Children enrolled in the Head Start early education program operated by Western Dairyland Economic Opportunity Council. (Photo courtesy of Western Dairyland EOC)
A new Trump administration federal rule would bar immigrants without legal status from a range of public programs, canceling a policy that was implemented nearly three decades ago.
The change bars the children of those immigrants from the Head Start child care program. It also closes the door to immigrants lacking legal status for various programs that provide mental health and substance abuse treatment, job training and other assistance.
Head Start, which provides early education and child care for low-income families, has never been required to ascertain the immigration status of its families, said Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association.
Families enrolling in the program have to provide a variety of pieces of information to verify they are eligible, Mauer told the Wisconsin Examiner Monday, and the programs are “very compliance oriented” and collect “exactly what they have to collect.”
Mauer said a trusting relationship between Head Start programs and the families they serve is important.
“We’re serving some of the neediest families in our community,” she said. Some have had “challenging relationships” in the past with schools and other government agencies — making nurturing that trust even more critical, she added.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)issued a notice July 10 that declared Head Start and a list of other federally funded programs would now be considered “public benefits” that exclude immigrants without legal status under a law enacted in 1996. The notice revokes a policy enacted in 1998 that had exempted the affected programs from the 1996 law.
The federal announcement said that the policy change was instituted to “ensure that taxpayer-funded program benefits intended for the American people are not diverted to subsidize illegal aliens.”
Mauer said there has been no implementation guidance from HHS since the notice.
The Wisconsin Head Start Association is among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in April by the American Civil Liberties Union opposing Trump administration actions against Head Start. The other plaintiffs include parent groups in Oregon and in Oakland, California, along with state Head Start associations in Washington, Illinois and Pennsylvania.
In a statement Friday the plaintiffs said they will amend the lawsuit if the administration follows through with the limits in the July 10 announcement.
Mauer said that the Wisconsin association is advising Head Start providers to “refrain from making any immediate changes to enrollment policy until they have an opportunity to fully evaluate their legal obligations.”
She said the notice has heightened concern about the safety of children whose families might be targeted by the new federal stance. But it will affect the entire program, she said.
Mauer said a second concern is that the policy could lead some families to take their children out of the program despite their need for it. If enrollment falls below the federally prescribed level of 97% of capacity, she’s concerned that the federal government might then take back grant money — creating “a negative feedback loop,” she said.
“I am so afraid for our families,” Mauer said. “This is fracturing the safety of all of our children. This will hurt all of the children in Head Start.”
A student draws with chalk on an outdoor court at a New York City public school in 2022. If states don’t receive billions in congressionally approved funding for K-12 education that the Trump administration is withholding, officials say programs for migrants, English-language learners and kids in need of after-school care will be at risk. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
The U.S. Department of Education’s decision last week to hold back $6.8 billion in federal K-12 funds next year has triggered alarm among state education officials, school leaders and advocacy groups nationwide over how the lack of funds will affect their after-school, enrichment and language-learning services.
The Trump administration’s decision to freeze the funding has put states in “triage mode” as they scramble to decide what programs may be cut without that funding, said Mary Kusler, senior director for the Center for Advocacy at the National Education Association. The money was approved by Congress to support education for English language learners, migrants, low-income children and adults learning to read, among others.
As of July 1, school systems are unable to draw down funding, jeopardizing summer programs, hiring and early-year planning for the 2025–26 school year.
The funding freeze affects several core programs: Title II-A (educator training and recruitment), Title III-A (English learner support), Title IV-A (student enrichment and after-school), as well as migrant education and adult education and literacy grants. Trump has proposed eliminating all those programs in his proposed budget for next fiscal year, but that proposal hasn’t gone through Congress.
State superintendents sent out missives to school districts early this week and now are scrambling to make choices.
“This is not about political philosophy, this is about reliability and consistency,” Alabama state Superintendent Eric Mackey said to Politico. “None of us were worrying about this.”
The administration says it is reviewing the programs.
“The Department remains committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the President’s priorities and the Department’s statutory responsibilities,” the U.S. Department of Education wrote to states in its announcement June 30.
Historically, the department releases allocations by July 1 to ensure schools can budget and plan effectively for the coming school year. Withholding the money could result in canceled programs, hiring freezes and the loss of essential support for English learners, migrant children and other high-need populations, education and state officials told Stateline.
“America’s public school leaders run district budgets that are dependent on a complex partnership between federal, state, and local funding,” said David R. Schuler, executive director of the School Superintendents Association in a statement. “For decades, school districts have relied on timely confirmation of their federal allocations ahead of the July 1 start of the fiscal year — ensuring stability, allowing for responsible planning, and supporting uninterrupted educational services for students.”
The states facing the largest withheld amounts include California ($810.7 million), Texas ($660.9 million), and New York ($411.7 million), according to data from the NEA and the Learning Policy Institute, an education think tank.
For 17 states and territories, the freeze affects over 15% of their total federal K-12 allocations, according to the Learning Policy Institute. For smaller jurisdictions such as the District of Columbia and Vermont, the disruption hits even harder: More than 20% of their federal K-12 budgets remain inaccessible.
Colorado Education Commissioner Susan Córdova urged school districts to begin contingency planning in case funds are not released before the federal fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond hinted at possible legal action, which has become a trend as states fight the second Trump administration’s funding revocations or delays.
“California will continue to pursue all available legal remedies to the Trump Administration’s unlawful withholding of federal funds appropriated by Congress,” Thurmond said in a statement.
The NEA and the NAACP have filed for a preliminary injunction, calling the administration’s delay an illegal “impoundment” — a violation of the federal Impoundment Control Act, which bars the executive branch from withholding appropriated funds without congressional approval.
Education advocates warn the recent decision by the Trump administration to withhold funding reflects a broader pattern of federal disengagement from public education.
Community nonprofits said the withholding could devastate their programming too. The Boys and Girls Clubs of America could have to close more than 900 centers — bringing the loss of 5,900 jobs and affecting more than 220,000 children, said President and CEO Jim Clark in a statement.
The 1974 Impoundment Control Act lets the president propose canceling funds approved by Congress. Lawmakers have 45 days to approve the request; if they don’t, it’s denied. Meanwhile, agencies can be directed not to spend the funds during that time.
A White House statement shared with States Newsroom this week said “initial findings have shown that many of these grant programs have been grossly misused to subsidize a radical leftwing agenda.”
“Kids, educators, and working families are the ones losing,” said Kusler, of the NEA. “We need governors and communities to step up — now.”
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
A rally goer rolls out a scroll with the names of every school district that has gone to referendum since the last state budget. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.
Education advocates are making a push for more investment in public schools from the state as the Republican-led Joint Finance Committee plans to take up portions of the budget related to K-12 schools during its Thursday meeting.
The issue has been a top concern for Wisconsinites who came out to budget listening sessions and was one of Gov. Tony Evers’ priorities in his budget proposal. Evers proposed that the state spend an additional $3.1 billion on K-12 education. Evers and Republican leaders were negotiating on the spending for education as well as taxes and other parts of the budget until last week when negotiations reached an impasse.
Evers has said that Republicans were unwilling to compromise on his funding priorities, including making “meaningful investments for K-12 schools, to continue Child Care Counts to help lower the cost of child care for working families and to prevent further campus closures and layoffs at our UW System.” He said he was willing to support their tax proposal, which Republicans have said included income and retiree tax cuts.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said on WISN 12’s UpFront that Evers “lied” about Republicans walking away from the negotiating table.
“We’re willing to do it, just not as much as he wanted… When you read that statement, it makes it sound like we were at zero,” Vos said. “We were not at zero on any of those topics. We tried to find a way to invest in child care that actually went to the parents, and to make sure that we weren’t just having to go to a business. We tried to find a way to look at education so that money would actually go back to school districts across the state. It just wasn’t enough for what he wanted.”
Public education advocates said school districts are in dire need of a significant investment of state dollars, especially for special education. After lobbying for the last week, many are concerned that when Republicans finally announce their proposal it won’t be enough.
State Superintendent Jill Underly told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview Wednesday afternoon that she is anticipating that Republicans will put forth more short-term solutions, but she said schools and students can’t continue functioning in that way.
Underly compared the situation of education funding in Wisconsin to a road trip.
“The gas tank is nearly empty, and you’re trying to coast… you’re turning the air conditioning off… going at a lower speed limit, just to save a little fuel and the state budget every two years. I kind of look at them as like these exits to gas stations,” Underly said. “We keep passing up these opportunities to refuel. Schools are running on fumes, and we see the stress that is having an our system — the number of referendums, the anxiety around whether or not we’re going to have the referendum or not in our communities. Wisconsin public schools have been underfunded for decades.”
The one thing lawmakers must do, Underly said, is increase the special education reimbursement rate to a minimum of 60%, back to the levels of the 1990s.
“It used to be 60% but they haven’t been keeping up their promise to public schools,” Underly said. “They need to raise the special education reimbursement rate. Anything less than 60% is once again failing to meet urgent needs.”
The Wisconsin Public Education Network is encouraging advocates to show up at the committee meeting Thursday and continue pushing lawmakers and Evers to invest. Executive Director Heather DuBois Bourenane told the Examiner that she is concerned lawmakers are planning on “low balling” special education funding, even as she said she has never seen the education community so united in its insistence on one need.
“We’re familiar with the way they work in that caucus and in the Joint Finance Committee,” DuBois Bourenane said. “The pattern of the past has been to go around the state and listen to the concerns that are raised or at least get the appearance of listening, and then reject those concerns and demands and put forward a budget that fails in almost every way to prioritize the priority needs for our communities.”
While it’s unclear what Republicans will ultimately do, budget papers prepared by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau includes three options when it comes to special education reimbursement rate: the first is to raise the rate to 60% sum sufficient — as Evers has proposed; the second is to leave the rate at 31.5% sum certain by investing an additional $35.8 million and the third is to raise the rate to an estimated 35% by providing an additional $68.6 million in 2023-24 and $86.2 million in 2024-25.
The paper also includes options for investing more in the high cost of special education, which provides additional aid to reimburse 90% of the cost of educating students whose special education costs exceed $30,000 in a single year.
The School Administrators Alliance (SAA) sent an update to its members on Monday, pointing out what was in the budget papers and saying the committee “appears poised to focus spending on High-Cost Special Education Aid and the School Levy Tax Credit, rather than significantly raising the primary special education categorical aid.”
SAA Executive Director Dee Pettack said in the email that if that’s the route lawmakers take, it would “result in minimal new, spendable resources for classrooms and students.”
Public school funding was one of the top priorities mentioned by Wisconsinites at the four budget hearings held by the budget committee across the state in March.
“I just think it’s time to say enough is enough,” DuBois Bourenane said. “We’re really urging people to do whatever they can before our lawmakers vote on this budget, to say that we are really going to accept nothing less than a budget that stops this cycle of insufficient state support for priority needs and demand better.”
Pettack and leaders of the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, Southeast Wisconsin School Alliance and the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance also issued a joint letter Tuesday urging the committee to “meet this moment with the urgency it requires,” adding that the budget provides the opportunity to allocate resources that will help students achieve.
The letter detailed the situation that a low special education reimbursement has placed districts in as they struggle to fund the mandated services and must fill in the gaps with funds from their general budgets.
“The lack of an adequate state reimbursement for mandated special education programs and services negatively affects all other academic programs, including career and technical education, reading interventionists, teachers and counselors, STEM, dual enrollment, music, art and more,” the organizations stated. “While small increases in special education reimbursement have been achieved in recent state budgets, costs for special education programming and services have grown much faster than those increases, leaving public schools in a stagnant situation.”
“Should we fail in this task, we are not only hurting Wisconsin’s youth today but also our chances to compete in tomorrow’s economy,” the leaders wrote.
If the proposal from Republicans isn’t adequate, Underly said Evers doesn’t have to sign the budget. Republican lawmakers have expressed confidence that they will put a budget on Evers’ desk that he will sign.
“There’s that, and then we keep negotiating. We keep things as they are right now. We keep moving forward,” Underly said. “But our schools and our kids, they can’t continue to wait for this… These are short term fixes, I think, that they keep talking about, and we can’t continue down this path. We need to fix it so that we’re setting ourselves up for success. Everything else is just really short sighted.”
WPEN and others want Evers to use his veto power should the proposal not be sufficient. DuBois Bourenane said dozens of organizations have signed on to a letter calling on Evers to reject any budget that doesn’t meet the state’s needs and priorities.
“What we want them to do is negotiate in good faith and reject any budget that doesn’t meet the needs of our kids, and just keep going back to the drawing board until you reach a bipartisan agreement that actually does meet those needs,” DuBois Bourenane said. “Gov. Evers has the power to break this cycle. He has the power of his veto pen. He has the power of his negotiating authority, and we expect him to use it right and people have got his back.”
The budget deadline is June 30. If it is not completed by then, the state continues to operate under the 2023-25 budget.
“Nobody wants [the process] to be drawn out any longer than it is,” DuBois Bourenane said. “Those are valid concerns. But the fact is we are in a really critical tension point right now, and if any people care even a little bit about this, now is the time that they should be speaking out.”
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