“We wouldn’t be able to function as an organization without him,” said Superintendent Jennifer Gaffney. “A lot of what students, teachers and our office staff do is centered around the use of technology and data systems. He is the backbone of all that.”

But now Gaffney doesn’t know how much longer she can rely on the federal dollars that pay his salary. The Rural Education Achievement Program is among the 17 funding sources that the Trump administration wants to roll into a . Congress approved $220 million for REAP this year, but under the president’s plan, governors and state education chiefs would decide whether rural districts would get extra money.

Monty Mayer, superintendent of the Velva Public Schools in North Dakota, about 20 miles southeast of Minot, used the $14,000 he received from the program this year to pay teaching assistants to work with students who were behind academically.

“Money rolled into a block grant would be swallowed up by the bigger schools as their needs are much greater than ours,” he said. That would leave “small rural schools looking to find answers in different places without a clear picture as to where those resources would come from.”

During with the Senate appropriations committee in late April, Education Secretary Linda McMahon faced several questions from both Democrats and Republicans about the future of the program. She suggested that REAP was underutilized.

“A lot of rural schools do not have grant writers, cannot bring in the resources other states might have or other cities might have,” she said. “A lot of states never participated in any of the grant funding.”

Under a consolidated program, she said, all states would receive a portion of the block grant and officials would decide “how this money should be spent in their state, where the greatest needs are, whether that’s in rural communities.”

Officials with years of experience in rural education say that isn’t how REAP works. States or districts don’t write grant proposals for the funding, said Steven Johnson, superintendent of the Fort Ransom Public School District, which operates one elementary school in southeast North Dakota. Districts , based on size and location, receive an invitation to apply. And most do, Johnson said.

“It’s rarely about capacity or lack of grant-writing ability. If anything, what we’re seeing is the opposite,” he said. “Rural districts rely on REAP because it is simple, direct and does not require extensive administrative capacity.”

Abigail Swisher, who previously worked on the REAP program at the department, said where rural districts struggle is applying for large, competitive grant programs.

“Applying for competitive federal grants is time-consuming and complex. Larger districts are hiring grant writers who have the specialized expertise and who have time,” she said. “That’s exactly why we have the REAP program. It was designed by Congress to help fill that gap.”

There were efforts to help rural districts access those other programs, she said, but those ended with the new administration.

‘Testing and reporting standards’ 

Districts that for Small, Rural School Achievement funding, one of the two REAP programs, have fewer than 600 students and are located in an area their state defines as rural. Others, with 20% of students who live below the poverty line, qualify for the Rural and Low-Income School program, and some are eligible for both. This year, 17,873 were eligible for one or both programs.

Last week, Kirstin Baesler, the assistant secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, that they have considerable leeway to use federal funds for programs like tutoring or after-school programs. 

But Johnson said that flexibility was “one of the original core concepts behind REAP.” His district, for example, didn’t have enough poor students to qualify for Title I funding, but under existing law, he was able to use federal funds to provide students with reading and math tutoring.

Congress created REAP as part of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal accountability law that set strict expectations for school improvement, and reauthorized the program as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Despite their small size, rural districts were not exempt from NCLB’s mandates, Johnson said. 

“Small, rural schools were expected to meet the same testing and reporting standards as larger systems but often lacked the staffing and resources to do so,” he said.

A from AASA, the School Superintendents Association, showed that districts most commonly used the funds for technology, followed by staff training, compensation and expanding programs like STEM and arts for students. When Johnson asked other administrators across the country, they listed bullying prevention, special education assistants and support to help students graduate among the ways they use the funds.

“Rural districts piece together budgets with many smaller sources,” said Margaret Buckton, a school finance consultant in Iowa. Although REAP “isn’t a huge sum, when combined with other small grants, it likely makes a difference.”

Questions of ‘efficacy’

In her exchanges with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican who has made rural schools a priority, McMahon questioned whether the program has a positive impact.

“Many of these programs have lost their efficacy and they really are not returning, giving the returns that we hope to see for rural schools,” McMahon said.

The Department of Education did not respond to questions about what data McMahon was referring to when she said the program wasn’t effective. But Melissa Sadorf, executive director of the National Rural Education Association, said because districts can use the funds in a variety of ways, the department looks primarily at compliance issues rather than impact on students.

“There is no single, consistent student outcome measure applied across grantees,” she said. “The program has not been the subject of a comprehensive federal evaluation in close to a decade, which makes any sweeping claim about effectiveness difficult to substantiate from the data.”

That was mostly a summary of the challenges facing rural schools, like transportation and teacher recruitment, and what the department was doing to support them.

The department also tracks whether districts comply with the rules for using the funds.

A in the Custer County, Colorado, district, for example, discovered an accounting error because a staff member entered data using hand-written notes. The same issue came up in Indiana’s in 2022. The department’s website doesn’t list any reports conducted since McMahon took office.

The administration pitched the same block grant idea last year, and Congress ultimately rejected it. With the appropriations process likely to drag out for months, it’s unclear whether lawmakers will be more receptive this year. 

But for rural districts like Sackets Harbor, the site of an important naval base during the war of 1812, the continued uncertainty over federal funding is “unnerving,” said Gaffney, the superintendent. 

The district’s annual , in which students fanned out across the historic town for service projects, like gardening and polishing headstones, is popular with local residents. The school board asked voters to approve a nearly 8% tax increase, which they did. But with increases in English learners and students with disabilities, Gaffney said the district is still under “a great deal of financial pressure.”

“That is precisely why every dollar matters to us, including REAP funding,” she said. “These resources are vital in helping us maintain programs, services and opportunities for our students.”

A private meeting between the Senate education committee and Education Secretary Linda McMahon was canceled Wednesday after Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat, invited the press to listen in. “I was unwilling to accept the notion that the discussion of matters of this magnitude, that matter so much to Virginians, could only be behind closed doors,” he told reporters.

He said he was willing to back down if the secretary would commit to appearing before the committee within the next six weeks. In December, Democrats to participate in a hearing to discuss efforts to shut down the Department of Education, but that hasn’t happened. Following passage of the 2026 budget in January, Congress asked to meet regularly with officials for updates on the interagency agreements with other agencies, but Kaine added that he’s unaware if those have taken place.

“In my view,” he said, “the secretary and other leaders have pursued a strategy that is unlawful in taking programs within the Department of Education that are statutory in nature and sort of willy nilly ending them, shrinking them or handing them over to other agencies.”

In , GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the committee, said “Democrats will not dictate the terms of today’s meeting and have lost the chance to speak to the Secretary today.”

McMahon hasn’t appeared before the committee since her confirmation hearing over a year ago. On X, : “It’s disappointing that instead of a productive conversation about the state of our nation’s students and the steps we’re taking at the Department of Education to reverse this trend and break up the bureaucracy, this became about producing another media clip for MSNBC.”

It was only three months ago that Congress the Trump administration’s last attempt to slash education spending and roll an array of programs into a block grant.

From the reception that some members of the Senate Appropriations Committee gave U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Tuesday, it appeared not much has changed. 

Both Republicans and Democrats grilled the secretary over the Trump administration’s plan to cut funding for rural schools and programs that help low-income students enter and complete college. 

Consolidating $220 million for rural education with 16 other programs — including literacy grants, education for homeless students and afterschool programs — into a $2 billion Make Education Great Again grant program would “undermine the goals of helping our K through 12 schools,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the committee, told McMahon. “Protecting rural schools and rural communities has always been one of my top priorities.” 

Throughout the two-hour hearing, McMahon defended the president’s $76.5 billion , saying that although “it is a reduction,” the block grant proposal — a long time goal for conservatives — would give states more say over how to spend federal dollars. The so-called MEGA grant program will prioritize reading and math, McMahon said, and “unleash momentous opportunity for every child to realize their God-given potential.”

The budget would maintain funding for Title I, serving high-poverty schools, at $18.4 million, and boost spending for students with disabilities by over $500 million. 

But the proposal includes a 35% cut to the Office for Civil Rights and eliminates some programs completely. Those include $428 million in services for migrant children and what is known as TRIO, a batch of programs that prepare students for higher education as early as middle school. 

“I oppose the administration’s proposal to … eliminate a program that enjoys robust support and has made such a difference in the lives of children,” Collins said, noting that three of her staff members would not have attended college without TRIO.

She was among the six Republicans and six Democrats who sent McMahon earlier this month objecting to how the department has altered two of the TRIO grants to direct students toward the workforce instead of college. 

“College is not the only solution for everyone,” McMahon told the members.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, cited data showing that low-income, high school students who participate in Upward Bound are more than twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than their peers who don’t participate. 

“The stats from these programs are pretty damn impressive,” he said. 

Even Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, who has authored that would eliminate the Education Department, called TRIO a “sensitive area” and urged McMahon to consider the committee’s concerns. 

Other Republicans praised the secretary for continuing efforts to shut down the department in the face of extensive criticism.

“You are so cool, literally and figuratively,” said Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. “They call you names, and you just ignore them.”

‘50 years of progress’

To some Democrats, McMahon has also turned her back on parents who don’t want to see special education offloaded to another agency. The secretary said her team still hasn’t decided what would happen to programs that fall under the Individuals with Disabilities Act. Some might go to the Department of Labor, while others could go to the Department of Health and Human Services, she said.

“I’ve gotten a petition from thousands of parents, educators, advocates who are concerned that will really undermine 50 years of progress in making sure the rights of children and students with disabilities are met,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, ranking member of the committee.

Both Murray and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut clashed with McMahon over the way her staff has handled civil rights enforcement. 

“How do you defend that not a single child in Connecticut got a positive resolution from the Department of Education for their discrimination claims?” Murphy asked her. “Seventy of them had disability claims.”

While he’s not on the committee, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent, released a calling McMahon’s OCR “the least productive in over a decade.” The document notes that the office reached “zero resolution agreements for students facing serious traumatic incidents including sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion, restraint, racial harassment and discriminatory school discipline.”

He cited a January government watchdog report showing that putting OCR staff on paid leave last year, after she tried to fire them, cost taxpayers at least $38 million. 

McMahon insisted that the administration was ramping up efforts to address such complaints and seemed confused that the president calls for a $49 million cut to OCR, bringing the budget to $91 million.

“That’s a floor number,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll have the ability to increase that number.”

She ordered OCR staff on leave to return in December to address a backlog of cases, and is supervisors and attorneys for regional offices. An internal memo, shared with ����Ӱ��, shows the regional directors would go to Denver, Seattle and the D.C. offices. But according to an OCR attorney, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, there have been “lots of departures” among those McMahon brought back. 

‘Overdue for a debate’

Some who watched the exchanges between McMahon and the committee Tuesday were struck by the level of bipartisanship over the TRIO program.

“It shows the kind of Congressional support these programs have built up over many years, and the strong constituencies they have behind them,” said Maureen Tracey-Mooney, associate director of FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank. Previously, she led K-12 policy development for the Biden White House.

She added that the programs that McMahon aims to wrap into the MEGA program “focus on the most vulnerable student groups.” 

Those would include students who need after-school care and are currently served by the 21st Century Community Learn Centers program. 

“What do you do once they leave the classroom when they’re so young and they can’t obviously take care of themselves at home?” asked Republican Sen. Shelley Capito of West Virginia.

McMahon responded that it would be up to states to decide whether after-school programs are a priority for them.“We’re certainly overdue for a debate about how to best support our nation’s students,” Tracey-Mooney said. “But I think we are unlikely to see a rigorous engagement in Congress with these ideas through the budget process.”