The U.S. Department of Education is cutting nearly half of its workforce, and President Donald Trump has said that he wants to see the agency eliminated completely. These major shifts in policy, and in rhetoric, are causing a lot of uncertainty among Vermont educators and state legislators.
In February, the national nonprofit education-focused news organization launched on their website. It lists a week-by-week report on what President Trump has done to dismantle the Department of Education.
Deputy managing editor for The Hechinger Report Christina Samuels said that for K-12 schools, the DOE provides funding for low-income schools, administers rules and distributes money for students with disabilities, and investigates parental complaints into schools and school districts. It also oversees the federal student loan and Pell Grant programs, and researches the best ways to educate students. All of this has been cut, Samuels said.
A recent article from The Hechinger Report , including a rollback of regulations that protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and calls for agencies to focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of sex. Samuels said that complaints of discrimination based on race and LGBTQ+ status are not being investigated right now, though complaints of disability status will continue to move forward.
"The department doesn't have necessarily a direct role in, for example, Vermont's textbook," Samuels explained. "But when it says that certain kinds of ideology are not going to be accepted, I think that a lot of school districts and school leaders are responding to that."
Samuels said that while eyes are on Washington, education really happens at a state level.
"We want to know what's happening in school districts in Vermont and other states or in other states because that's where people are really going to start feeling it," Samuels said. "However many are cut from the Department of Education, that might not be meaningful until the state is trying to draw down funds or find out what happened to a competitive grant, or get a question answered, and there is nobody there to answer that question."
The chair of the Vermont Senate鈥檚 Committee on Education, Democrat Sen. Seth Bongartz of Manchester, said that Vermont can count on some degree of federal funding loss, though it may not happen immediately.
"Because of the way the budget works at the federal level, we may be OK this year and the year after that," he said. "The question is, what happens after that? It's really hard to know what is going to hit us when."
Bongartz said that everything from low-income school funding to money for special education to summer programming is at risk. What happens on a federal level could likely require a backfill on the state level.
"The only way for us to do that is for our systems to position our system to be as effective as it can be, cost efficient, while providing a high quality education," Bongartz said. "If we are going to transform the system, we need the right staff in place."
Vermont's education officials are working to understand the local impacts of the recent gutting of the U.S. Department of Education. Last week, the federal agency announced it was cutting about half its workforce.
Vermont's Education Secretary Zoie Saunders said the changes have been somewhat destabilizing. She said her agency wants to avoid more anxiety, and is working to provide guidance after they evaluate directives from the federal government. Saunders said it's yet to be determined exactly how that will impact Vermont.
"We recently received a letter from the [U.S. Department of Education] that provided more details around where that reduction of force is occurring and which offices are staying largely intact," Saunders said. "That's giving us a better sense of where the potential impacts might be as we look at changes and impacts on Vermont schools."
Saunders went on to say that she is paying particular focus to cuts to education research and to the Office of Civil Rights, which works to protect students with disabilities.
"We do know that the Office of Special Education has not been impacted by the reduction in force, so that is promising as it is related to a goal of continuing to support students with disabilities," Saunders said.
She added that the letter indicated that a lot of the reduction is related to administrative and clerical work and trying to "remove redundancies."
Broadcast live on Monday, March 17, 2025, at noon; rebroadcast at 7 p.m.
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