Maya McFadden Photo
Cross educator Brian Grindrod: Civics education is actively suffering due to Trump cuts.
The Trump administration’s recent termination of $600 million in teacher training grants nationwide — as part of a broader push to dismantle the federal Department of Education entirely — means that five New Haven educators cannot receive training this summer to teach their middle schoolers about the importance of democratic civic engagement.
It’s also caused Wilbur Cross senior Natalia Jacobs to reconsider her dream of one day becoming a public school teacher.
Those stories were shared Friday morning in the atrium of East Rock’s Wilbur Cross High School, New Haven’s largest school. Cross students and staff joined city leaders and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro for a press conference shedding light on the financial consequences that New Haveners and others living in Connecticut could face if Trump follows through on plans to dismantle the U.S Department of Education.
DeLauro laid out the cost of Trump’s attack on public education. She selected Cross to be the backdrop of the presser Friday not only because her three children graduated from the comprehensive high school, but also because of its large school community that can help join the fight.
“We are building a coalition and an army of people to stand up and fight for public education,” she declared Friday.
She said she never thought in her decades in federal government that she’d have to fight to ensure that there is education for every child in this country. “That used to be a principle that every American agreed to and today it is one that the Republican party has abandoned,” DeLauro said.
She described Trump’s signing of an executive order to dismantle the U.S Department of Education as illegal and as not representing the interests of Congress. She also informed the dozens of students from Cross’s civics and educator pathway courses that only Congress can create or eliminate federal departments.
Nevertheless, DeLauro cautioned, “before the courts can rule, this order will wreak havoc on our education system by transferring all the responsibility and funding back to the states.”
DeLauro and New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) Supt. Madeline Negrón laid out the impact of Trump’s education funding cuts for New Haven specifically.
Title l, a federal program that provides financial assistance to schools with high numbers of students from low-income families, provided New Haven’s public school district with $11.8 million last year — of which $775,000 went to Cross.
Friday’s speakers included Mayor Justin Elicker, Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE) Executive Director Patrice McCarthy, Cross senior and elected school board member John Carlos Musser, Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents Executive Director Fran Rabinowitz, Connecticut PTA Vice President of Advocacy Sarah Odell, and CT Students for a Dream Executive Director Tabitha Sookdeo.
Speakers described the huge loss that would come from a dismantled federal Department of Education for all students, parents, the workforce, and communities at large.
“Rather than work on bringing down the cost and investing in the future,” DeLauro said, “President Trump and Elon Musk are pulling up the ladder of economic opportunity behind them.”
DeLauro talks to students at Friday's presser.
Negrón noted that the department closure would limit the federal government’s current oversight of Title l and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act programs for youth. Without equitably distributed resources from the department, Negrón said New Haven’s after-school programs, summer initiatives to bridge achievement gaps, family engagement, and professional development are at risk.
She described Trump’s choices as “another way to keep us down” and make it more difficult for students to break the cycle of poverty through learning. “Public education is the one promise that we all have as Americans to be able to break cycles.”
In response to DeLauro’s mention of Trump’s disruption to the teacher pipeline due to the U.S. Department of Education cutting over $600 million in teacher-training grants, Cross civics teacher Brian Grindrod laid out what that means for New Haven teachers as soon as this summer.
Click here to read an op-ed written by Grindrod this week about the impact of the Trump administration on civics education.
He said that the coming elimination of the federal Education Department and its Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grants are not abstract policy changes. Rather, “they directly attack the core of educational opportunity, particularly for our most vulnerable students.”
In 2018, Grindrod was trained through the James Madison Legacy Project. He brought that curriculum to his civics course. Since then, he’s brought his students almost every year to the state We the People competition. “We the People: Civics that Empowers All Students” is a federally funded project through the Center for Civic Education.
Now, the program that encourages students to research, study, and speak publicly about civics and participate in a mock congressional hearing is up in the air.
Grindrod said on Friday that the Civics that Empowers All Students (CEAS) project that is funded by a grant from the Center for Civic Education was terminated on Feb. 10.
The Center has appealed the termination of this grant and is currently awaiting a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, Grindrod told this reporter Friday, referring to an email he received from the Center’s President & Chief Executive Officer Donna Paoletti Phillips.
Grindrod concluded that the civics-focused program has afforded his students the chance to demonstrate their constitutional knowledge on a national stage. “My students would have never participated in this learning experience without the professional learning I’ve received,” he said.
Beyond his classroom this summer, Grindrod had plans to mentor five fellow New Haven teachers that would have been funded through SEED. But now, Grindrod said those plans have since been called off.
He noted that he will continue to mentor for the Project Community grant in Annapolis, Maryland, in July and is encouraging his middle school colleagues to sign up for the mentorship opportunity, which has a separate funding source.
“This means that teachers in our region and our country will have less access to the tools and training they need to provide high quality civics education,” he said.
Friday’s call for action informed students like Cross senior Natalia Jacobs, who is in the school’s educator pathway.
Jacobs, who lives in Fair Haven Heights, said the conversation opened her eyes to a situation she hadn’t known was “this scary and bad.”
She described fears for her future children’s education and her plans to pursue a career in education. “I’m not sure it’s even worth going into the field now because who knows if I’ll even get a job?” she said.
“Is public education still the great equalizer or has it become an additional barrier for us to overcome?” student rep Musser asked.
At the end of Friday’s presser, student journalists from Cross’s student paper, The Proclamation, asked DeLauro follow-up questions.
One student named Brian asked DeLauro, “Do you have a concrete plan to address the issues and combat the education attack?”
DeLauro told the students that many of the changes Trump is proposing are being battled in court with the basic argument that dismantling a federal department on his own is illegal.
She said as a member of Congress, she and her Democratic colleges cannot sue the Trump administration themselves because the Democratic Party doesn’t “have the standing to bring a suit with Republicans making up the majority.” And so instead she is working to support other organizations that are filing lawsuits and joining suits as a “friend of the court.”
She also said she is helping to rally together grassroots education advocates and community members to fight against Trump’s efforts.
DeLauro encourages Cross student journalists to keep documenting history and sharing their voices.
