As enrollments fall, rural-serving universities are shedding a huge number of programs

This story was originally published by The Hechinger Report.

CLEVELAND, Miss. — Although she won a scholarship to Mississippi State University, two hours’ drive away, Shamya Jones couldn’t get there because she had a new baby and no car.

So she enrolled instead at a local community college, then transferred to the four-year campus closest to her home in the rural Mississippi Delta — Delta State University.

She planned to major in digital media arts, but before she could start, Delta State eliminated that major, along with 20 other degree programs, including history, English, chemistry and music .

“They’re cutting off so much, and teachers [are] leaving,” Jones said. “It’s like we’re not getting the help or benefits we need.” The cuts “take away from us, our education.”

That kind of frustration is growing. Rural Americans already have far less access to higher education than their counterparts in cities and suburbs. Now the comparatively few universities that serve rural students are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors, blaming plummeting enrollment and financial crises.

Many rural private, nonprofit colleges are closing altogether

“We are asking rural folks to accept a set of options that folks in cities and suburbs would never accept,” said Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “It’s almost like, well, ‘This is what you get to learn, and this is how you get to learn it. And if you don’t like it, you can move.’ ”

When programs at rural colleges and universities are eliminated, “It’s not just, if this institution doesn’t do it, another one can pick up the slack,” Koricich said. “It’s that if this institution doesn’t do it, it just does not happen. It is not offered. It’s not an option.”

While large-scale cuts to majors in the years during and since the Covid-19 pandemic have gotten some attention, what many have in common has been largely overlooked: They’re disproportionately happening at universities that serve rural students or are in largely rural states.

“All you hear is, ‘We used to have this, because we used to have more students.’”

Rural-serving institutions are defined by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, which Koricich directs, as those that share such characteristics as being located in counties classified as rural and a certain distance from metropolitan areas.

Even some flagship universities that serve rural places are making big cuts. The most widely reported were at West Virginia University, which is eliminating 28 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration. The University of Montana is phasing out or has frozen more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations. A similar review is under way at branch campuses of Pennsylvania State University.

But most of the cuts have occurred at regional public universities, which get considerably less money from their states — about $1,100 less, per student, than flagships — even as they educate 70 percent of undergraduates who go to public four-year schools. These kinds of schools are also more likely than other kinds of institutions to enroll students from lower-income families and who are the first in their families to go to college.

St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, for example, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics. The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40, including earth sciences, geography and environmental resources and hospitality administration. Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25. Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 undergraduate and graduate majors, minors and concentrations.

The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 majors. SUNY Potsdam is cutting chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other programs. The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing religious studies, drama, philosophy and concentrations in French and German.

[Related: In this shrinking Mississippi Delta county, getting a college degree means leaving home behind]

Among the many other regional public universities that are dropping programs and majors are Missouri Western, Eastern Kentucky, Arkansas State, Dickinson State in North Dakota and the University of Nebraska at Kearney. North Dakota State University has proposed cuts to 14 programs; the university did not respond to questions about the status of that plan.

“Some institutions have no other options” than to do this, because of financial problems and plummeting enrollment, said Charles Welch, president and CEO of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a former president of both Henderson State and the Arkansas State University System.

At Delta State, for instance, enrollment is down by nearly a quarter since 2014.

A drop in tuition revenue stemming from that decline created an $11 million hole in the university’s budget, President Daniel Ennis, told the campus last year. When Ennis got to Delta State, he also found the university was overestimating its revenue from facilities and merchandise.

“At a certain point there’s going to be less of everything — personnel, money, equipment and opportunities — because we have to right-size the budget,” Ennis said.

Are administrators exploiting the problems?

But the American Association of University Professors, which represents faculty, said in a report that administrators are exploiting these problems to close programs “as expeditiously as if colleges and universities were businesses whose CEOs suddenly decided to stop making widgets or shut down the steelworks.”

Many of the programs affected are in the humanities and languages, making those disciplines less available to rural students than they are to urban and suburban ones.

These subjects “do much of the work of helping students dream beyond their realities,” said Michael Theune, who chairs the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, a private, nonprofit school that is also eliminating majors.

“We are paring down the sense of the vastness of our world and the possibilities of university students to experience it differently.”

But Welch said states are often simply trying to reduce duplication among campuses in the same systems and compensate for having less financial support than flagship universities receive.

“The challenge that our institutions have is that they tend to be lower resourced than institutions in urban areas, or flagship institutions. They can’t rely on big endowments,” Welch said. The pandemic, he said, “threw a whole additional layer on top of what those institutions were already facing.”

[Related: What one state learned after a decade of free community college — 36 states followed their lead]

Some rural-serving public universities and public universities in largely rural states have now undergone repeated rounds of cuts. Youngstown State University in Ohio, for instance, axed Italian, religious studies and other majors in 2021, then six more three years later. In all, more than 25 programs have now been eliminated there, many of them in the humanities.

The university points out that there were no students at all in 10 of those majors. But students and faculty say it was still important to offer them.

Students’ perspectives and questions

Owen Bertram is a senior theater studies major at Youngstown State University. Bertram is about to graduate, but says he hears his classmates asking the questions, “Do I stay?” “Do I leave?” “Is it worth it?”

“It is easy to just write us off as, ‘Oh, well, do they really need that school?’ when there are so many other majors,” said Bertram, whose theater major program has so far escaped the cuts. “But I don’t think it’s that simple.”

His classmates who will be affected by the changes “are such creatives at heart, and they all came here because they loved what they were doing,” said Bertram, who is also student government representative for the university’s College of Creative Arts. He said it’s hard to watch these students struggling with the questions, “Do I stay?” “Do I leave?” “Is it worth it?”

For rural students, there are few other places to go. About 13 million people live in higher education “deserts,” the American Council on Education estimates, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away.

“It is creating a second class of people to say, ‘You pay your taxes just like everybody else does. You vote like everybody else does. But you just can’t have the same choices as everybody else, because there aren’t enough of you here,’” Koricich said.

“In a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction. If you only have one option, you don’t really have choice.”

COurtesy ACE/CPRS

From the report, “Education Deserts: The Continued Significance of “Place” in the Twenty-First Century.”

In many cases, this particularly affects low-income and Black students. At the University of North Carolina Greensboro, for example — another institution in a largely rural state, which is in the process of phasing out 20 degree programs, including anthropology and physics — more than half the students are low-income and 35 percent are Black, according to the university.

Holly Buroughs is a physics major at University of North Carolina Greensboro. Buroughs started a petition protesting the elimination of 20 degree programs — including physics. “UNCG should be a place where anyone should be able to come and get an affordable education in whatever they want,” she said.

[Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open]

Azariah Journey is a second-year graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, who comes from a rural town in Kentucky. She asked, “Is a first-gen student like me going to come next year and not see the UNCG that I fell in love with and the opportunities I had?”

Meanwhile, more than a dozen private, nonprofit universities and colleges in rural areas or that serve large proportions of rural students have closed outright since 2020; some of the rural private institutions that remain are also axing majors.

The proportion of rural high school graduates going to college at all is falling. Fifty-five percent enroll right after high school, down from 61 percent in 2016, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

[Related: A community college promises a rural county it ‘hasn’t been left to die’]

Dominick Bellipanni is one of the last remaining music major students at Delta State University as the department is being phased out. He received a scholarship, which he isn’t sure he would have gotten if his only options to study piano had been at the state’s larger, more competitive universities.

Bellipanni is from Indianola, a once-busy crossroad 30 minutes from the university, where he grew up hearing stories about businesses that once operated there but closed.

Courtesy DSU

Bologna Performing Arts Center at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi.

“Used to be, used to be, used to be,” he remembered people telling him.

Now he’s hearing that again.

His professors talk about how there used to be more music recitals, more scholarships, more money, said Bellipanni, who said he plans to leave the Mississippi Delta when he graduates.

“All you hear is, ‘We used to have this, because we used to have more students.’”

[Related Grant Opportunity: Large education improvement research grants]

Rural-serving public universities cutting degree programs

• St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics.
• The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40 programs, including earth sciences, hospitality administration and geography and environmental resources.
• West Virginia University is eliminating 40 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration.
• Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25 programs in disciplines including history, political science and biology.
• Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 programs and majors in English, physics, history and chemistry, all language courses except Spanish and minors in French, German and journalism.
• The University of Montana is phasing out, has frozen or has announced that it will closely monitor more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations.
• Delta State University in Mississippi has eliminated 21 degree programs, including history, English, chemistry and music.
• North Dakota State University announced plans to phase out 14 programs, including food safety and soil science, and has proposed getting rid of 10 more. The university did not respond to questions about the status of this process.
• The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 degree programs, including sociology, philosophy, industrial management, French and Spanish.
• The University of Nebraska at Kearney is cutting nine degree programs, including geography and recreation management.
• SUNY Potsdam is eliminating chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other degree programs.
• The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing degree programs in religious studies, drama, philosophy and classics, and concentrations in French and German.
• Missouri Western State University eliminated majors, minors and concentrations in English, history, sociology, political science and other subjects.
• Eastern Kentucky University shut down economics and other majors.
• Arkansas State University has shed programs in multimedia journalism and music, a master’s degree in criminal justice and others.
• Dickinson State University in North Dakota eliminated communication, information analytics, math, math education, music and political science, a university spokesperson confirmed.

Rural private colleges closing or cutting majors

In addition to rural-serving public universities and colleges, more than a dozen private colleges serving rural places have closed since 2020.

• Chatfield College in Ohio
• MacMurray College in Illinois
• Nebraska Christian College
• Marlboro and Goddard colleges in Vermont
• Holy Family College in Wisconsin
• Judson College in Alabama
• Ohio Valley University in West Virginia
• Lincoln College in Illinois
• Marymount California University
• Cazenovia and Wells colleges in New York State
• Finlandia University in Michigan
• Presentation College in South Dakota
• Iowa Wesleyan University
• Bacone College in Oklahoma lost its accreditation, filed for bankruptcy and stopped enrolling students

Many rural private institutions are also axing majors, including:

***

Jon Marcus is a reporter for The Hechinger Report. He writes and edits stories about, and helps plan coverage of, higher education. A former magazine editor, he has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Wired, Medium.com and the Times (U.K.) Higher Education magazine, among others.

Reporters in the Open Campus Local Network who contributed: Mississippi Today’s Molly Minta, WUNC’s Brianna Atkinson and Signal Ohio’s Amy Morona.

This story about rural college majors was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on strengthening local coverage of higher education. Sign up for Hechinger’s higher education newsletter. Listen to Hechinger’s higher education podcast.

This story also appeared in Open Campus and The Washington Post.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters.

On the Saturday after the election, Cheryl Suydam headed to an impromptu meeting of parents of trans kids. The gathering was called by the local chapter of PFLAG, an advocacy group that supports LGBTQ+ people and their families, to discuss their feelings after American voters elected a president who ran on an openly anti-trans platform.

“Every single person in that room was absolutely terrified,” Suydam said.

Suydam and her husband are the parents of three daughters, including a 15-year-old who is transgender. They live in Asheville, North Carolina, a more progressive community in a state that is less so.

About two dozen parents seated around a living room discussed changing their children’s legal names while they still could, starting medical treatment while it was still available in other states, and moving to more welcoming communities.

“It was cathartic to connect with others living this same experience and feeling the need to mobilize in some way,” Suydam said.

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to bar transgender athletes from competing in women’s and girls’ sports, ban gender-affirming care for minors, investigate whether such care should be available even to adults, roll back the Biden administration’s Title IX changes that gave transgenders students more legal protections at school, and punish schools that teach what Trump calls “left-wing gender insanity.”

How will we ‘keep kids safe?’

“Teachers are wondering: What resources will I be able to use to keep kids safe? And that’s not just LGBTQ kids, but all students,” said Scott Miller, co-chair of the LGBTQ+ Caucus of the National Education Association.

Students and teachers in Republican-led states that have passed anti-trans laws have experience resisting those laws, said Craig White, director of Supportive Schools at the Campaign for Southern Equality — and they have lessons for people in the rest of the country if the federal government pushes those policies into more states.

[Related Report: 2024 U.S. national survey on the mental health of LGBTQ+ young people]

Many anti-LGBTQ+ policies are vague, leaving room for districts and teachers to take a more supportive approach and for students to keep exercising their free speech, White said. Activists are also contesting those laws in the courts.

Since Trump’s election, White said he has been overwhelmed with calls from people who want to organize.

“My weeks have not just been doom and gloom,” White said. “Within just a couple of days, I’ve seen people turning towards energy and activism and organizing. I have not even been able to keep up with the number of people contacting me and saying, ‘Okay, we’re ready to take action. What do we do now?’”

[Related Grant Opportunity: Child/youth conflict resolution education project grants]

Students move to secure documents, treatment before inauguration

In Texas, Mandy Giles works supporting families of trans children. Since the election, she’s received many messages expressing fear and seeking advice.

“Parents of trans kids and young adults have been scared for a long time in Texas, but there has been a feeling that there was some level of federal protections that now may be going away,” Giles said.

She runs a monthly support group in Houston. The first meeting after the election had the most attendees ever — but at least half of the families in the meeting said they will be moving out of state soon.

“Some families have been with us since the beginning,” Giles said. “We had some tearful goodbyes because we knew we wouldn’t be seeing each other again before the end of the year.”

In North Carolina, Suydam has found support locally despite hostile state laws. The state has restricted discussions of gender and sexuality in elementary schools, banned gender-affirming care for minors, and barred transgender youth from competing in middle, high school, and college sports.

[Related: Transgender youth athletes find support, community in one Atlanta basketball league]

“It’s an incredible community,” Suydam said. “As soon as my daughter came out, we contacted the school, and they quickly started using her preferred pronouns and name.”

Her daughter, whose name she asked to withhold to protect her privacy, started hormonal therapies before state legislators passed a bill in 2023 to ban gender-affirming care to minors. The law allowed minors who already were under treatment to continue. But her daughter had to stop swimming after legislators passed a law that students can only join sports teams for the genders they were assigned at birth.

“She used to be a competitive swimmer and has only competed as a female,” Suydam said. “Since these laws were passed, she has stopped because they gave people the freedom to talk openly against trans athletes. So, it never felt safe to talk to her teammates or the parents of the teammates about the fact that she was trans.”

The family is preparing for the coming months. “I’m actively updating all of her documentation to reflect her name and gender now and in the next few weeks while I still can,” Suydam said.

[Related: Texas politics leave transgender foster youth isolated — during and after life in state care]

Trump’s election means that any hopes of federal protection to counter state laws have disappeared. People are thinking about how they can protect themselves and their family members, advocates said.

Ben Cooper is an attorney based in Columbus, Ohio, who has provided free legal advice at a legal aid clinic for LGBTQ people since 2016. Since the election, he said he’s seen more people rushing to get their names and gender markers changed in legal documents.

This type of change is regulated by state law, but advocates fear the Trump administration may adopt policies that affect federally issued documents like passports.

“My advice is: If you’ve been thinking about adjusting your documents, then there’s no time like the present,” Cooper said.

Gender-affirming care accessibility

Milo McBrayer, 17, who identifies as transmasculine and queer, is also considering fast-tracking his documents before Trump takes office.

“I am also thinking of going out of state to start gender-affirming care,” said Milo, who also lives in Asheville. “Because of North Carolina’s ban, I didn’t plan to do it before I turned 18, but now I don’t know if my ability will go away after Trump takes office.”

Milo said that he has also become more active in local groups that support trans people “as a way of building a stronger support system.”

One of those is the Pansy Collective, a group of LGBTQ+ artists, who recently organized a “bug-out bag” workshop. The workshop covered information about how to be safe and what to bring if you need to escape quickly, whether that’s fleeing a natural disaster such as Hurricane Helene or moving across state lines to access gender-affirming medical care.

“The workshop was mostly about reducing anxiety by providing educational resources,” said Riley, an organizer with the group who asked that his last name not be published.

Bullying a major concern for transgender youth

Last year, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey estimated that 40% of students who identify as transgender or who are questioning their gender identity suffered bullying at school. Advocates worry the election may exacerbate hostile environments in some schools.

According to the Movement Advancement Project, 25 states have no specific protection for LGBTQ+ students in their anti-bullying laws, and two states — Missouri and South Dakota – actively ban schools from including LGBTQ+ students in their anti-bullying policies.

Even in states such as North Carolina where students have some protections from bullying, ensuring that schools respect the law is not always easy.

“In my old school, people just had the audacity to yell slurs at you walking down the hallway,” said Milo, who transferred to a charter school for his senior year. “And even though I was being bullied pretty heavily, the school refused to do anything about it because it was about me being trans. And that has turned into a political issue, not a human rights issue.”

In his new school, The Franklin School of Innovation, he feels much more comfortable and has found community among other queer students.

[Related: Missouri appeals court sides with transgender student in $4 million discrimination case]

Even in liberal states like California, trans students and their families can have difficulties. Juliet Stowers is an elementary school teacher in Orange County, California, and the parent of a 16-year-old trans girl. She said that it is not rare to hear anti-trans rhetoric in her district, and many parents complain about the presence of trans kids in schools.

“Some days, it can be debilitating,” she said. “Trump is saying that we, as teachers, are offering hormones or performing surgeries when we have to pay for the pencils in our classrooms.”

Stowers said she’ll continue working in the community to support other educators, parents, and kids.

“My daughter is terrified, but I’ve been telling her, ‘Don’t worry, there are many people ready to fight. We are ready to fight,’” she said.

Across the country, Milo feels similarly.

“I felt very failed by the adults in my country,” he said of the election results. “So, I have been spending a lot of time grieving. But I have also been trying to do a lot of community work by helping my friends as much as I can, sharing resources to cope with this situation, and talking about it openly.”

***

Wellington Soares is Chalkbeat’s national education reporting intern based in New York City.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools providing essential education reporting across America.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters.

On the Saturday after the election, Cheryl Suydam headed to an impromptu meeting of parents of trans kids. The gathering was called by the local chapter of PFLAG, an advocacy group that supports LGBTQ+ people and their families, to discuss their feelings after American voters elected a president who ran on an openly anti-trans platform.

“Every single person in that room was absolutely terrified,” Suydam said.

Suydam and her husband are the parents of three daughters, including a 15-year-old who is transgender. They live in Asheville, North Carolina, a more progressive community in a state that is less so.

About two dozen parents seated around a living room discussed changing their children’s legal names while they still could, starting medical treatment while it was still available in other states, and moving to more welcoming communities.

“It was cathartic to connect with others living this same experience and feeling the need to mobilize in some way,” Suydam said.

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to bar transgender athletes from competing in women’s and girls’ sports, ban gender-affirming care for minors, investigate whether such care should be available even to adults, roll back the Biden administration’s Title IX changes that gave transgenders students more legal protections at school, and punish schools that teach what Trump calls “left-wing gender insanity.”

How will we ‘keep kids safe?’

“Teachers are wondering: What resources will I be able to use to keep kids safe? And that’s not just LGBTQ kids, but all students,” said Scott Miller, co-chair of the LGBTQ+ Caucus of the National Education Association.

Students and teachers in Republican-led states that have passed anti-trans laws have experience resisting those laws, said Craig White, director of Supportive Schools at the Campaign for Southern Equality — and they have lessons for people in the rest of the country if the federal government pushes those policies into more states.

[Related Report: 2024 U.S. national survey on the mental health of LGBTQ+ young people]

Many anti-LGBTQ+ policies are vague, leaving room for districts and teachers to take a more supportive approach and for students to keep exercising their free speech, White said. Activists are also contesting those laws in the courts.

Since Trump’s election, White said he has been overwhelmed with calls from people who want to organize.

“My weeks have not just been doom and gloom,” White said. “Within just a couple of days, I’ve seen people turning towards energy and activism and organizing. I have not even been able to keep up with the number of people contacting me and saying, ‘Okay, we’re ready to take action. What do we do now?’”

[Related Grant Opportunity: Child/youth conflict resolution education project grants]

Students move to secure documents, treatment before inauguration

In Texas, Mandy Giles works supporting families of trans children. Since the election, she’s received many messages expressing fear and seeking advice.

“Parents of trans kids and young adults have been scared for a long time in Texas, but there has been a feeling that there was some level of federal protections that now may be going away,” Giles said.

She runs a monthly support group in Houston. The first meeting after the election had the most attendees ever — but at least half of the families in the meeting said they will be moving out of state soon.

“Some families have been with us since the beginning,” Giles said. “We had some tearful goodbyes because we knew we wouldn’t be seeing each other again before the end of the year.”

In North Carolina, Suydam has found support locally despite hostile state laws. The state has restricted discussions of gender and sexuality in elementary schools, banned gender-affirming care for minors, and barred transgender youth from competing in middle, high school, and college sports.

[Related: Transgender youth athletes find support, community in one Atlanta basketball league]

“It’s an incredible community,” Suydam said. “As soon as my daughter came out, we contacted the school, and they quickly started using her preferred pronouns and name.”

Her daughter, whose name she asked to withhold to protect her privacy, started hormonal therapies before state legislators passed a bill in 2023 to ban gender-affirming care to minors. The law allowed minors who already were under treatment to continue. But her daughter had to stop swimming after legislators passed a law that students can only join sports teams for the genders they were assigned at birth.

“She used to be a competitive swimmer and has only competed as a female,” Suydam said. “Since these laws were passed, she has stopped because they gave people the freedom to talk openly against trans athletes. So, it never felt safe to talk to her teammates or the parents of the teammates about the fact that she was trans.”

The family is preparing for the coming months. “I’m actively updating all of her documentation to reflect her name and gender now and in the next few weeks while I still can,” Suydam said.

[Related: Texas politics leave transgender foster youth isolated — during and after life in state care]

Trump’s election means that any hopes of federal protection to counter state laws have disappeared. People are thinking about how they can protect themselves and their family members, advocates said.

Ben Cooper is an attorney based in Columbus, Ohio, who has provided free legal advice at a legal aid clinic for LGBTQ people since 2016. Since the election, he said he’s seen more people rushing to get their names and gender markers changed in legal documents.

This type of change is regulated by state law, but advocates fear the Trump administration may adopt policies that affect federally issued documents like passports.

“My advice is: If you’ve been thinking about adjusting your documents, then there’s no time like the present,” Cooper said.

Gender-affirming care accessibility

Milo McBrayer, 17, who identifies as transmasculine and queer, is also considering fast-tracking his documents before Trump takes office.

“I am also thinking of going out of state to start gender-affirming care,” said Milo, who also lives in Asheville. “Because of North Carolina’s ban, I didn’t plan to do it before I turned 18, but now I don’t know if my ability will go away after Trump takes office.”

Milo said that he has also become more active in local groups that support trans people “as a way of building a stronger support system.”

One of those is the Pansy Collective, a group of LGBTQ+ artists, who recently organized a “bug-out bag” workshop. The workshop covered information about how to be safe and what to bring if you need to escape quickly, whether that’s fleeing a natural disaster such as Hurricane Helene or moving across state lines to access gender-affirming medical care.

“The workshop was mostly about reducing anxiety by providing educational resources,” said Riley, an organizer with the group who asked that his last name not be published.

Bullying a major concern for transgender youth

Last year, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey estimated that 40% of students who identify as transgender or who are questioning their gender identity suffered bullying at school. Advocates worry the election may exacerbate hostile environments in some schools.

According to the Movement Advancement Project, 25 states have no specific protection for LGBTQ+ students in their anti-bullying laws, and two states — Missouri and South Dakota – actively ban schools from including LGBTQ+ students in their anti-bullying policies.

Even in states such as North Carolina where students have some protections from bullying, ensuring that schools respect the law is not always easy.

“In my old school, people just had the audacity to yell slurs at you walking down the hallway,” said Milo, who transferred to a charter school for his senior year. “And even though I was being bullied pretty heavily, the school refused to do anything about it because it was about me being trans. And that has turned into a political issue, not a human rights issue.”

In his new school, The Franklin School of Innovation, he feels much more comfortable and has found community among other queer students.

[Related: Missouri appeals court sides with transgender student in $4 million discrimination case]

Even in liberal states like California, trans students and their families can have difficulties. Juliet Stowers is an elementary school teacher in Orange County, California, and the parent of a 16-year-old trans girl. She said that it is not rare to hear anti-trans rhetoric in her district, and many parents complain about the presence of trans kids in schools.

“Some days, it can be debilitating,” she said. “Trump is saying that we, as teachers, are offering hormones or performing surgeries when we have to pay for the pencils in our classrooms.”

Stowers said she’ll continue working in the community to support other educators, parents, and kids.

“My daughter is terrified, but I’ve been telling her, ‘Don’t worry, there are many people ready to fight. We are ready to fight,’” she said.

Across the country, Milo feels similarly.

“I felt very failed by the adults in my country,” he said of the election results. “So, I have been spending a lot of time grieving. But I have also been trying to do a lot of community work by helping my friends as much as I can, sharing resources to cope with this situation, and talking about it openly.”

***

Wellington Soares is Chalkbeat’s national education reporting intern based in New York City.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools providing essential education reporting across America.

If you’re in youth ministry, you know the grind: every week, you pour your heart and soul into studying, writing, and delivering a talk. And whether it soars or flops, one reality remains: next week’s talk is already looming.

For 16 years in ministry, I’ve lived that cycle. Some weeks, I’d feel great after a talk, only to realize… it’s over. On to the next one. Other weeks, when a talk bombed, I felt a strange relief—”Thank goodness I get a do-over!”

But lately, I’ve been thinking: what if we could extend the life of a sermon? What if the work we put in for one week could keep impacting students, parents, and small groups long after the last word is spoken?

Here are some ideas to get more mileage out of every sermon:

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1. Plan Talks That Answer Students’ Biggest Questions

Youth ministry is a mission field, and your sermons are a key way to address the questions weighing on students’ hearts.

• Start by listening to your students. What questions are they asking about faith, culture, relationships, or God?
• Craft your talks to address these topics in a way that’s biblical, practical, and relatable. When students hear you speaking directly to their concerns, it creates deeper engagement and longer-lasting impact.

---

2. Focus on the Essentials of Faith

Some messages are timeless because they center on the core truths of Christianity.

• Build sermon series around spiritual disciplines like prayer, Bible reading, and worship.
• Highlight essential Bible stories that students should know (think David and Goliath, the Good Samaritan, or the Exodus).
• Keep the Gospel front and center. The clearer students understand the Good News, the more they’ll apply it in their lives.

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3. Record Your Sermon and Post It Online

Every message you give has the potential to reach far beyond the room you’re in.

• Set up a YouTube channel: Post weekly sermons and make them easy for students, parents, and even future ministry leaders to access.
• Create a playlist for each series so content stays organized and searchable.
• Include links to resources like small group questions, follow-up talks, or related Bible reading plans in your video description.

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4. Create Resources for Small Groups and Families

A great sermon can spark conversation—not just in youth group, but at home and beyond.

• Write small group discussion guides that build on your message. Help students and leaders go deeper.
• Equip parents by providing follow-up questions they can ask at home. This not only reinforces the message but also strengthens family faith conversations.

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5. Turn Your Manuscripts into DIY Study Guides

Your sermon is already written—why not make it a resource for students to use on their own?

• Take your notes or manuscript and format it into a study guide.
• Add discussion prompts, reflection questions, or personal challenges.
• Share it as a downloadable PDF or print copies to have on hand.

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6. Build a Future Resource Library

Your sermon series can become the foundation for future small groups or events.

• Create a curriculum from your series. For example, if you preached on relationships, bundle it into a resource for small groups, retreats, or DNOW weekends.
• Your church’s future youth pastor (or even you in a few years!) will thank you for these ready-to-use resources.

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7. Use Sermons to Engage Parents

Parents are eager to help their kids grow spiritually, but many don’t know where to start. Your sermon can bridge the gap.

• After preaching on a topic like mental health, send parents the video along with additional tips or related articles.
• Consider recording interviews with parents who’ve navigated similar issues and include their advice. This creates a practical, real-world resource for your church family.

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8. Create a Digital Library for Long-Term Impact

Imagine having an online collection of sermons, organized by topic, where students can explore faith on their own terms.

• Your videos could answer questions like, “Why do bad things happen?” or “How do I pray?”
• Over time, this library becomes a tool not just for students, but for your entire church community.

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Start Building Momentum This Week

Youth pastor, the work you do matters. Your sermons can be more than a one-week event—they can be a lasting resource for spiritual growth. With just a little extra effort, you can take the time you’ve already invested and multiply its impact.

Let’s get started this week. Which idea will you try first?

And hey, I get it. Writing lessons can be TOUGH. Why not check out Coleader? DYM has built an amazing curriculum for you to use in ministry. See if its the right fit for you!

From the 4th to the 7th of November, 2024, World Youth Alliance Europe hosted this year’s Emerging Leaders Conference in Brussels, Belgium. The topic of the event was Empowering by Educating: Training on Women’s Reproductive and Mental Health and Rights. It was part of the project called Women’s Health Goes Digital funded by the European Commission. 

On the first day Ina Delić, WYA’s Regional Director of Operations, made an introduction to the Conference and its partners – University of Navarra, Teen Star Italy, SWRK Pontes, Incubator of Excellence and World Youth Alliance Southeast Europe –  were presented. The next morning began with a speech by Ramón Barba Castro, the Regional Director of Advocacy, on the mission and ideas behind World Youth Alliance. He was followed by Tamara Bador, PhD, who gave a lecture on the influence of hormones on female bodies and put emphasis on understanding the menstrual cycle and its different phases. This was a chance to promote FEMM, where participants can learn about women’s health in more detail.

The topic of difficulties women face today regarding their reproductive rights was developed by Natalia Strzyżewska, founder of SWRK Pontes, who discussed the situation of women-migrants from Eastern Europe and how young people’s activism can support them. The next speaker, Pilar Vigil, BMed, MD, PhD, FACOG, broadened the medical knowledge of participants with her online presentation. It focused on the current scientific research regarding oral contraceptives (OCs) and their impact on health and hormones, including mental health, and their particular impact – and difficult side effects – among adolescents.

On the third day, the ELC moved to the European Parliament. First, participants entered into a panel discussion with Laetitia Pouliquen, Léopold Vanbellingen and Moutiaa Gouaida. The experts touched on challenges brought by the European law, such as sharing health-related information, substances of human origin, surrogacy, abortion, violence against women and work-life balance. Afterwards, the participants had a chance to meet representatives from all of their countries, including MEPs Margarita de la Pisa Carrión and Jorge Buxadé Villalba from Spain, Niels Geuking from Germany, Paolo Inselvini from Italy, Tomasz Buczek from Poland, Lukas Mandl from Austria and Karlo Ressler from Croatia, as well as French EPP Policy Advisor Jean Etienne Marie Patrick Amaudric Du Chaffaut. The day concluded with a tour of the European Parliament’s building.

The final stage of ELC was hosted by the Taipei Centre. The participants were welcomed by HE Roy Chun Lee who spoke about Taiwan and the importance of dialogue in democratic countries. A final lecture by Francisco Guell, BS, BPh, PhD entitled The Phenomenon of Medically Assisted Reproduction in Europe: From Science to Lobbying provided a meta-analysis regarding fertility treatments and disinformation across 8 European countries. After this plethora of insightful presentations, the ELC concluded.

The Conference attracted 50 young people from 7 European countries. The 10 speakers represented 6 countries and multiple fields of work, including academia, medicine, social sciences, NGOs, diplomacy and international organizations.

 

 

Originally published by The 19th

A Republican-controlled Congress will decide its fate next year, but early conversations indicate those pledges may be empty.

Key Takeaways

• The child tax credit was temporarily increased in 2021, cutting child poverty in half, but reverted back to $2,000 in 2022, leading to a rise in child poverty rates.
• Both President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Vance proposed expanding the child tax credit during the election cycle.
• Republicans are considering various options for the child tax credit, including potentially indexing it to inflation and adding a “baby bonus”, but the most likely scenario is that the credit will remain at its current level without a major expansion.

In the lead up to Election Day, presidential candidates had big ambitions for the future of the child tax credit, which is set to expire next year. That looming deadline means Congress will have to take up the credit in 2025, deciding whether to let it lapse, lock it in as is or expand it further. But despite what had been proposed on the campaign trail, there is unlikely to be a major expansion coming to one of the most popular policies for American families.

During the election cycle, candidates were proposing expansions that would have doubled and tripled the existing tax credit, from the $2,000 it is today to as much as $5,000 or $6,000. But the feasibility of those proposals is now being tested.

Child tax credit from 2017 to today

In 2017, Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act raised the child tax credit amount from $1,000 to $2,000 and made it available to families earning up to $400,000, instead of those earning up to $110,000. But at least 20 percent of the poorest children still didn’t receive any or most of the credit because their parents earn too little to pay income taxes. That’s how the tax credit has been structured since it was introduced in 1997.

In 2021, a one-time change to the child tax credit showed what was possible if it was significantly expanded. In the wake of the pandemic, the credit went up so that families received at least $3,000 per child and as much as $3,600 if they had kids under 6. The credit also came via monthly checks to households, instead of one annual lump sum.

And, critically, it was expanded so that the poorest families qualified for the first time. The impacts were immediate: Child poverty was cut in half, to 5.2 percent. But that expansion expired in 2022 and the credit went back to $2,000 — 18 million kids became ineligible again, most of them children of color. The child poverty rate also rose back up to 12.4 percent. Today, it stands at 13.7 percent.

What can happen in 2025?

Both versions of the credit show the different paths Congress could take next year, and those conversations are already beginning, according to several advocates lobbying for the credit.

Republicans will go into the negotiations with control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, which means they can “fast-track legislation,” said Meredith Dodson, the senior director of public policy for the Coalition on Human Needs. She said early conversations indicate members of Congress are working to iron out details of what could be in the tax package so they can get started as soon as a new Congress is sworn in.

At minimum, it’s likely the credit will not be allowed to expire, which would return it to $1,000 per child and cut more higher-income families out of the benefit, experts told The 19th. The current Republican platform outlines a goal of making the 2017 expansion permanent, which makes the possibility of the credit just remaining as it is now the most probable starting point.

It’s possible the credit could be indexed to inflation so that it retains its value over time. A proposal in Congress this year would have done just that, as well as make other modest changes to the tax credit. Three-quarters of House Republicans supported it, but ultimately the bill failed because Senate Republicans opposed some parts of the plan.

Historically, Republicans have opposed any provisions that they view as disincentivizing work. One of the most hotly contested components of the child tax credit proposal from earlier this year was a provision that would allow people to use their prior year’s income to qualify for a larger credit, which would allow caregivers who are not working this year to still claim the money.

Proposals for increasing the dollar amount of the child tax credit may also lead parents to reduce their work hours, Republicans have argued. But proponents say that money instead aids parents in paying for child care or other needs, which is how much of the 2021 expansion dollars were used by families, at least in the short term.

[Related Grant Opportunity: Youth inequality and outcomes research grants]

Indexing child tax credit to inflation

All of that shapes the kind of child tax credit changes that Republicans may now consider. Sen. Chuck Grassley, who sits on the influential Senate Finance Committee and was one of the Republicans who voted against the expansion proposed this year, has been supportive of an approach that would index the credit to inflation, for example.

Dodson said there is “a lot of interest” in indexing the credit to inflation, making that one of the most likely changes that could be on the table next year. If the credit stays at $2,000, that would mean it would be worth less today than it did in 2017. Indexing it to inflation would raise the credit to around $2,500. Still, that approach would continue to leave out about 18 million children who would still not be eligible. 

“We can still sometimes see a real disconnect between what families are saying they need, what the evidence shows, and then what actually ends up happening. The details really matter,” said Megan Curran, the policy director at Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, which has done much of the research and analysis on the child tax credit. “What the child tax credit has the potential to do, and that we have seen that it has done in very recent history — that’s a different child tax credit from what we have on the books and what is the baseline on the books for negotiation in 2025.”

[Related: Early childhood workforce index 2024]

Trump and Vance campaign positions

The best evidence that some in the new administration would consider going a more ambitious route has come from Vice President-elect JD Vance, who said on the campaign trail he would support a $5,000 child tax credit for “all” families. No further details were released and the definition of “all” could be immensely consequential if it meant making the credit universal. Trump himself has said far less on the credit, but he has at least indicated that he does “support it and I want to have it.”

In an interview with CBS News, he alluded to there being two to three variations of the child tax credit on the table, but those details have not been released. A campaign official told Semafor in August that Trump “will consider a significant expansion.”

The Trump transition team did not respond to multiple requests for comment to clarify what kind of expansion the president-elect might push.

Still, two of the biggest Republican child tax credit champions are also leaving Congress — Utah Sen. Mitt Romney is retiring, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has been tapped to lead the State Department.

Covering the cost of the tax

Also in the mix is how Republicans plan to pay for any extensions of the 2017 tax provisions. To offset some of the costs, Republicans said last week they are considering making cuts to Medicaid and food stamps.

That may be unlikely if it alienates moderate Republicans who oppose that approach in the House where the GOP only has a slim majority, said Michelle Dallafior, the senior vice president for budget and tax at First Focus Campaign for Children, a bipartisan advocacy organization. Some of the proposals on the table would create new work requirements and spending caps on the programs, impacting some 70 million low-income people.

“If the approach they take on this is to pay for some of these tax cuts and to pay for them with things that cause a lot of pain to kids and families, communities and people most in need, they start losing votes and they don’t have many to lose in either chamber,” Dallafior said.

[Related: Despite Trump’s win, school vouchers were again rejected by majorities of voters]

The “Baby Bonus” tax options

If Republicans do choose to consider a broader child tax credit expansion, one place they might look is at some form of “baby bonus” for very young children. During the campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a $6,000 bonus for families during the first year of a child’s life, when costs are highest.

Others have also supported versions of that idea, including various conservative groups that signed on to a memo outlining their view for what form the credit should take. They support raising the amount to $3,000 and adding a $2,000 credit for families with newborns.

The groups argue it is one of the best ways to signal support for families who choose to have children, particularly at a time of falling fertility rates and after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

“In a post-Dobbs, low birth rate, high deficit environment, a baby bonus will give the biggest political and cultural bang for the buck, and thus should be prioritized accordingly,” wrote Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative think tank the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Parents stepping up

As politicians decide where they land, parents like Tia Simmons are stepping up their advocacy efforts.

Simmons is part of the Automatic Benefit for Children Coalition parent advisory board, a group of about a dozen parents who are working to lobby Congress on the child tax credit. She joined the coalition earlier this year after being cut out of the 2021 expansion because of an issue with  child custody payments for a child she put up for adoption nearly two decades prior. Simmons has a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old, and cares for her 9-year-old niece. If she had received the credit in 2021 for all three, it would have amounted to about $900 a month that year — nearly enough to cover her mortgage payment.

“It made me realize that I can’t be the only one who has small kids who are not getting credit for whatever reason,” she said. “These kids are missing out on the money, not the parents.”

The coalition is advocating for a universal child tax credit — available to all kids no matter how much their parents earn — that is at least $6,000 a year.

Simmons said, “It needs to be something that is enough that it can be helpful. So many of the times you get SNAP or housing assistance that just isn’t enough.”

The family struggles are real

Child care alone, for example, cost families between $6,500 and $15,600 for just one child in full-time care in 2022, the most recent year data is available from the Department of Labor.

Simmons is now in her third year of law school and still struggling to support three children. She hasn’t received the tax credit for her niece in recent years because the way the credit is structured, the money goes to the person who claims the child as a dependent in their tax returns, not necessarily the one doing the caregiving. It’s all those small policy decisions that will be before Congress, and she wants to remind members that each decision could have a big impact on individuals’ lives.

“While they’re in Congress arguing about it and to determine whether or not it’s going to make us quit our jobs, we are out here with no incomes, struggling to make ends meet — their attitudes about it are totally wrong,” Simmons said.

“Every month we worry: ‘Is there going to be a gas cut-off notice? Do we have to pick between buying Christmas gifts for our kids?’ So these things are real. There are real families who need this funding, and that’s what we want them to know the most: We are here and we are struggling, and we need these funds to come in and it might seem removed from them, but it’s our reality.”

***

Chabeli Carrazana, is The 19th’s economy and child care reporter and has been an economy reporter for a decade. She previously reported for the Miami Herald and the Orlando Sentinel.

The 19th has a different kind of economy beat. It includes the women and LGBTQ+ folks who make up the majority of the nation’s low-income workforce and a growing portion of small business owners — a group often invisible in news coverage. As the granddaughter of a former child care worker, Carrazana says she’s honored to be one of the nation’s only child care reporters, writing stories you won’t read anywhere else about how child care policies — or the lack of them — are changing people’s lives.

The 19th — named after the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution — is an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy. Their goal is to empower women and LGBTQ+ people — particularly those from underrepresented communities — with the information, resources and tools they need to be equal participants in our democracy. Subscribe to their daily newsletter.

This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.

This summer parents were supposed to have a bit more financial breathing room while their children were out of school. The government rolled out Summer EBT, the first new federal food assistance program in decades, for its inaugural year, providing qualifying families $120 per school-aged child to help them afford groceries during the summer while going without school meals to help feed their kids.

Nearly 21 million children are eligible for the program, but there are early warning signs that many families were unable to take advantage of the benefits.

A prominent challenge is that the enrollment process was opaque and complicated enough that hundreds of thousands of families may miss out altogether, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars unclaimed and sent back to the government, according to policy consultant David Rubel, who has done extensive research on the Summer EBT program as well as its predecessor, the Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) program, which gave parents money to cover meals while children were learning remotely.

The experience for families

Erika Marquez’s family was one of many that were unable to access the funding. Marquez has four children — three of them attend school programs and one, her infant, is at home. Her husband, who she is separated from, told her that he received a letter saying that Summer EBT benefits were coming, but said he got no further instructions about how to actually claim the funds. “He didn’t know who to contact, how to contact them, or anything for that matter,” she said.

[Related: Grandfamilies disproportionately at-risk for food insecurity, advocates say]

Summers are always harder for her family to make ends meet — when her three school-age kids are home, they miss two daily meals they would have gotten for free at school. Marquez was hopeful that the Summer EBT money coming in would help cover that gap this year, but when her family couldn’t access the funds, they suffered. Marquez works full time and says that to ensure that her children have what they need, she has to follow a strict budget to cover all of their expenses, and this was a particularly difficult summer. Living in Las Vegas, Nevada, which experienced the hottest summer on record, her electricity bill went through the roof after cranking the air conditioning. Normally it costs her about $100 to $150 for the season; this summer she says it was about $400.

Without help from the new food assistance program, Marquez says she had to ignore those utility bills and prioritize groceries so that her children had enough to eat. “It’s just hard when you hear your child say, ‘Mom, my stomach is rumbling,’” she shared. “It’s more important to be able to make sure that my children are fed.” She had to skip paying for electricity for two months, landing her on a payment plan, which has added fees on top of the bill itself. Had she received Summer EBT for her three children, that would have come to $360 — almost the same cost as her electricity bill, she noted.

California missed out on $1 billion earmarked for P-EBT.

Many other parents have found themselves in a similar situation to Marquez this season. In California, according to the state’s response to a FOIA request made by Rubel, 281,690 Summer EBT cards were returned due to a wrong address and went unused between June 1 and Aug. 31. In a state where 1 in 5 residents is food insecure, this is troubling, especially given that during the pandemic

Propel, a financial technology company that helps low-income Americans with banking and public benefits, administered a survey of low-income families in August, which revealed anecdotal evidence that backs Rubel’s finding that some eligible families had trouble getting the money. The survey surfaced scattered reports of barriers to access. “No, haven’t received yet,” one respondent from Missouri wrote, adding, “It would help me not having to skip meals to feed my kids.” Another from Michigan wrote, “No, it would make a big difference. We haven’t received them yet, or the card.”

Most of the families that received Summer EBT dollars got their cards automatically through a process known as streamlined certification. States enrolled them without them having to take any action if they were on certain public benefit programs, including free and reduced price school lunch, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. In some states, if a family already had an EBT card for SNAP benefits, for example, the money was automatically loaded onto it; other states decided to send out separate cards.

Families Must Enroll; Many Don’t

But a number of eligible families didn’t automatically receive the benefits. For example, families that don’t participate in other programs, but whose children do qualify for free and reduced price meals at school, are eligible for Summer EBT, but they must enroll, which has proven a challenge. In part, that’s because in 2020, Congress made school meals universally free so families did not need to enroll, but that expired last fall, and some parents are out of practice with signing up. In the 41 states without universal school meals, many parents are failing to sign up for free and reduced price meals, let alone Summer EBT. Meanwhile, nine states have passed universal school meals, requiring no paperwork during the school year, so parents had to know to sign up for Summer EBT separately.

Kelsey Boone, senior child nutrition policy analyst at the Food Research & Action Center, an anti-hunger nonprofit, said that, anecdotally, her organization has heard that while the streamlined application has had a lot of success getting benefits to families, states are seeing “lower than expected application return rates” for everyone else. Kansas, for example, had received more than 2,000 applications for Summer EBT by mid-September even though the Kansas Department for Children and Families estimates there are more than 100,000 families that are eligible for the program but have to enroll.

[Related: ‘It’s hard to focus’: Schools say American kids are hungry]

One problem is that some states haven’t created statewide applications specifically for Summer EBT, making it challenging for parents to figure out where and how to apply, and some have buried the applications deep in their websites. Another is that outreach to let parents know what they have to do “has not been as robust as it could be,” Boone said. She added that states don’t always have up-to-date addresses for households, particularly for low-income families who tend to move a lot, so any mail or even the EBT cards themselves may not reach parents. In at least some states, she noted, school districts weren’t even aware they had to tell parents to sign up.

The same problems plagued the P-EBT program. When summer P-EBT cards were distributed in 2022 and 2023, about $1 billion in benefits went unclaimed by eligible families, according to Rubel’s research, and about 4.5 million cards were either expunged or at risk of being expunged. Instead of conducting extensive outreach to make sure parents knew about the benefits and how to claim them, Rubel was told that:

Many state departments of education put the information on their websites and left it to parents to find it.

The problem with Summer EBT promises to be even more acute. Families had 274 days to realize they were missing out on P-EBT funds and sign up for the benefits, and if they spent at least a dollar the clock would reset, giving them another 274 days. The Summer EBT program gives families just 122 days from the date the money is loaded onto a card to spend it all before it’s forfeited and sent back to the federal government. “This is a very short window,” Rubel said. Nebraska started sending expungement letters in early September. Rubel estimates most of the money will be gone by the end of November.

Deadlines Extended, But Outreach is Needed

The good news is that states have been allowed to push application deadlines back so more families can apply and receive their money before it gets forfeited. In an email response to a question about the timeline, a USDA spokesperson said that the agency provided “additional flexibility” to allow all states that participated in the program this year to extend their application deadlines to ensure “sufficient time for applications to be submitted and processed.” The spokesperson said the agency will work with each state individually to determine the “appropriate” amount of time a state can extend a deadline.

Some states have already taken the agency up on the offer. Kansas and Oregon both announced they would push their deadlines to apply back.

But Rubel insists that school districts must do outreach to ensure eligible families get the money they’re owed before it’s too late. “They have the capacity, they have the infrastructure,” he said, adding that districts have up-to-date contact information for families. “They need to be prodded a little bit to help their families.”

It’s all the more urgent because the families that did receive Summer EBT dollars saw a huge benefit.

In Propel’s August 2024 survey, fewer families reported that they had to eat less, skip meals or were unable to buy the food they wanted as compared to August 2023. Fewer lacked household essentials, owed money on utility bills, or had their utilities shut off; fewer were evicted or lived in unstable housing. Summer EBT “was life saving,” one respondent said. “I didn’t know where my next meal was coming [from].” Another said, “It helped tremendously with groceries for me and my daughter right when we really needed it.”

“This money really can mean the difference between having food on the table and not having food on the table for a family during the summer,” Boone said.

There is a chance to fix this problem before next summer starts. First, advocates hope more states will decide to join the Summer EBT program, ensuring more families can participate. In 2024, 13 states opted out, but Alabama, for example, has already said it will join in 2025. The application window for next summer is currently open and will remain so through next August. For the states that participated this year, there are lessons to be learned about expanding accessibility. “There’s a lot of discussion about that right now,” Boone said. Some of that is about how states can improve their outreach, including putting more resources into it, trying to reach families in a multitude of ways and offering better customer service.

“So many of our problems are so hard to fix,” Rubel said. “This is a really easy one to fix.”

[Related Grant Opportunity: Farm to school program planning, education and edible garden grants]

***

Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy. She is a contributing op-ed writer at the New York Times and a contributing writer at The Nation. Her writing has appeared in Time Magazine, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Slate, and others, and she won a 2016 Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus.

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

What if your presentation software could seamlessly integrate a customizable spinning wheel—no clunky browser windows required?

In this episode of The Hybrid Ministry Show, I will demonstrate the new Sidekick feature, showcasing creative ways to engage your audience, from prize giveaways to interactive lessons.

Watch now and transform your programming!

This story was originally published by the Georgia Recorder.

President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education will be far easier said than done.

As Trump seeks to redefine U.S. education policy, the complex logistics, bipartisan congressional approval and redirection of federal programs required make dismantling the department a challenging — not impossible — feat.

It’s an effort that experts say is unlikely to gain traction in Congress and, if enacted, would create roadblocks for how Trump seeks to implement the rest of his wide-ranging education agenda.

“I struggle to wrap my mind around how you get such a bill through Congress that sort of defunds the agency or eliminates the agency,” Derek Black, an education law and policy expert and law professor at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law, told States Newsroom.

“What you can see more easily is that maybe you give the agency less money, maybe you shrink its footprint, maybe we’ve got an (Office for Civil Rights) that still enforces all these laws, but instead of however many employees they have now, they have fewer employees,” Black, who directs the school’s Constitutional Law Center, added.

What does the department do?

Education is decentralized in the United States, and the federal Education Department has no say in the curriculum of public schools. Much of the funding and oversight of schools occurs at the state and local levels.

Still, the department has leverage through funding a variety of programs, such as for low-income school districts and special education, as well as administering federal student aid.

[Related: What might happen if the Education Department were closed?]

Axing the department would require those programs be unwound or assigned to other federal agencies to administer, according to Rachel Perera, a fellow in Governance Studies in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Perera, who studies inequality in K-12 education, expressed concern over whether other departments would get additional resources and staffing to take on significantly more portfolios of work if current Education Department programs were transferred to them.

The shut down process and Project 25 agenda

Sen. Mike Rounds introduced a bill last week that seeks to abolish the department and transfer existing programs to other federal agencies.

In a statement, the South Dakota Republican said “the federal Department of Education has never educated a single student, and it’s long past time to end this bureaucratic Department that causes more harm than good.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposed a detailed plan on how the department could be dismantled through the reorganization of existing programs to other agencies and the elimination of the programs the project deems “ineffective or duplicative.”

[Related: How could Project 2025 change education?]

Though Trump has repeatedly disavowed the conservative blueprint, some former members of his administration helped write it.

The agenda also calls for restoring state and local control over education funding, and notes that “as Washington begins to downsize its intervention in education, existing funding should be sent to states as grants over which they have full control, enabling states to put federal funding toward any lawful education purpose under state law.”

Title I funding

Title I, one of the major funding programs the department administers, provides billions of dollars to school districts with high percentages of students who come from low-income families.

Black pointed to an entire “regulatory regime” that’s built around these funds.

“That regime can’t just disappear unless Title I money also disappears, which could happen, but if you think about Title I money — our rural states, our red states — depend on that money just as much, if not more, than the other states,” he said. “The idea that we would take that money away from those schools — I don’t think there’s any actual political appetite for that.”

‘Inherent logical inconsistencies’

Trump recently tapped Linda McMahon — a co-chair of his transition team, Small Business Administration head during his first term and former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO — as his nominee for Education secretary.

If confirmed, she will play a crucial role in carrying out his education plans, which include promoting universal school choice and parental rights, moving education “back to the states” and ending “wokeness” in education.

Trump, according to his plan, is threatening to cut federal funding for schools that teach:

• “critical race theory;”
• “gender ideology;” or,
• “other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”

On the flip side, he wants to boost funding for states and school districts that adhere to certain policy directives.

That list includes districts that:

• adopt a “Parental Bill of Rights that includes complete curriculum transparency, and a form of universal school choice;”
• get rid of “teacher tenure” for grades K-12;
• adopt “merit pay;”
• have parents hold the direct elections of school principals; and
• drastically reduce the number of school administrators.

But basing funding decisions on district-level policy choices would require the kind of federal involvement in education that Trump is pushing against.

Perera described seeing “inherent logical inconsistencies” in Trump’s education plan.

While he is talking about dismantling the department and sending education “back to the states,” he’s “also talking about leveraging the powers of the department to punish school districts for ‘political indoctrination,’” she said.

“He can’t do that if you are unwinding the federal role in K-12 schools,” she said.

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Shauneen Miranda is a reporter for States Newsroom’s Washington D.C. bureau. She covers education policy and other congressional developments. Miranda previously covered breaking news for Axios, where she produced nearly 300 breaking news and original feature stories on politics, policy, extreme weather, education, tech and health. Prior to that Miranda worked as a reporter for CNN and NPR.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. 

The Trump administration has promised big changes, but the president can’t make them alone

This story was originally published by The Hechinger Report,

By now, you know about the endless speculation on whether the incoming Trump administration might close the U.S. Department of Education. It remains just that: speculation. Congress would have to be involved, and even a Senate and House controlled by the same party as President-elect Donald Trump would not necessarily go along with this idea.However, in a statement about his nomination of Linda McMahon for education secretary, Trump underscored his campaign pledge to disband the department, saying, “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”

The mere specter of shuttering an agency that commands more than $200 billion has led parents, students, teachers, policy experts and politicians to wonder about (and in some cases plan for) the possible effects on their children and communities.

Collectively, state and local governments spend far more on education than the federal government does. With federal dollars connected to many rules about how that money can be spent, however, the Education Department does play a significant role in how schools and colleges operate.

Deleting the agency would not undo federal law providing money for students in rural places, with disabilities or who come from low-income families, but doling out that money and overseeing it could get messy. This week, Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota introduced a bill to unwind the Education Department and spread its work across other federal agencies.

The questions

The Hechinger Report tried to answer some of the questions raised by the possible dismantling of the department, consulting experts and advocates on student loans, special education, financial aid, school lunch and beyond.

Nothing is out of the realm of possibility, however complicated. A much smaller agency that guided Congress on science, the Office of Technology Assessment, simply had its budget set to zero back in 1995 — and just like that, it was gone.

The Education Department, created in 1979, reaches far wider and deeper, into essentially every community nationwide. Its impact is felt not so much in what students are learning every day but whether their schools or the government can:

• pay for the special equipment or training that might be essential for some students with disabilities;
• pay for an extra teacher to work with struggling readers;
• pay for a student from a low-income household to get federal grant money for college;
• forgive federally backed college student loans.

At the same time, many education programs, as well as some that touch schools, exist entirely outside of the Education Department. For example, it doesn’t run or oversee:

• the education of students whose parents live on military bases, managed by the Defense Department;
• the education of students who attend school on Native American reservations, managed by the Interior Department;
• school lunch or breakfast programs, managed by the Agriculture Department;
• the biggest child care programs for low-income families, managed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Early education

What would happen to federal early education programs?

The most well-known and biggest federal early childhood programs, Head Start and the Child Care Development Block Grant, are not a part of the Education Department — they’re administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. So they would not be directly affected by an Education Department shutdown.

But Education does oversee and pay for some smaller early learning programs and early childhood research. For example, the Preschool Development Grant — Birth through Five, provides funding for state early learning programs and is overseen jointly with HHS. Other programs, such as Promise Neighborhoods and Full Service Community Schools, also address the early years and family support.

The Education Department also is home to several research centers that focus on young children, many of which conduct long-term students or research aimed at improving the lives of infants and toddlers with disabilities. Those programs, if they were not cut, would have to move to another agency.

K12 Education

What happens to Title I and other money that the department doles out?

Closing the Education Department would not undo it. Title I — a program established in 1965 that provides money to schools with large numbers of low-income students — is part of federal law. If the Education Department were to be eliminated, the most likely scenario is that Title I money would flow through another federal agency. Major cuts to the program are unlikely.

While Trump and others close to him have said they would like to cut federal education funding streams like Title I, any cuts would need to go through Congress — where that funding has broad political support among both Republicans and Democrats. That is especially true for Title I: Almost all school districts in the country get a share of that money.

So it’s unlikely Title I “would ever see an actual cut, and certainly not a substantial cut,” said Nora Gordon, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She said even members of Congress who are hostile to other federal programs that allocate funds for low-income families would be reluctant to defund Title I.

Related: What education could look like under Trump and Vance

Do I have to worry about special education?

There would be bureaucratic upheaval if another agency took on oversight of education of students with disabilities, but the special education law itself, and the money allotted to it, would not change without an act of Congress.

The law now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed in 1975, four years before the Education Department was formed. At that time, it was administered by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now known as the Department of Health and Human Services department).

About 7.5 million children are now served under the IDEA. For fiscal 2024, the department oversaw about $14 billion in funding for school-aged children, with smaller pots of money going to infants, toddlers, and other special education-related programs.

Through the Education Department, the government sets rules for states, districts and schools about how children should be identified for possible disabilities and how families, parents and schools should work together to create a child’s “individualized education program,” a menu of the supports and services they should receive.

Does this mean everyone will get a private school voucher?      

Regardless of the future of the Education Department, Trump could, with the support of Congress, take some action to expand school choice nationwide. Republicans in their official party platform made universal school choice, in every state, a top priority. The idea didn’t go far under Trump’s first education secretary, but political headwinds may make it easier for him to achieve some policy wins this time.

During the first Trump administration, then-Secretary Betsy DeVos pushed to expand school choice, largely through charter schools and private school vouchers. Congress, however, ignored her budget request in 2018 for $400 million to fund their expansion. A year later, DeVos pitched $5 billion in tax credits for individuals and businesses that contribute to scholarships for students to attend private schools. Trump resurrected the idea in early 2020, and again as an option for parents frustrated with prolonged school closures during the pandemic. A bill to create the tax credits died in committee.

As part of the agenda for his next term, Trump has pledged to allow families with a 529 college savings plan to spend up to $10,000 a year per child on homeschool education. The GOP also wants to expand education savings accounts, or ESAs — a polarizing program that allows families to pull their children out of public school and use a portion of state per-pupil funding on private school tuition, homeschool supplies and other educational costs. At least a dozen states since 2020 have created ESA programs, with some offering universal enrollment regardless of a family’s income level and with few restrictions on taxpayer money being spent on religious education.

Rural opposition has stalled such legislation in states like Texas, and voters in November rejected school choice measures on ballots in three states. But in recent years, the Supreme Court has expanded the religious rights of parents and sectarian schools. Trump’s next education secretary is also likely to have an easier time clearing school choice legislation with Republican control of both the House and Senate.

Related: School choice may have its biggest moment yet

What would happen to school lunch, and free and reduced-price school lunches?

Nothing. Eliminating the Education Department would likely have little or no impact on the school lunch program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, not the Education Department, runs the vast National School Lunch Program, although the data collected by schools about the number of students who qualify for low-cost or no-cost breakfast and lunch powers a lot of the education agency’s work. About 30 million kids participate in the program on a given school day — including students at public charter schools and some nonprofit private schools.

During Trump’s first term, as part of a collection of pandemic-related measures, he approved providing school lunches to all students, regardless of their household income. Several states have since kept up that effort since the pandemic option expired, offering free meals to all students no matter their family earnings. And a growing number of schools in other states now offer meals to all students if a large enough number qualify for free lunches. Earlier this year, a Republican budget proposal, called Fiscal Sanity to Save America, said that option should be eliminated.

Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, created by the conservative Heritage Foundation, but that document also calls for reining in spending on school meals. “Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs that have strayed far from their original objective and represent an example of the ever-expanding federal footprint in local school operations.”

What happens to education research and the tracking of students’ academic achievement?

The work of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research and statistics arm of the Education Department, is mandated by law and would not disappear overnight even if the agency were abolished. IES collects and aggregates data from more than 19,000 school districts around the country to give the public a national picture of our decentralized educational system, from counting the number of students and dollars spent on schools to tracking class sizes and years teachers stay in the job. IES disburses millions of dollars each year to researchers to develop new ideas for improving instruction, and it evaluates programs afterward. One-fourth of IES’s $800 million a year budget goes to administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which is an important yardstick for measuring academic achievement among fourth and eighth graders.

All three of these functions — statistics collection, research and assessment — theoretically could be transferred to other agencies, according to former IES director Mark Schneider, whom Trump appointed to a six-year term during the former president’s first term. Education research could shift to the National Science Foundation, which already awards grants for educational research along with the Education Department. The statistics unit, also known as the National Center for Education Statistics, could be folded into the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the main statistical agency of the federal government. A new home for the NAEP test is less obvious.

Schneider said that talk of eliminating the Education Department may invite more scrutiny into what its research arm does. Advocates could try to capitalize on this scrutiny as an opportunity to lobby for an overhaul of the research division, he said.

Higher Education

What happens to student loans if the Education Department is abolished?

Student debt won’t disappear even if the Education Department does. The federal agency contracts with the loan servicers that manage nearly $2 trillion in student loan debt and oversees the programs that can lead to loans being forgiven, such as for teachers and people who work in public health.

“The terms and conditions of the loans don’t change just because the agency changes,” said Betsy Mayotte, president of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, which offers advice and guidance on student loans to borrowers. If there is no Education Department, it’s likely that student loan oversight and debt collection would shift to the Treasury Department. “I expect that at least initially the servicers wouldn’t even change.”

Aside from that,Republicans in Congress, who will soon control both chambers, have proposed a College Cost Reduction Act, which would increase the amount of federal Pell grants for third- and fourth-year college students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in fields considered to be in high demand. It would also simplify the student loan repayment process and end certain kinds of loans available to parents, graduate students and low-income learners. It would hold colleges and universities, rather than taxpayers, responsible for loans on which their students have defaulted.

The Biden administration’s relentless and embattled attempts to forgive some student loan debt are almost certain to come to an abrupt end. Many have been blocked by courts anyway, and Trump and his allies have characterized them as an unfair transfer of wealth from people who didn’t go to college to people who did.

What about grants and aid for paying for college, and the FAFSA?

Even without an Education Department, it is unlikely that the Pell grant — which most low-income students use to help pay for college — would disappear. Congress controls who is eligible for Pell, so the Trump administration couldn’t decide on its own to change or take away the grant. Pell has long had bipartisan support in Congress, and it is very unlikely that a Republican-controlled Congress would get rid of a grant that is relied on by so many constituents.

House Republicans have, however, proposed changes to eligibility and the award amount. A version of the College Cost Reduction Act has a chance of passing since Republicans will soon control Congress. The bill would peg the Pell award to the median cost of a college program, instead of basing it on the particular cost of the program or college where a student is enrolled. In practice, this means students enrolled in a program that is more expensive than average, whether due to the price set by the institution or due to a higher cost of living in that area, could see their award reduced. In addition, the determination of financial need would no longer take into account a family farm where the family resides or a family-owned small business that has fewer than 100 employees.

McMahon, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, also supports changes to Pell. She wrote an opinion piece in September promoting what’s known as “short-term Pell.” Right now, for the most part, Pell can be used only to pay for education programs that last 15 weeks or more (about one semester). McMahon supports a bill, which has some bipartisan support, that would allow federal aid dollars to pay for short-term programs that train students for particular jobs.

Critics worry such an expansion could take Pell dollars away from traditional programs. They note many short-term programs (for example, welder and HVAC programs) are already Pell-eligible and that shorter programs, including many run by for-profit companies, often don’t have good results. A recent report showed no improvement in employment for students who used short-term Pell.

While last year’s FAFSA rollout was broadly criticized, there seems to be no appetite to further complicate students’ ability to access federal financial aid. In fact, the College Cost Reduction Act includes a requirement that would simplify and standardize college financial aid offers so that students have an easier time understanding and comparing them.

Related: How four universities graduate their low-income students at much higher rates than average

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Reporting for The Hechinger Report:

• Jill Barshay, writes the “Proof Points” column about education research and data
• Meredith Kolodner, senior investigations reporter
• Jackie Mader, senior reporter
• Jon Marcus, senior higher education reporter
• Neal Morton, western education reporter
• Javeria Salman, staff writer and writes the Future of Learning newsletter
• Christina A. Samuels, deputy managing editor
• Nirvi Shah, editor

This story about the Education Department was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.