Trump’s plan to abolish the Education Department could devastate NC schools and students

President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the elimination of the US Department of Education. If he’s successful in abolishing the agency, special education students and rural and lower income communities in North Carolina could lose crucial support.

Susan Book has been fighting for public education for years. 

Protecting and improving the state’s public schools and the funding they get is personal for Book. The Wake County mom has a high-school aged son, Emerson, who has autism and relies on special education programs offered by local public schools. 

Those programs and schools are what Book advocates for in Wake County and at the North Carolina General Assembly. 

“I got started because there was a bad budget bill at one point that was taking away things like music teachers and art teachers in elementary schools, and at that time, my kid — who is on the autism spectrum — those are things that he looked forward to doing,” she said.

Students like Emerson are supported by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which Congress passed in 1990 to provide federal support to students with special needs through the age of 21.

IDEA funding is provided by the US Department of Education, which President Donald Trump has pledged to close down.  Trump formally called for shuttering the department when he signed an executive order on March 20, which read in part: “Ultimately, the Department of Education’s main functions can, and should, be returned to the States.” Trump cannot unilaterally close a cabinet-level agency like the Education Department without congressional approval, and multiple lawsuits have been filed seeking to block Trump’s order, but the prospect of the agency shuttering and IDEA funding going away has Book deeply concerned.  

Under IDEA, the federal government is required to provide at least 40% of the funding for special education at the state level, though it’s never truly lived up to its promise and often underfunded states’ special education needs. In the 2020-2021 school year, the federal contribution to North Carolina for special education funding came in at 33.4% of the total cost. 

While Book says current funding isn’t sufficient, if the department shuts down, she worries that her son’s experience will be made worse.

“I don’t actually want to think about that too hard as a parent who has a child who would have something taken away. That’s the biggest fear, that one of your resources, one of your teachers, one of your aides, would not be there the next day.”

With the help of IDEA funding, Emerson is able to attend his public school and receive an education. 

“My son is able to access general education as a high school student. He is able to go to his science labs, he is able to participate in PE and Health, because he has a one-on-one [aide] next to him, helping him navigate those hallways that are crowded and noisy — everything my autistic son absolutely despises,” she said.

State Rep. Lindsey Prather (D-Buncombe County), a former special education teacher, says students with disabilities thrive in the classroom when they receive necessary extra support, such as one-on-one help, access to psychologists, and added time for testing. 

“These are students who have the ability to learn, who can be productive members of society with just a little bit of extra help — extra help that the federal government requires that we give them. We have laws in place that dictate that we have to follow these plans for these students,” she explained.

Should the state have to provide more direct funding to school districts, it will need to change its current law that caps funding for students with disabilities. As it stands, the state provides school districts with $5,300 per student with special needs, but only up to a certain point. Districts will receive that per-student funding so long as special needs students make up 13% of the student population or less. If the special needs population in a district exceeds 13%, the district gets the same amount of funding as if it only had a population that was 13% special needs.  That means that a district where 17% of students have special needs would get the same amount of funding as a district with 13%. 

Durham State Rep. Zach Hawkins says that this outdated law needs to be changed to provide students and schools with adequate funding.

“It’s incredibly unfair because that puts an unnecessary burden on school leadership to stretch those resources, but most importantly, it comes down to the classroom and the teachers that are trying to provide those services, and then that means every student is not cared for in the way they need to be,” he said.

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Susan Book’s son is a high school student with autism, and receives one on one support at school. If Donald Trump’s plan to close down the US Department of Education comes to pass, she worries about what the future would look like for her son and students like him. “I worry that my son would just be left to the wolves,” Book said.

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Rural schools have a lot to lose

North Carolina has the country’s second largest rural population behind Texas, with the state’s 3.4 million rural residents accounting for 33% of the state’s total population. Many of the schools in these areas rely on another Education Department program, Title I, for crucial funding. 

Title I schools were created to provide federal funding for schools with large populations of students from low-income families, because states were unable or unwilling to allocate the necessary money. 

Columbus County, a rural community in southeastern North Carolina, is one of the rural counties that greatly benefits from federal support, receiving around $10 million in federal funds to help pay for essential positions like teachers, their assistants, and school nurses and counselors.

“Without the federal dollars, we would really, really struggle,” Whiteville City Schools Superintendent, Dr. Jonathan Williams recently told Bladen Online.

Prather says rural schools stand to lose even more if there is disruption at the federal level, and that decreased funding will make difficult situations even worse.

“We don’t talk enough about fixed costs in education. When you think about these rural communities in North Carolina, in particular in western North Carolina and farther eastern North Carolina, there are some counties and communities in North Carolina that are actually shrinking,” she said. 

Prather says the enrollment declines in these sorts of communities forces some districts to spend the same amount of money with less resources than before.

“Maybe you used to have a community that needed three different Kindergarten classes and now you only need one. Well you still have to pay for that school building. It still costs the same to heat and cool a building, whether there’s 30 students in that classroom or 20 students. That teacher still has the same base salary whether there’s 15 students in a classroom or 12.”

More pressure on local governments

If the US Department of Education is abolished, more decision making will be delegated from the federal government to state and local governments — a longtime goal of conservative activists. 

In North Carolina, county commissions in all 100 counties are already making final decisions on issues concerning local education, including school construction and infrastructure, how to appropriate funds, and whether or not to further supplement teacher salaries beyond what the state legislature approves.

Stephanie Walker, a member of the New Hanover County Commission and former school board member, worries about a world where the state government has even more authority over public school spending, and is concerned that local governments like hers will have to step up even more to ensure schools are fully funded.

“I’m already troubled with how the state funds schools anyway. They don’t adequately fund. New Hanover County funds 700 or so local positions because I guess the state’s formula has not been updated in a while, and that’s how they fund us. Any more money going out the door is going to be detrimental to schools,” she told Cardinal & Pine.

In recent years, the state has provided at least 60% of school funding, but total funding has been insufficient, critics say, and that’s had severe consequences. Average teacher pay in North Carolina ranks 38th in the country, and a 2022 study by the National Assessment of Education Progress found that just 58% of fourth graders and 65% of eighth graders were reading at or above basic levels. 

North Carolina has a noticeable gap in school funding between the state’s wealthiest and poorest counties. The 10 wealthiest provide $4,000 in spending per student via property taxes, compared to just $1,000 per student in the state’s poorest. 

“I worry about the rural counties because they’re not as fortunate as the more populated counties that have more resources,” Walker said.

However, challenges exist even in wealthier counties. County commissioners in Buncombe County, which continues its recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Helene, voted in January to cut $4.7 million in education spending from the county budget, and implemented a teacher pay freeze in light of a $25 million budget shortfall.

Everyday people can still make a difference

Book, the Wake County mother of a teen with autism, wants those worried about the future of public education, including everyday citizens and parents, to know they are not alone in advocating for public schools and the future of the Department of Education.

“There are so many groups working on this, including the one I work with, a large coalition of all these groups put together called Every Child NC,” she said. “Talk with your teachers, that parent-teacher relationship, if we work together, we make a huge and powerful force that’s hard for our General Assembly not to listen to.”