Education Department cuts threaten summer learning programs
Uncertainty over Education Department funding won't go on vacation when the school year ends because the cuts also threaten vital summer learning programs.
The big picture: Summer learning programs are essential for kids and working parents alike because federally-funded programs offer enrichment, academic support, social interaction and basic needs, like access to healthy food.
"For every child that's in a program, there's a parent of at least one more that wants their kid to be in a program, but they don't have access," Afterschool Alliance Executive Director Jodi Grant said.
Her group anticipates an "an even larger shortage of summer learning."
Driving the news: Organizers are "very uncertain and anxious" about hosting summer programs while facing upheaval at the Education Department and broad spending cuts, Grant said.
While the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program — a critical funding stream that supports summer, afterschool and before-school programs — remains intact, the first Trump administration repeatedly pushed to eliminate it.
"I'm worried that when it comes to cuts, unless we have a separate funding stream that explicitly goes to afterschool and summer, those programs get cut before any other education programs," Grant said.
Zoom out: The Education Department's halt to pandemic aid reimbursement extensions approved by the Biden administration is already hitting summer and afterschool programs.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon alerted state education chiefs in a March 28 letter that the previously prolonged spending period would end that evening, but individual projects may get extensions.
Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann called the Biden administration's decision to extend the spending deadline "an irresponsible precedent" in a statement to Axios.
She said extensions would be considered "on an individual project-specific basis where it can be demonstrated that funds are being used to directly mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on student learning."
Zoom in: For Baltimore City Schools, that meant it would lose around $48 million in reimbursements for funds spent or committed, it said. As a result, it halted tutoring and after-school programs that were funded with pandemic money.
The "catastrophic" end to reimbursements, Maryland officials said, jeopardizes more than $400 million for the state's schools and education department.
What they're saying: In Baltimore, an estimated 12,000 seats will be lost for summer opportunities this year compared to last year, said Ellie Mitchell, director of the Maryland Out of School Time Network.
And it's not just in Baltimore where the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund clawback is being felt, she said, with several districts "saying no summer programs at all."
Even with potential extensions on a program-by-program basis, Mitchell said that without funding in place by Memorial Day, "there's just no way we will recover this summer."
Dismantling the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps — who often work as camp counselors — will further disrupt summer programs, she noted.
"The environment is retrenchment, so everyone is just trying to protect the spaces that they can and being incredibly cautious and conservative about where they are spending money," Mitchell added.
In South Dakota, changes in federal funding caused the cancellation of career exploration summer programs hosted on college campuses throughout the state.
According to the South Dakota Board of Regents, the program served 1,800 students from 2022 to 2024.
The bottom line:"Administrators are holding a lot on their shoulders right now," said Billy Mawhiney, the executive director of the South Dakota Afterschool Network.
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After all, Trump's own mental fitness is far from uncontested: He publicly defended himself from such claims in 2018 by boasting that he was a 'very stable genius.' For those reasons, Trump's own attempt to delegitimize his predecessor's administration would be unlikely to achieve any substantial legal goals. A Supreme Court where one-third of the justices were appointed by Trump is unlikely to agree that a mentally incompetent president's judicial appointees can be removed from the bench by executive fiat. As with Richard III's Titulus Regius, the memorandum's real effect may be as propaganda—grist for the content mills of right-wing media. That this is all arriving ahead of a summer simmering with bad economic headwinds is significant. Even so, it will be hard to distract from the damage wrought by Trump's own administration over the next four years.
