Veronica Turbinton left her job as a detention officer at a correctional facility in 2023 after a traumatic workplace incident. With more free time on her hands, she started volunteering at her children’s school, and eventually accepted a part-time job there helping students with disabilities.
She quickly began to dream of a career in the classroom and started on a pathway to get her teaching license. Now Turbinton, 45, has begun her pursuit of a master’s degree in special education.
“It brings joy to me,” she said. “I feel like it is rewarding. It’s impactful.”
But a few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education may have shattered that dream.
In mid-September, Texas’ Prairie View A&M University, where Turbinton is enrolled in the teacher education program, received notice from top officials at the federal agency that it was immediately discontinuing more than $2 million in remaining grant funding that was subsidizing tuition for Turbinton and dozens of her classmates.
Turbinton found out by chance that the grant had been canceled while calling an adviser with an unrelated question. At first, she worried she’d have to drop her current-semester classes, but she ultimately stayed in them.
Unless her university covers tuition for next semester, she said, she has two options for continuing: break a 20-year-old vow she made to never again take out a student loan, or pay out of pocket. But, “I don’t make enough to pay out of pocket,” she said.
The only other alternative is to drop out.
Hundreds more would-be educators across the country are contemplating similar dilemmas. Education Week confirmed nine other universities received nearly identical non-continuation notices for their remaining years of funding through the Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence grant program, which supports teacher-preparation initiatives at historically Black colleges and universities like Prairie View, as well as tribal colleges and universities, and other minority-serving institutions.
School districts are feeling the cuts as well. Most prospective teachers benefiting from Hawkins grants attend teacher-residency programs, which place college students in public school classrooms with full-time teachers as mentors.
Hundreds of K-12 students—many in high-poverty areas where the pool of credentialed educators is small—could see their educators disappear midway through the school year if the college students who were depending on Hawkins grants can’t find other ways to cover expenses starting next semester.
“We’re not doing teacher ed. just for our students, we’re doing teacher ed. for the kids in our communities,” said Rhianna Casesa, who oversees the teacher-residency programs at Sonoma State University in California, another institution whose Hawkins grant has vanished. “That’s what is so profoundly disheartening. Those are the folks being impacted by this: children that don’t have a say.”
Those benefiting from Hawkins are underrepresented in teaching
As with many of their education funding changes this year, the Trump administration didn’t publicize the Hawkins grant cancellations, making it difficult to tabulate their exact scope.
According to universities that shared figures with Education Week, the administration pulled back at least $20 million in Hawkins funding those institutions were slated to receive between now and September 2029.
But the administration hasn’t shuttered the program altogether: At least 10 other institutions with active Hawkins grants received their latest round of funding with no disruption, Education Week confirmed. Another six institutions with active Hawkins grants didn’t answer requests for comment in time for publication.
The Education Department didn’t respond to a request for comment about the grant cancellations.
Congress established the Hawkins program in 2008, but only started allocating funding for it during the Biden administration. The program is geared toward minority-serving colleges and universities; its namesake was a California congressman who wrote, among other laws, the section of the Civil Rights Act that bans employment discrimination.
Grant recipients were in the process of spending those dollars on programs that help aspiring educators—most of them people of color, who are underrepresented in the profession—realize their career goals and expand the embattled teacher workforce in the process.
Other programs that lost Hawkins funding were supporting aspiring bilingual educators in California, Illinois, Minnesota, Texas, and Washington state; Native American and Indigenous educators in Colorado; and special education professionals in Oregon.
Noemi Gonzalez is a senior at Prairie View A&M who wants to teach special education—a discipline for which school districts perennially struggle to find qualified teachers. She also has three kids, including one born this month.
Without support from the Hawkins grant, she’ll likely drop out, and might never finish her degree.
“I don’t feel like it’s OK for something just to happen out of nowhere, for students that really want an education in education,” Gonzalez said.
One of Gonzalez’s fellow students, Santrelle Alexander, is determined to finish her degree, even without Hawkins funding.
“Stopping the program is not an option,” she said.
Alexander has been working alongside a 4th grade teacher this year in the Royal school district west of Houston. Over the summer, she wasn’t sure she’d return to school this semester—her brother had just passed away, and she was “mentally drained.”
Her professors pushed her to keep going, and offered funds from the Hawkins grant to ease the financial burden. The grant is paying for Alexander’s tuition, housing, and even her meals—roughly $8,000 total this semester alone, she said.
Without that money, Alexander might have to squeeze in another job, ask her parents for help, or take out loans. Even so, she intends to graduate on time.
The Trump admin. said canceled grants diverged from policy priorities
The Trump administration sent at least 10 universities non-continuation notices for Hawkins grants. The letters were largely identical, with each flagging a few sentences from the university’s original grant application and arguing that the language reflects divergence from the administration’s policy priorities—specifically, its commitment to rooting out practices under the umbrella of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.
The department’s 2024 call for applications specified that prospective grant recipients “must propose projects that are designed to increase the number of well-prepared teachers and the diversity of the teacher workforce,” including a plan for “identifying and supporting teacher candidates from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the profession, including teacher candidates of color.”
Applicants that didn’t prioritize those issues wouldn’t even be considered, said Amanda Miller, who oversaw rulemaking for the Hawkins grants during her tenure as assistant secretary of higher education in the department from early 2023 to late 2024.
“Through statute and rulemaking, that is what this program is designed to do,” Miller said. “It’s not clear to me why they didn’t continue half of those programs.”
At Sonoma State, admissions staffers in the education school looked to admit diverse students, broadly defined—not just people of color, but also men, people with disabilities, single parents, and career switchers.
“We wanted to provide access to as many people as possible” who are broadly underrepresented in K-12 classrooms, Casesa said.
For one year of the grant, Sonoma State spent roughly $550,000 of its $625,000 on student scholarships. This year alone, the grant cuts affected roughly 80 student-teachers in more than 20 California schools—many of which have been training those teachers with the goal of hiring them next school year to fill existing shortages.
One of those students is Gabriel Monje-Paulson—not a recent high school graduate, but a former executive in the animation industry. Monje-Paulson spent a year leading an after-school program in Santa Rosa, Calif., tutoring students from low-income families in English and French.
Now he’s a first-year student in Sonoma State’s teacher education program, taking classes and spending two-and-a-half days a week in a 6th grade language immersion class.
He got a boost of confidence when he earned the Hawkins-funded scholarship. Now he feels disheartened.
“I hope people stepping into the profession can be supported somehow so the good intentions that we have can be acted upon without stressors of, how do we do this?” Monje-Paulson said.
The university has since committed to cover all the lost scholarship funds for current program participants, including Monje-Paulson.
But no future students will benefit. The department gave affected grantees a week to appeal the non-continuation. But Sonoma State’s appeal was denied. Education Week did not find any universities that successfully saw their funds reinstated after appealing.
Hawkins grant cancellations are the latest affecting teacher training
The Trump administration has made no secret of its disdain for teacher-preparation programs.
In February, the Education Department canceled nearly all the ongoing grants for three congressionally mandated programs aiming to grow and diversify the educator workforce, prompting two court challenges that are still ongoing.
Then in September, the department nixed 17 ongoing personnel development grants—worth a combined $26 million—for training special education teachers.
The administration’s education budget proposal, released in May, pitches eliminating all federal support dedicated for teacher-preparation programs, including the Hawkins grants.
Both the Senate and House versions of the federal budget bill that was advancing through Congress prior to the government shutdown maintained level annual funding of $15 million for the Hawkins program.
More recently, the U.S. Department of Education last month issued layoff notices to dozens of employees in its office of postsecondary education, including those who administered the Hawkins grants. A federal judge placed those layoffs on hold, but it’s not yet clear whether a higher court will reverse the decision—or how the department will administer the program if those workers don’t return.
Education colleges, which have already seen long-term enrollment declines, are now also seeing fallout from the lack of federal funding stability. Applications for the current cycle of Sonoma State teacher-preparation program have slowed relative to previous years, Casesa said. She attributes waning interest to the removal of the scholarship opportunity from the recruitment materials.
If recruitment had continued at the pace prior to the Hawkins cuts, Casesa said, more than 400 aspiring educators would have benefited from the funds by the time the grant expired in 2029.
That number grows when factoring in all the universities whose teacher workforce investments have been cut short by the federal government.
It’s not yet clear how many students benefiting from Hawkins grant will drop out altogether. But for Turbinton it remains a real possibility, even though the need for teachers with special education expertise remains great, she said. When she applied for her current paraprofessional job, the hiring manager got back to her less than 12 hours later and interviewed her later that day.
Turbinton is still holding out hope that her university or an external funder will step in—not just for her, but for her peers and the students they serve.
“It’s for the children,” Turbinton said. “And the children are our future.”
