For more than half a century, as spelled out in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government has funded a set of “equity assistance centers”—small nonprofit organizations initially focused on desegregating schools that now more broadly help expand opportunities for marginalized students.
Eshé Collins currently runs the Region II center, which covers schools across 11 southern states. She and her four colleagues work out of the offices of the Southern Education Foundation downtown here. Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice, once used the offices to support his legal work.
As soon as Collins saw that Donald Trump had won the 2024 presidential election, she began to fear for her organization’s future. “We said we’d be more likely to be on the chopping block because we have ‘equity’ in our name,” Collins said in a May interview.
Indeed, on Feb. 13, 2025, Collins got an email notifying her that the U.S. Department of Education, which has administered the centers since the agency’s inception in 1979, had ended her center’s five-year grant more than two years early, effective immediately. “The gut reaction was, we weren’t surprised,” she said.
Even so, she immediately emailed the Education Department staffer who managed their grant to ask: “Is this real?”
Six months and two court cases later, Collins’ center and its three sister organizations got all their grant funds back. But some changes couldn’t be undone: During the funding lapse, two of Collins’ colleagues left for other jobs. The Region I center, which covers the Northeastern states, laid off some of its longest-serving staffers and made its remaining employees part-time. And the Region III center, covering the Midwest and based at a public university in Indiana, shut down entirely. It’s since been revived with a new staff and a new organizational home.
The tumult hasn’t stopped there, though. President Trump has proposed eliminating the centers’ annual funding of $6.6 million in both of his current administration’s federal budget drafts. And last month, the Trump administration announced three more major changes to the equity assistance centers.
First, in early June, a move from the Education Department’s office of elementary and secondary education to its research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. Less than two weeks after, the department announced another move for the program, to the Department of Justice, along with the Education Department’s office for civil rights. (Collins said she found out about that change from media reports.)
Nine more days passed before yet another shock arrived: The Education Department is proposing to rescind all the regulations that currently underlie the equity assistance center program.
The agency’s stated rationale is to promote “greater flexibility” in carrying out the law establishing the program, and aligning the centers with “current and evolving priorities.”
A spokesperson for the Education Department said the program’s shift to the Justice Department will begin this Oct. 1, the same day the current centers start their fifth and final year of funding.
“They will be operational until September 30, 2027, which means there will be one year of overlap to ensure a smooth implementation for all involved,” wrote Savannah Newhouse, the department’s press secretary. Newhouse didn’t respond to a specific query about the goal behind the rescission of the regulations.
What exactly does that language mean for Collins’ center?
“I think it is finalizing the end of the equity assistance program as it is,” Collins said. Beyond that speculation, “we don’t know anything.”
Centers support desegregation and more
The equity assistance centers were among the first federally funded education programs to begin experiencing common features of the Trump administration’s policy approach: chronically unstable funding; attacks on initiatives that aim to promote racial equity; and an upending of longstanding laws and conventions.
The original purpose for the equity assistance centers—originally known as desegregation-assistance centers—was to help ensure that school districts were complying with federal court orders mandating school integration in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
That remains part of the remit, particularly in the South. More than 120 U.S. school districts—all within the coverage area of Collins’ center—still have active federal desegregation orders.
But the centers’ purview has expanded. In the 1980s, as the desegregation project morphed into one focused on integration, the term “equity” in education came to mean that “the different characteristics of students must be taken into account regarding how students access curriculum, programs, supports and other opportunities in educational settings,” wrote Bradley Scott, a researcher, in a history of the equity assistance centers. The centers now deal with efforts to prevent discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, and national origin.
Since Collins arrived in 2023, her center has crafted a strategic plan for one district that wanted all students to have access to gifted and talented courses; built community-engagement materials for a district navigating a controversial redistricting effort; and redesigned a recruitment and retention strategy for a district that was losing too many staff members to higher-paying nearby districts.
Much of the pushback against the centers specifically, Collins contends, is rooted in misconceptions about how much they cost and what they do.
The four centers in recent years cost around $6.6 million combined—a miniscule fraction of the Department of Education’s overall budget of nearly $80 billion, and smaller even than most of the agency’s other competitive-grant programs for K-12 schools.
Equity assistance centers don’t just serve traditional public schools—they also serve state education departments and private schools. When the initial grant cancellation came last February, in fact, two of the center’s five ongoing collaborations were with public charter school districts.
And the centers don’t just support students of color. A candidate for the superintendent job in Fayette County, Ark., told school board meeting attendees last year that the staff from Collins’ center had educated him during a recent HR training about rooting out “affinity bias” during staff recruitment.
“What they have trained us to do is that when you’re looking to find a candidate for a position, no matter if it’s a teacher, a principal or whatever, you look at the background, the qualifications, the skills, and what they’re able to do,” said Eddie Keel, an assistant superintendent who was contending for the district’s top job.
Since getting its funding back, Collins’ center has revived its work with Keel’s district and doubled its clientele to 10 school districts, including in Atlanta; Jackson, Miss.; Madison County, Ala.; and Harris County, Texas. Eight more southern districts are in talks to work with the Region II center as well.
“The work that we’re doing is not aligned with this propaganda of a ‘woke’ agenda,” Collins said. “The work that we’re doing is legitimately real issues that districts are experiencing, no matter the race or the nationality of a child.”
Months of chaotic layoffs and lawsuits ensued
In April 2025—roughly two months after the equity assistance centers’ funding disappeared overnight—the Southern Education Foundation filed a federal lawsuit challenging the grant disruption for the Region II center.
Exactly one month later, the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, which was operating the Region I center, filed a similar lawsuit, in conjunction with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A judge on May 21, 2025 granted a preliminary injunction in the first case. The same judge followed up on July 30 with a second preliminary injunction. By the early fall, the Education Department had restored funding for the equity assistance center program.
Getting back to work wasn’t straightforward, though.
Indiana University Indianapolis had already shut down the entire Region III center within days of the grant cancellations. Twelve people lost their jobs, as did several graduate assistants for whom the university had to find alternative placements, said Ruthie Payno-Simmons, the center’s director.
“They were really upset,” Payno-Simmons said. “They felt like they didn’t really have a chance to plan or do anything ... The work with the clients just stopped. We were not allowed to even reach out to them.”
Darryl Williams, the director of the Region I center, found himself in a similar position after more than three decades working for equity assistance centers. He lost his job right after the grant funding evaporated, and didn’t return full-time until November.
“I’ve been through all the changes that Congress made to the program. I had committed a large portion of my professional career to the center. And so it was personal. And it still is,” Williams said.
The Region III staff kept in touch and gathered virtually several times to check in on their efforts to find new jobs. All of them eventually did, though for some the process took almost ten months, Payno-Simmons said.
Meanwhile, some of the center’s school district clients were so eager to continue their work that they took initiative to contact the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium for help while the Region III center was out of commission.
Others were more hesitant to proceed. Building a new Region III staff also didn’t happen overnight, Payno-Simmons said.
“I was acclimated in a work family that was completely dismantled and ripped apart,” she said. “Now we’re part of a new family and it’s pretty amazing. I’m cautiously optimistic.”
More changes lie ahead for the embattled equity centers
Trump administration officials haven’t said much about their current plans for the equity assistance centers. It’s clear, though, that they want to shutter it eventually.
In a court filing last spring, the Trump administration described the equity assistance centers program as “inconsistent with [the administration’s] interpretation of ‘the letter and purpose of civil rights law.”
In a congressional justification document the Education Department submitted as part of its fiscal 2027 budget proposal, the Trump administration said it “believes the program is ineffective and has been used inappropriately to support training in diversity, equity, and inclusion and gender ideology.”
The administration hasn’t provided any evidence to that end.
But in the same document, data show that the centers accept most requests for help they received. Four in 5 of the center’s clients reported that the centers’ assistance led to an increase in awareness or knowledge. And more than 85% reported “changed policies or practices related to providing students with a full opportunity for participation in all educational programs,” according to the department’s figures.
All of those data points exceeded the Education Department’s targets.
The centers’ move to IES came as a surprise to Collins and her team, but not an unwelcome one; Education Department staff members told her the centers’ scope of work wouldn’t change.
The DOJ announcement felt more troubling. After reaching out to Education Department contacts about it, Collins concluded: “There’s no plan in terms of what organizations or team or department that they created to even take that on, because DOJ historically has not done this kind of work.”
The centers’ current five-year grants expire on Sept. 30, 2027. Collins doesn’t know if the education or justice departments will launch another grant competition—or, if they do, what it will look like. She suspects, in light of the proposal to rescind all the program’s regulations, that future centers may be limited to helping districts under desegregation order.
But that number could shrink quickly—Trump administration officials reportedly believe the remaining orders are causing undue burdens to school districts, and have internally pushed to end more of them as quickly as possible.
Limiting the centers to serving the dwindling number of districts with open desegregation cases would also leave out all the the ones that seek free help from the centers.
When Collins was on the Atlanta school board, contracting with a private consultant providing similar services to the center’s would have cost close to $1 million, she said.
Regulation changes could decimate the centers
The proposal to rescind the equity assistance center regulations has garnered 43 public comments so far, with four days remaining.
Only five support the proposed rescission. One commenter, who describes himself as a pastor and member of an organization that defends parental rights, points to materials from the centers “on subjects like classroom discussions of racial injustice and how to support transgender students.”
“None of this bears any real connection to helping a school district comply with a desegregation order,” the pastor wrote. “It is ideological programming, funded by the taxpayer, delivered under the label of technical assistance.”
Another commenter said the program would benefit from regulation revisions instead of eliminating them altogether.
The remaining 37 comments advocate for rejecting the rescission and maintaining the centers.
A parent of two children who attend private school wrote that the center helped her children’s schools cultivate “a diverse student body in a respectful and positive environment” that prepared them well for higher education and adulthood.
And an education researcher and program evaluator noted that “many districts, particularly those serving rural, low-income, and historically underserved communities, often benefit from specialized technical assistance that they may not have the internal capacity to provide on their own.”
Center leaders told Education Week that, even with uncertainty about what the recently announced changes will look like or which ones will be implemented, they see the ongoing fight as an existential one. The 2025 lawsuit brought by the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium is ongoing.
Darryl Williams, the Region I director, is still grappling with balancing the daily goal of supporting students with the broader project of preserving hard-fought legal protections.
Eliminating the centers “could decimate all of the things that the Civil Rights Act tried to build to ensure that discrimination in public education would not be a leading force,” Williams said. “The years and the history of trying to ensure that everyone has access and a right to a free, public education is in jeopardy.”
