education for students from poor communities, loaning college students money to complete a degree, ensuring disabled students receive access to education and helping young kids from low-income households receive a VPK education through programs like Head Start. Without the department, those funds would instead go to states to divvy up. It would be up to each state how the money would be used.
Andrew Spar, president of Florida Education Association, raised concerns about how each state might decide to use those funds.
“In a state like Florida, where we already woefully underfund our public schools, and where we divert dollars away from our public schools on a daily basis, that’s a concern for schools and for districts that they all of a sudden can find themselves significantly short of resources to serve our most at-risk student populations,” Spar said. “That, I think, is the biggest concern that anyone in Florida would have, is … what happens with those dollars?”
Here’s a glance at different areas in which federal funds are utilized by pre-K through post-secondary Space Coast students.
Title I is a program that provides supplemental financial assistance to school districts for kids from low-income families. Ultimately, it should help these students receive a fair education and close educational achievement gaps, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.
In Brevard, Title I funding goes toward helping unhoused students, providing services to migrant children, engaging families in their children’s schooling, staff development and Step FOUR ward VPK and Head Start. Funding comes from the federal department of education, and it’s also generated by the number of low-income students who live in Title I school attendance areas but attend private school.
This year, Brevard has 41 public and charter Title I schools and 33 private schools, according to BPS’ website.
FLORIDA TODAY reached out to Brevard Public Schools’ communication department, Superintendent Mark Rendell and the school board for comment on how they would approach the potential loss of Title I funds. Board member Katye Campbell was the only one to respond via email, saying she believes that those who believe that the dissolution of the Department of Education will mean the end of Title I or IDEA are misinformed or being purposefully inflammatory.
“Both streams of funding are federal law, and the DOE is basically a pass through of those funds to the states,” she said. “In the unlikely event that those funding sources go away, it will be up to the state of Florida, not the individual school boards, to find a way to comply with federal law for students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students.”
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, is a law governing special education in the United States. It guarantees a free, appropriate public education for disabled children and ensures they’ll receive special education and related services such as early intervention, according to DOE.
The law authorizes formula grants to state and discretionary grants to applicants such as state educational agencies, institutions of higher education and nonprofit organizations.
State formula grants are sent to states annually for early intervention services and special education. These grants go to state programs, preschool programs and infants and families programs.
Discretionary grants are awarded through a competitive process. There are six possible grant programs for which agencies, educational institutions and nonprofit organizations can apply.
Special education in Florida is called Exceptional Student Education, or ESE. In her email to FLORIDA TODAY, Campbell said the district does not receive full federal funding for ESE students. The funding they do receive is enough cover about 13% of necessary services, she said, adding that IDEA was supposed to cover 40% originally.
During the 2024 fiscal year, the approved budget showed that the district received revenue funds for IDEA that amounted to $28,316,964.
Lindsay Kubatzky, director of policy and advocacy at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said the staffing cuts will impact the more than 7 million public school students with disabilities.
“The primary role of the Department of Education is to protect and uphold the rights of students and their families,” she said, adding that in the 2023 fiscal year, the Office of Civil Rights handled 6,749 disability-related complaints and resolved about 6,400 of them.
“Slashing the number of committed public servants who work at OCR leaves our students vulnerable to discrimination, harassment, bullying and a lack of a free and appropriate education as codified under law 50 years ago,” Kubatzky said.
“These cuts are not ‘focused on unnecessary or reductive teams,’ as reported. The Department laid off nearly 250 attorneys, many of whom work in states across the country to protect the rights of students with disabilities. This is fundamentally about rolling back hard-fought protections for our most vulnerable and disenfranchised youth.”
How student loans will be handled — and who will handle them — is up in the air. Both Trump and McMahon have said DOE will likely not handle loans in the future, but rather the Small Business Administration or another agency.
“(Student loans) will likely be brought into either Treasury or Small Business Administration or Commerce,” Trump told reporters earlier this month. “I don’t think the education should be handling the loans, that’s not their business.”
McMahon told NewsNation that loans, as well as Pell grants — funds awarded to students who display “exceptional financial need” and generally haven’t earned a degree, according to DOE — “might be best served in another department.”
A March 7 executive order will also make it harder to achieve loan forgiveness through public service, with Trump ordering that individuals not have their loans forgiven if they worked with organizations that “engage in activities that have a substantial illegal purpose.”
The list of the type of activities organizations couldn’t take part in focused on work with migrants, transgender children and protests, with the order laying out that loan forgiveness would not be available to those who aided in the violation of immigration laws, supported terrorism or took part in violence to influence federal government policy, engaged in the “chemical and surgical castration or mutilation” of children or the “trafficking” of children to transgender sanctuary states, took part in “aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” or engaged in violating state state tort laws like obstructing highways or being a public nuisance.
On his first day in office, Trump begun slashing funding for research, starting with threatening grants related to DEI and later cutting funds to the National Institute of Health.
The reimbursement rate from NIH to universities for indirect costs of research would be capped at 15%, the Trump administration said, according to a post by NIH to X. This would be down from an average of about 27% to 28% and would save the government about $4 billion a year.
On March 5, a judge blocked Trump’s administration from carrying out the cuts to federal funding for NIH research. But universities are still bracing for the impact.
Florida Tech has a contingency plan should they lose funding through NIH, according to Hamid Rassoul, chief research officer and senior associate provost for research at the university.
“Florida Tech Facilities & Administrative costs are broad categories of spending in the name of conducting research,” Rassoul said in a statement to FLORIDA TODAY, adding that the school negotiates the rate with the federal government. Right now, the rate for on-campus federal grants and contracts is 44.87%. The proposed reduced rate is 15%.
“With our current F&A rate of approximately 45%, the eight NIH projects generate indirect costs totaling $616,000,” Rassoul said. “Under the proposed reduction of the F&A rate to 15%, the overhead would decrease to $215,000, resulting in a difference of just over $400,000.”
At this point, Florida Tech holds seven active NIH grants. They also received a small NIH subaward as part of a Vanderbilt University-led NIH project. All research projects and their deliverables will be completed as planned, Rassoul said.
University of Central Florida did not respond to FLORIDA TODAY’s request for comment.
Finch Walker is the education reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Walker at fwalker@floridatoday.com. X: @_finchwalker.
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