Why Linda McMahon’s Plan To Close The Education Department Matters For Public School Parents
Last Tuesday, I was sitting at my kitchen table, sticky with a grape juice ring from my 4th grader’s after-school snack, waiting for her to finish her fraction homework, when the headline popped up on my phone: Democrats Move to Impeach Linda McMahon Over Willful Intent to Close the Education Department. I’d scrolled past half a dozen other DC political stories that week, so I almost swiped past it too. Then my kid looked up, pushed her unicorn-stuck workbook across the table, and asked, “When are we getting art club back? Mia’s school has it every week.”
Art club got cut last fall, right after our district had to cover a $1.2 million budget gap from state funding cuts. Most parents I talk to assume that’s just how it goes these days—state budgets are tight, something has to give. But what almost no one talks about is how much of that gap would have been filled if we didn’t already see slow roll cuts to federal education support, and what closing the entire Department of Education would do to that.
I went to a school board meeting last month, right after McMahon first confirmed she planned to shutter the department as soon as she could, regardless of what Congress says. I sat in the back next to Ms. Lopez, my daughter’s special education aide, and we talked during the public comment break. She told me that right now, 40% of the special education budget in our district comes from the Ed Department. The state of Ohio has cut special education funding three years running, and the only thing keeping her job and the jobs of nine other aides in our district is federal funding that flows through the department. She also said the only thing that requires districts to re-evaluate every child’s IEP every year, no matter how tight money gets, is federal regulation enforced by the Ed Department. If the department closes, that enforcement goes away. Our state legislature already passed a bill last year that would let districts push IEP evaluations back to every three years to save money; they just can’t implement it because it violates existing federal rules.
After the meeting, I asked our district’s finance director what our total annual Ed Department funding adds up to. He said it’s around $8 million a year for our 3,000-student district. That’s 12 full teacher salaries, right there. Last year, that money paid for all our free and reduced-price school lunches, the after-school tutoring program for kids reading below grade level, the new roof on the gym, and the emergency boiler repair that forced the art club cut in the first place. If all that funding goes away, or the rules that require it to go to low-income districts disappear, what’s next? The football program? The only full-time school nurse we have for the whole elementary school?
Most people see “impeachment” in a headline and think it’s just another partisan fight that doesn’t touch us here in small-town Ohio. I get that. I’m tired of DC yelling matches too. But this isn’t just a fight over political point-scoring. Democrats aren’t bringing this forward over a minor procedural misstep; they say McMahon has been intentionally shifting funds around, refusing to disburse congressionally approved grants, and rolling back regulations on purpose to make the department non-functional, so she can close it without a vote from Congress. That’s the “willful intent” at the center of the articles of impeachment. Whether you agree with impeachment as a process or not, the core issue here is what closing the department would actually mean for your kid’s school day, no matter where you live.
After that school board meeting, I started asking other parents what they knew about this plan. Almost none of them had heard anything about closing the Ed Department at all. Most didn’t have any idea how much federal funding their kid’s school relies on. It’s easy to find out, though, and it takes less than five minutes. Just search “[your school district name] annual budget” and pull up the most recent public report, then search for “federal grant revenue” or “US Department of Education funding.” I did it that night after my kid went to bed, and that $8 million number was right there on page 17.
Another small thing you can do that takes 30 seconds at your next school board meeting: just raise your hand and ask, “What programs would we cut if all Department of Education funding disappeared?” I did that at the last meeting, and the finance director admitted he hadn’t run the numbers yet. That told me everything I needed to know—no one is planning for this, even though it’s being pushed forward right now.
If you have a kid that gets any support through the Ed Department—whether that’s free lunch, special education services, after-school tutoring, or even the college financial aid form your older kid fills out—you can send a two-sentence email to your two US senators and your representative. Just put “Oppose closing the US Department of Education” in the subject line, and add one line about what service your kid gets that would be affected. That’s it. You don’t have to write a long essay or get into a debate. Most reps count every email they get, even the short ones, to gauge where their constituents stand.
Last weekend, my daughter rode her bike over to the park with her friends, and I stayed on the porch going through the district budget docs. I thought about when I was her age, I had really bad dyslexia and our school got a federal Title I grant to start a reading recovery program. No one in our state was requiring districts to do that back then, and our rural district never would have had the money locally to run it on its own. If that program hadn’t existed, I don’t know if I would have ever gotten comfortable reading, let alone gone to college.
I sent my email to my senator last week, and I got a generic form reply back saying they’d note my position. A few other parents from the elementary school reached out to me after the last school board meeting to say they’d looked up their district’s numbers too, and they had no idea how much depended on that funding. No one knows right now how the impeachment will go, or what will happen with the push to close the department. What I do know is that this isn’t just a headline in a DC newspaper. It’s art club, it’s special ed aides, it’s free lunch for kids who need it, it’s the reading program that helps kids who struggle. We can’t just scroll past it.
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