GRAND FORKS — Three days after the U.S. Department of Education announced sweeping layoffs, North Dakotans are still waiting to find out what the cuts to staff will mean for their public schools and universities.
More than 1,300 federal employees were told they were being laid off in a Tuesday, March 11, purge, alongside the nearly 600 who have chosen to leave since the onset of President Donald Trump’s second term.
Newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a Tuesday press release the staff cuts reflect “the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.”
That exodus has raised questions about the ability of the Education Department to continue its duties, particularly its disbursement of vital federal funds to K-12 schools and higher education, with half its staff, or less, compared to two months ago.
“When you consider that they work all across the country, and they provide monies to different state education agencies for the use and benefit of students, I can’t imagine that cutting half of the staff is a good thing,” said Nick Archuleta, president of teachers union North Dakota United.
The state Department of Public Instruction has said little publicly about the federal cuts. In a Thursday newsletter, the agency said its partner, the National Council of State School Officers, was working to understand how the Education Department cuts would impact state agencies.
North Dakota DPI serves as the pass-through agency for federal K-12 grants like Title programs and special education funding.
According to the National Education Association, North Dakota receives around $52.9 million in Title I funding, which goes to schools with significant low-income populations, and $42.5 million in Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funds.
The Education Department has said formula funds like Title I and IDEA are not expected to be affected by the staff cuts, a point DPI reiterated in its newsletter.
Sen. Tim Mathern, D-Fargo, said DPI Superintendent Kirsten Baesler has told him the cuts represent a “reduction of administrative overhead” and will not change much.
Trump has nominated Baesler to be assistant secretary in charge of K-12 education within the Education Department.
Aimee Copas, executive director of the North Dakota Council for Educational Leadership, said right now the group is advising districts to continue operating as normal. She did express concern that the Trump administration could further target education programs for spending cuts in order to balance the federal budget.
Trump has also expressed a desire to shutter the Education Department outright, which Copas noted would require a 60-vote majority in the U.S. Senate.
Copas also said public schools in North Dakota were a hub for communities and often one of the largest employers in many cities.
“We believe that strengthening our public education system should be the goal of every Administration,” Copas wrote in an email. “I hope that this administration sees that importance as well.”
Donene Feist, executive director of Family Voice of North Dakota, which advocates for students with disabilities, is particularly concerned by the deep cuts made to the Office of Civil Rights, which investigates civil rights complaints in public schools.
She says families of children with disabilities have turned to OCR in cases where their child was subject to discriminatory treatment, like being repeatedly secluded or restrained.
“We have had families who have had to use that, and so if there is no Office of Civil Rights, there’s nowhere else to take it,” Feist said.
which helps bankroll school-based special needs services like physical therapy or sessions with a speech pathologist, also have Feist concerned about how schools will meet children’s needs.
She took umbrage in particular with an incident broadcast on Fox News where McMahon was unable to tell cable host Laura Ingraham what the IDEA acronym stood for.
“How are we making these decisions when we don’t know what the terminology means, let alone how this is going to impact kids with disabilities?” Feist asked.
Mathern, who has called for the Senate Appropriations Committee to hold a hearing on how federal cuts will impact North Dakota, says people who have reached out to him are most concerned about cuts to special education services.
He says North Dakota needs to consider dipping into its own coffers to make up for any funding gaps created by cuts at the federal level.
Notice of the Education Department layoffs coincided with spring break for the North Dakota University System’s 12 higher education institutions.
Administrators at the University of North Dakota have said they are monitoring the impact of the Education Department cuts as they develop.
Vice President of Research and Economic Development Scott Snyder said Thursday that he still has not heard from the Education Department on how the cuts potentially impact federal contracts and awards given to the university, and the person in charge of handling those programs was out of the office until next week.
North Dakota State University spokesperson Brynn Rawlings said in a Friday message to the Grand Forks Herald that the university is also examining how the Education Department cuts will affect it.
On Thursday, The Associated Press reported an hourslong outage on StudentAid.gov, the website for federal student grants and loans.
Matthew Sanchez, NDSU’s financial aid director, says financial aid administrators at NDSU rarely interact with Education Department officials directly but rely heavily on infrastructure maintained by the federal department, like the student aid site.
“If there’s more outages, does that affect us more? I mean, yeah, greatly,” he said. “Being down for an hour, you can probably get away with that. But if you’re down for a couple months, then that’s going to be a concern.”
North Dakota students receive some $56.8 million in Pell Grants, per NEA.
Archuleta noted that staff layoffs have happened at the Education Department before — he cited President Bill Clinton’s administration as one such example — but said the latest round of cuts was chaotic and poorly planned.
“I don’t think anybody took into consideration how any and all of these cuts are going to affect the children that are being served,” he said. “If we really care about kids, we need to tap the brakes. We need to evaluate which programs are necessary and unnecessary, which personnel are vital to the mission and which are not, and then make decisions accordingly.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: After its initial publication, this piece was updated with additional comments from Aimee Copas of the North Dakota Council of Educational Leaders. Also, the first paragraph was revised to more accurately reflect the date of its publication online.