Updated: This article was updated on Sept. 26 with a new statement from the Education Department, new details on the agency’s mental health grant program solicitation, and a clarification on the Education Department officials whose names appear in the non-continuation letter.
The U.S. Department of Education is shutting down a Biden-era grant program intended to help make K-12 classrooms more racially and socioeconomically diverse—leaving four urban school districts and one charter school network millions of dollars short of the funding they budgeted for the school year that’s now underway.
The school districts in Anchorage, Alaska; East Baton Rouge, La.; and two boroughs of New York City each had three years remaining of the five-year Fostering Diverse Schools grants they received in 2023. All four were expecting $1.5 million to $3 million apiece for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
The school district in Miami-Dade County, Fla., and the Citizens of the World Charter Schools in Los Angeles were both expecting to wrap up their two-year Fostering Diverse Schools grant awards with roughly $500,000 to flow in the coming days.
But on Sept. 15, the Trump administration sent all six Fostering Diverse Schools grantees a letter with the same language, announcing the discontinuation of their grants and the end of the overall program.
“The department has determined that continuation of this program is not in the best interest of the federal government,” says the letter, which bears the names of two Trump appointees: Hayley Sanon, acting head of the department’s office of elementary and secondary education; and Murray Bessette, acting head of the department’s office of planning, policy development, and evaluation, who signed the letter.
Funding for the program will instead go toward future rounds of grants for mental health supports in schools, Sanon and Bessette wrote. The Trump administration in April terminated dozens of previously awarded grants for that program.
The competitive Fostering Diverse Schools program called for participants to develop “comprehensive plans for increasing school socioeconomic diversity.” School districts were using funds from the program for a variety of purposes, including studying and revising attendance boundaries; expanding access to programs like dual-language instruction; and ramping up instructional offerings at schools with high concentrations of students from poor families and students of color.
“It’s preparing students for a global economy by providing more diverse environments where students could learn from students from different backgrounds,” said Miguel Cardona, who oversaw the program’s launch while serving as secretary of education under President Joe Biden. “Isn’t that what we need in this country? Students that are better prepared to welcome ideas that are different from theirs, and not associate different with bad.”
Three of the six ongoing grants were going to schools in conservative-leaning states. The move to cancel the Diverse Schools grants is drawing rebukes from the president’s party as well.
Alaska’s two senators and one U.S. House member—all Republicans—wrote to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Monday, urging the Education Department to reinstate the Anchorage district’s grant. Lawmakers rejected the accusation that the program was engaged in inappropriate diversity, equity, and inclusion work.
“While we agree with you that School Based Mental Health funding is desperately needed, Anchorage School District has used their Fostering Diverse Schools grant funds to help all high school students prepare for high-paying, high-demand jobs,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, reported by the Anchorage Daily News.
A spokesperson for the Education Department sent a statement Thursday evening noting that the agency is “evaluating every federal grant to ensure that they are in line with the administration’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education” and repurposing Fostering Diverse Schools funds for programs that “better serve students.” The spokesperson didn’t respond to detailed questions.
The department has discontinued dozens of individual grants in recent weeks, citing language in the grant applications that mentions efforts around “diversity” and “equity.”
The department’s decision to end the Fostering Diverse Schools program stands out from other recent grant cancellations because it’s terminating an entire program as opposed to a handful of grants from programs that are otherwise slated to continue.
Schools were using federal funds to pay staff and fuel programming
The Fostering Diverse Schools grant program first surfaced as a possibility during the Obama administration, but Congress made it a reality in 2023.
Roughly a dozen school districts, a handful of county and state agencies, and two charter networks won awards through the program, championed by advocates as a meaningful first step toward reversing the recent trend toward resegregation in schools across the country.
“Public schools are one of the only places that the vast majority of us are going to spend a lot of time in our lives,” said Ary Amerikaner, who co-founded the desegregation advocacy group Brown’s Promise and previously served in leadership roles at state and federal education agencies. “There’s this opportunity to learn to be us, to learn to be together. Any effort from leaders ... to promote more diversity in schools so we can build that ‘us’ is incredibly worthwhile and worth doing.”
The biggest category of expenses for schools is always personnel. This grant was no exception—federal Fostering Diverse Schools dollars are paying for, among others, six career-technical educators and eight career coaches in Anchorage; and six instructional specialists in East Baton Rouge. Districts paired these hires with efforts to change attendance patterns so students from low-income families or students from particular racial minorities weren’t concentrated in one place and had access to opportunities like more prestigious high schools.
The department telegraphed its plans to wind down the program in May, when it notified grantees that it was “de-obligating” the remaining years of funding for the program unless districts demonstrated “substantial progress.” But the agency waited until just two weeks before the new fiscal year to finalize the cuts.
The Anchorage schools’ superintendent, Jharrett Bryantt, reassured parents at a Sept. 17 school board meeting that the funding loss wouldn’t jeopardize crucial classroom instruction for students.
Even so, he said, district leaders have to either find alternative funds or let affected staff members go.
“In many ways school’s going to happen tomorrow just as normal, and in the background, I’m going to figure out how we’re going to get out of this mess that I didn’t ask for but it’s my responsibility to get us out of it,” Bryantt said, according to the local TV station KTUU.
Districts were using the grant funds to fuel a wide variety of initiatives. An elementary school in the East Baton Rouge district hosted a statewide book fair, while a nearby middle school opened a science lab and a high school launched a food pantry, the Advocate reported this summer.
New York City had two separate Fostering Diverse Schools grants that will unexpectedly end next week—one for attracting more students of color to middle schools in Brooklyn, and another for providing “culturally affirming learning” opportunities for the West Side of Manhattan. One of the New York districts will have to sever its relationship with a third-party consultant that had been supplying roughly 10 educators, including math coaches for elementary schoolers.
Efforts to desegregate the city’s schools are also losing another $36 million from the cancellation of federal Magnet Schools Assistance grants, after the Trump administration accused the city of violating civil rights law by allowing transgender students to access bathrooms and athletic facilities that correspond with their gender identity.
“If the federal government pulls this funding, that means canceled courses and shrinking enrichment,” Jenna Lyles, a spokesperson for the city school system, told Chalkbeat New York this week. “That’s a consequence our city can’t afford and our students don’t deserve.”
The department hasn’t yet clarified when funding will be repurposed
The Trump administration is currently in the process of discontinuing hundreds of individual ongoing grants across more than a dozen K-12 and higher education funding streams. In most cases, the Education Department has left many or most of the ongoing grants untouched, and the underlying programs will continue.
But for Fostering Diverse Schools, the Education Department has shut down the entire program, not just awards for some of the grant recipients.
The program isn’t specified in federal law itself, but a congressional budget directive in 2023 put it under Title IV-A, the formula grant program that annually supplies $1.3 billion nationwide for student support and academic enrichment.
President Joe Biden pitched investing $100 million annually for the program, but ultimately the annual awards totaled roughly $12 million in 2023 and another $1 million in 2024.
Meanwhile, questions remain about how the Trump administration will ensure the Fostering Diverse Schools grant funds—roughly $8.8 million for the current school year—go to other priorities, rather than expiring and returning to the Treasury Department when the current fiscal year ends next week, as is typical for unobligated funds at the end of each fiscal year.
The department in July updated the grant priorities for the two mental health grant programs under the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, three months after abruptly discontinuing nearly all the previously approved ongoing grants. Both grant programs were aimed at growing the ranks of mental health professionals serving schools.
Colleges and universities will be ineligible for the new mental health grant competition, and new rounds of funding will be permitted to pay for school psychologists, but not counselors or other types of mental health professionals as prior awards allowed, according to the new priority listings for both grant programs.
“They’re making these small tweaks without evidence, research, or explanation, which leads me to believe these are political changes or dog whistles,” said Kayla Patrick, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank who previously served as a senior policy adviser for the Cardona-led department and helped implement the inaugural round of School-Based Mental Health awards.
A call for applications for the new awards will appear in the Federal Register on Sept. 29.
In the meantime, schools and education agencies across the country are struggling to navigate the “unpredictable and messy” situation for federal grants, with the school year already in progress, said Catherine Pozniak, a school finance consultant who previously served as assistant superintendent of the Louisiana education department.
“If ED wanted to make shifts, they should have given notice at the end of April when that notice was due to Congress,” Pozniak said. “If they didn’t have time to make a thorough assessment by then, they could have waited until next year.”
As for ongoing work to fight segregation in public schools, Amerikaner remains cautiously hopeful.
A nationally representative poll her organization recently commissioned appears to indicate steady support among American voters, including growing support among independents, for racial integration in public schools, she said.
“When there was an opportunity to get some federal money to do school diversity work, these people raised their hands, and they wanted it,” Amerikaner said. “That’s the part that isn’t going to change when this grant ends.”
