(WBRE/WYOU)— President Trump signed the executive order around 4:30 p.m. Thursday shutting down the Department of Education (DOE).
Many are now wondering what that means for schools right here in NEPA, as well as across the country.
To fully eliminate the department requires an act of Congress, and while the White House says funding for essential programs for schools across the country will remain, local educators and analysts have concerns about how exactly schools will get the funding.
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"Currently the department funds our title programs and also programs with 'idea' so that's anybody with disabilities and things like that, title program offers funding for interventions for students in reading and math programs," said Brian Durkin, Superintendent, Valley View School District.
Valley View alone receives more than one million dollars from the federal government. Superintendent Brian Durkin is cautiously optimistic hoping the impact won't be as detrimental as some fear when it comes to losing or decreasing funding.
"We're hoping that it's not going to be as bad as people are painting a picture of. We believe that public schools are underfunded as it is, so anytime you have a chance of losing a million dollars, what you're gonna have to do is look at programs, and how to increase funding for those programs and the last thing that we wanna do is have to put that back onto our taxpayers and have to raise taxes," explained Durkin.
Political analyst David Sosar says Trump's plan intends to redirect funds to local governments, but warns this could create new problems.
"At least that's Mr. Trump's plan and Mr. Musk's plan that one would return this money to the local governments and let them distribute what needs to be in the categories. I don't know if substituting one bureaucracy in the federal government for 50 bureaucracies which would have to be established across the country is maybe the best thing to do," said Sosar.
Sosar says Pennsylvania has historically struggled with education funding, raising concerns about how effectively the state would manage these funds.
"It (pa) always has a problem with its educational programs as well and educational budgets so will they spend the money as it most effectively would be, that's gonna be the question," wondered Sosar.
Sosar also tells me there's still a lot of gray area to this, that we won't really know how giving the money to states will work until it actually happens.
