Education is a lightning rod for Trump administration cuts, threats, and orders. As part of WNIJ’s “Uncertainty” series, Peter Medlin asks education leaders at every level how they plan for the future when funding is unstable...
Early Childhood Centers
On one side of a classroom, kids point to vocabulary words on a board as their teacher effortlessly switches between English and Spanish. On the other side, they munch on turkey sandwiches.
It’s a pretty typical day at Two Rivers Head Start in Aurora, a federally funded early childhood program for low-income families.
In her nearby office, executive director Kelly Neidel works on a vocab assignment, too.
“Do not use welfare, poverty, faith based," she reads from a “banned words” guide, which they use to make changes to grant proposals they worry will trigger a review from the federal government.
She has to be careful. Head Start has been on and off the chopping block all year.
Neidel says the majority of her 200+ families are a paycheck from homelessness. And, frankly, Neidel doesn’t buy the administration's claims of waste and abuse.
“We have to have an audit every year; an independent audit," she said. "They're very picky.”
But the administration has already dismantled parts of Head Start. The Department of Health and Human Services closed several regional Head Start offices, including theirs in Chicago.
Neidel says that’s made it even harder to plan, since those offices answer questions about future grants, pending building sales, and incident reviews. Now, she says they just get generic responses.
Uncertainty in K-12 education
K-12 education leaders feel uncertain too. Angie Smith helps run business operations for the West Aurora School District.
They have federally-funding after-school programs they’re not sure will exist next year. But she says her biggest frustration isn’t that there could be funding cuts, it’s not knowing.
“If the news is bad, just tell us," said Smith. "If you're going to cut Title funding. President Trump, then just get it over with and just tell us so then we can build a plan. The harder thing is when we might, we might not.”
She says it’s already almost impossible for schools to plan beyond the next year, but this level of uncertainty -- including with tariffs -- just makes that calculus more difficult.
While most of the district’s $200 million budget goes to teacher and staff salaries, Smith says they spend significant cash on everything from paper and computers to construction.
For example, they’re renovating a middle school theater, which means wood and lighting equipment.
“One of the administrators that was helping with it got some quotes" Smith said, "and was basically told, here's all these things that are potentially going to be subject to tariff."
She says they hurried up and bought it, just in case. But they can’t stockpile goods because schools just don’t have the space. One thing they can do is buy things like paper in bulk with other school districts.
University uncertainty
In higher education, they’re facing an existential threat to research funding. Over $1 billion in National Science Foundation grants have been terminated since April.
Richard Mocarski is the Vice President for Research and Innovation Partnerships at Northern Illinois University.
“There’s multiple grants that have been terminated at the university," he said, "across five different federal agencies."
That includes $260,000 for Equity for Excellence in STEM. He says other canceled NIU grants are for training programs to fill national shortages. Some are for health studies. They’re currently in an appeal process.
“A lot of grants we submit," he said, "have students on them, whether they're graduate students or undergraduate students. So, we work really hard to find alternative ways to fund those students who have lost their funding off grants."
With federal funding uncertain, Mocarski says they’re accelerating a plan to diversify funding sources, including partnering with the private sector and foundations.
He says he’s not sure people realize the role long-term, federally funded research at universities plays in their lives, from the development of WiFi to Ozempic, but cutting back not only makes it harder for universities to plan for the future, it makes it harder for future breakthroughs to happen at all.
And at every level of education, these leaders worry instability isn’t just making their lives tougher, it’s degrading the quality of education they can offer.
