What Closing The U.S. Department Of Education Would Mean For Your Child’s School: A Parent’s Breakdown
The styrofoam cup in my hand was sweating through the sleeve of my hoodie when Mandy, our PTA treasurer, leaned over the folding table at last week’s book fair prep meeting and asked if I’d seen the news. Linda McMahon, the current Secretary of Education, has been pushing to shut down the entire U.S. Department of Education, and House Democrats have filed articles of impeachment over it, claiming “willful intent” to dismantle the department by undermining it from within. I nodded, I’d seen the headlines scroll past my Instagram feed between after-school snack recipes and my son’s soccer team photos, but I hadn’t stopped to unpack what any of it would actually mean for us, sitting here in our small-town elementary school in northwest Ohio.
I picked my 4th grader up from after-care an hour later, and he hopped in the car with a glitter glue mustache and a half-finished papier-mâché pumpkin, and all I could think about was that question. My sister Jenna has taught 7th grade special ed at our local middle school for 12 years, so I texted her to bring tacos and meet me at my place after dinner. She showed up 20 minutes later with a grocery bag full of hard shell tacos and a printed copy of her building’s current budget, folded in half in her purse.
“Most parents think the Department of Education is just a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington who don’t affect us here,” she said, spreading the paper out on my kitchen table, smudging a spot of sour cream in the margin. “But 12% of our district’s entire budget comes from the feds, through the Ed Department. That’s not nothing. Two years ago, we got a $2.1 million Ed Department grant to replace all the lead pipes in the elementary school water fountains. Before that, the test results came back high, and the district said they couldn’t afford to fix it. Where do you think that money would have come from if the department didn’t exist?”
I’d forgotten about that lead pipe issue. My son had drunk from those fountains every day for three years before the work was done. We’d gotten a note in our backpacks, but I never thought about where the money for the fix came from.
McMahon’s public argument is that closing the department would push all education decision-making back to the states, which know what their kids need better than Washington bureaucrats. On paper, that sounds reasonable enough, until you look at what that actually means for our state. Ohio just cut $300 million from public education funding two years ago, and our district responded by cutting 8 teaching assistant positions. My son’s 4th grade class has 28 kids and one full-time teacher. They lost their reading intervention TA last year, so the teacher has to pull kids out for extra help during recess. If we lose 12% of our budget, how many more TAs get cut? How many more art or music classes?
The impeachment isn’t just a fight over policy, either. Democrats say McMahon hasn’t just talked about closing the department—she’s already cutting 20% of the department’s staff, moving core functions to other agencies, and slowing down grant processing to the point that some districts haven’t gotten their allocated funding this year. That’s why they’re calling it willful intent: it’s not a proposal for the future, it’s something that’s happening right now.
The conversation around this has been all political noise, so I’ve been putting together small, concrete things any parent or teacher can do to figure out what this means for your kid, no matter where you live. The first thing I did was pull up my school district’s website, go to the finances tab, and search for “annual budget report.” I found the share of funding that comes from federal sources in five minutes. If you haven’t done that, it takes less time than packing your kid’s lunch for a day of school. It’s eye-opening to see exactly how much of your school’s budget relies on that Ed Department money.
The second thing is to write down three simple questions to ask at your next PTA meeting or school board gathering: How much federal grant money does our school use right now for things like lead testing, special education support, and the national school lunch program? If that federal funding went away, what would be the first three cuts your team would make? Is the district or state already planning to make up that gap if the department is closed? I asked these exact questions at our local school board meeting Wednesday night, and the superintendent didn’t brush me off—he answered honestly, saying there’s no plan to make up a 12% budget cut, and the first cuts would be after-school programs and all remaining teaching assistant positions.
A third small step: when local or federal candidates knock on your door or post on social media ahead of the next election, skip the generic “do you support public education” question. Ask them specifically: if the Department of Education closes and our district loses 10-15% of its budget, would you vote to replace that funding at the state or federal level? It’s a specific question that forces a specific answer, instead of a generic campaign line.
A lot of people I’ve talked to say this impeachment is just political theater, that nothing will actually come of it, and the department won’t actually close. Maybe they’re right. But even if it’s just a threat, it’s worth knowing what’s at stake for your kid. Our next door neighbor has an 8-year-old son with autism, and his one-on-one classroom aid is 50% funded by a federal Ed Department grant. She told me last weekend that if that funding goes away, she can’t afford the $40,000 a year it would cost to keep that support on her own. That’s not a political talking point. That’s a kid who goes to the same elementary school as my son.
I left the school board meeting Wednesday with a stack of flyers I volunteered to pass out for the next bond measure, and more questions than answers. I don’t know how the impeachment vote will go, I don’t know if the department will actually be dismantled, and I don’t have any big solutions to the fight in Washington. But I know that knowing how much of my kid’s school relies on that federal funding changed how I think about the headlines. I’ve texted the three questions to the other 24 parents in my son’s class group chat, and half of them have said they’re going to ask the same questions at the next meeting. It’s a small thing, but it’s the only thing I can do right now, while everything else stays up in the air.
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