President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education will hit Utah’s at-risk kids the hardest, state education groups warned as the administration announced it would transfer many of the federal agency’s critical functions to other parts of the government.
Under an interagency agreement the Trump administration announced Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Labor would take over administration of Title grants, which make up a majority of K-12 federal dollars, according to an Department of Education news release. Title programs primarily support at-risk students, including those with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students and students of color.
It’s a bid by the Trump administration to prove to Congress — which has the lone authority to eliminate the department — that it’s not necessary.
“The Trump Administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in the release. “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission.”
Five other interagency agreements were also unveiled Tuesday, moving programs that support Native American students, provide child care for college-attending parents and assist low-income college students to other agencies. All were signed Sept. 30, just before the government shutdown that furloughed most Education Department employees, Education Week reported.
While states would continue to receive Title funds, according to a Department of Education fact sheet, the new partnership with the Department of Labor would emphasize empowering “states to use federal investments to foster a more competitive and prosperous workforce.”
Still, the Utah Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, warned that an eventual “gutting” of the Department of Education would have a “significant effect” on Utah’s public schools.
“Class sizes will grow, leaving students with less one-on-one attention and individualized support,” UEA president Renée Pinkney said in a statement. “Rural, suburban and urban districts alike will lose critical funding, hitting lower-income families the hardest. Students with disabilities and their families will lose the coordinated services they depend on at school and at home.”
But Utah lawmakers are already discussing potentially walking away from millions in federal dollars, citing a desire to be free of the “strings attached” to federal education money.
Federal dollars make up a relatively small portion of Utah’s overall education budget, an estimated 7% for the current fiscal year — or $598.7 million out of a total budget of $8.6 billion, according to the state’s website. But when broken down by program, the impact becomes much greater.
Roughly a third of the funding for the state’s at-risk students comes from Washington. Federal money also accounts for 19% of special education spending, and nearly 86% of the costs for school breakfast, lunch and other child nutrition programs.
Districts with high populations of economically disadvantaged students also rely more heavily on federal funds. For instance, nearly 30% of San Juan District’s revenue for the 2023-24 school year came from federal sources, compared to Park City’s 1.8% that same year, according to a report by the Utah State Board of Education.
The state board is still assessing how the federal shuffling of responsibilities could affect public school funding. “There would be potential financial implications,” USBE spokesperson Ryan Bartlett said. “We don’t [yet] know what those are.”
Civil rights are on the line
Moe Hickey, executive director of Voices for Utah Children, said the Trump administration’s “final mission” carries far-reaching consequences beyond simply giving states more control over education and possible loss of dollars.
“One of the reasons that the Department of Education was formed … was because there was no appetite at the state level to address civil rights,” Hickey said Tuesday, hours after Trump’s announcement. “Reverting back to that model, which is what this looks like, at least at the moment, I’m concerned.”
The Department of Education, Hickey said, “was probably the No. 1 supporter of civil rights in public education. Do you trust that going back to the states, who historically have proven not to be that huge a supporter?”
It wasn’t until the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education — which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine established by the court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson and legally ended racial segregation in public schools — that the federal government had a role in education funding.
The Brown ruling didn’t have much effect on desegregation in the South, Josh Dunn, a professor and the executive director of the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, previously told The Salt Lake Tribune.
It did, however, set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the first major infusion of federal dollars into public schools through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act a year later.
It was the first time, Dunn said, that the government could cut off or refuse funding to school districts that were unlawfully segregated.
“It turned out that these school districts simply couldn’t resist the federal funding,” he said.