What would federal budget cuts to the Department of Education mean in Chapel Hill?

"Basically, if you want to continue teaching Latin or French, you’ll need to find another job. But if you're willing to teach a different subject, they’ll reassign you elsewhere," Arwen Helms, a Carrboro High School graduate and UNC student, said.

Helms spoke at a Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools board meeting on March 20 — where community members and students spoke out against potential budget cuts that are threatening eliminations to language programs across the district. 

On March 11, the U.S. Department of Education announced plans to cut its staff in half. Then, on March 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the department. 

Chief Communications Officer at Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Andy Jenks said in an email that the district received $11,725,893 in federal assistance for the 2024 fiscal year.

“If there were reductions or eliminations in federal funding, we would have to look at reallocating local dollars to make sure all students continue to receive the support they need,” Jenks said. 

Of the total federal assistance, $5.05 million came directly from the Education Department to support Title I, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Career and Technical Education — funding that has been recurring.

Marisa Kathart, a parent of a special needs student at Carrboro High School, said that enforcing IDEA across all districts in the country would be at risk because it is managed at the federal level by the Department of Education. She said another concern is funding for a major advocacy group in the state: the Exceptional Children's Assistance Center.

“They are directly funded by the Department of Education federally,” Kathart said. “That would be a real concern because they provide immediate telephonic consultative services and provide informative webinars, both online as well as coming to our district community meetings and doing presentations about how to write effective IEPs [Individualized Education Programs]. Those are real, tangible programs that benefit mostly students and families and also staff — I’m concerned about that.”

Kathart said she believes most of the funding for the CHCCS Exceptional Children’s Program is federal rather than state and local funding. 

“That would be concerning if the funding at the federal level was cut,” Kathart said. “That would have a huge impact.” 

A parent of a student at Carrboro High School, who wanted to stay anonymous, said that the CHCCS school district is grossly understaffed. 

“Language programs are being shifted, cut, moved, juggled… we have not been given any specific direction about what's happening with certain language programs, but we're already operating at a major deficit without any of these proposed cuts, and that is causing chaos and confusion for families, also for students who had a certain path in mind,” they said. 

They said their child was planning to take Latin next year at school, and they have received conflicting information from the principal and the teacher about the fate of that course. 

“[CHCCS Superintendent] Nyah Hamlett, I believe she said something along the lines of ‘we have to be fiscally conservative now, because we expect federal budget cuts in the future,’” Helms said. “I don't know if they had seen the budget cuts at that point or not, but part of their decision-making did seem to be driven by the federal budget cuts.”

Helms said that 15 to 20 teachers received a message that, in her impression, essentially stated that they could keep their jobs at CHCCS, but it wouldn’t be in the language they had been teaching. A teacher she spoke to experienced this firsthand.

The anonymous source said that the situation is further complicated by Newcomer Programs, which support newly arrived immigrants — regardless of legal status — in developing language skills at Northside Elementary School, Culbreth Middle School and Carrboro High School.

“The idea of losing funds in any capacity to serve those students, or the general population of students — there's no more corners to cut,” they said. “We're in a circle now — the square is gone — Yeah, I don't know what the sacrifice would be.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: Arwen Helms is a former City & State writer. 

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