The U.S. Department of Education will supply expected competitive grant funding for hundreds of in-progress special education projects nationwide in time for the upcoming fiscal year, reassuring grant recipients and advocates nationwide who had feared widespread cancellations.
The department told Congress on Friday that 464 IDEA Part D grants will receive notice imminently that their awards will continue for another year.
But roughly 25 grant recipients were set to receive notices of cancellation, effective Oct. 1, as soon as Friday afternoon, an agency official wrote to Capitol Hill staffers in an email reviewed by Education Week.
In total, the canceled funds for the upcoming year amount to $14.8 million, according to a spreadsheet attached to the department’s email to Congress. The agency plans to dole out those funds to programs that train educators to work directly with students with disabilities.
Six grants slated for cancellation—totaling roughly $6 million combined, all but one for teacher training—were due to be distributed in the coming days to state education agencies in California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Washington state, and Wisconsin. Spokespeople for those agencies didn’t immediately return requests for comment.
Disability advocates and lobbyists warned the special education community last month to expect hundreds of cancellations for grants awarded in recent years under Part D of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, the federal law that enshrines a right to education for K-12 students with disabilities
Ultimately, only a fraction of the feared cuts materialized.
In a statement to Education Week Friday evening, the Education Department said its continuations and cancellations of IDEA Part D grants are part of a broader Trump administration protocol for “evaluating every federal grant to ensure they are in line with the administration’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education.”
The grants slated for cancellation “use overt race preferences or perpetuate divisive concepts and stereotypes, which no student should be exposed to,” wrote Savannah Newhouse, the department’s press secretary. “The non-continued grant funds are not being cut; they are being re-invested immediately into high-quality programs that better serve special needs students.”
Programs with grant materials that used phrases like “diversity, equity, and inclusion”; “cultural humility”; and “systemic racism” were among those the Trump administration has canceled, Newhouse wrote.
Continuation awards appear to come with new conditions
The coming announcements of continuation awards will likely come as a relief to many advocates in the special education field.
Unlike IDEA formula grants that pay for direct services to K-12 students with disabilities, IDEA Part D grants fuel a wide range of programs that support the special education field, from academic research and data collection to technology development and teacher training. Most recipients of in-progress competitive IDEA grants typically get notice of their next round of annual funding in June or July, if not sooner.
“The expected decision to continue previously awarded grants and cooperative agreements would be most welcome news, and signals trust in university faculty to do essential work on behalf of America’s citizens,” said Michael Kennedy, a professor of special education at the University of Virginia, who works on three separate projects funded with Part D grants for technology development.
Even so, grantees getting the awards they’ve been anticipating aren’t in the clear yet. Several IDEA Part D programs—including projects to refine data collection efforts and train educators to serve students with disabilities—on Friday received notices from the department that they’ll get their funding only after they certify in writing that their projects align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
Education Week confirmed Friday that at least ten separate projects funded by Part D received emails from the Department of Education telling them to expect continuation award paperwork with new language “to ensure that all dollars expended by this department are in the best interest of the federal government, reflect this administration’s priorities, and are in compliance with” numerous existing federal civil rights laws.
“Your [project officer] will contact you and provide an opportunity for you to review and discuss changes in your [project] in order to finalize it so that you can receive your continuation award,” the email reads.
The grantees behind projects funded under the Part D programs for personnel development and technical assistance were among those that received these emails Friday. It wasn’t clear in time for publication whether all recipients of grants from those programs received the same notice.
Even without a definitive promise of funding, the email came as a relief to one university faculty member who’s currently overseeing a Part D-funded program of more than 20 special education doctoral students.
“Even having the opportunity to make revisions and keep funding, that was best-case scenario,” said the faculty member, who spoke with Education Week on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal for publicly discussing the university’s grant award.
Compliance will not be difficult, says one university faculty member
The email announcing new terms for grant recipients, unlike some recent dispatches from the Education Department, doesn’t mention President Donald Trump’s executive orders or the acronym DEI.
Assuming the modified continuation award language matches what today’s email says, the faculty member said, signing it should be no problem.
“Everything that they list are just existing laws we already have to say that we will follow,” the faculty member said.
Unlike with withholding formula funding, which is illegal, the federal executive branch has some legal latitude to cancel in-progress discretionary grants that don’t align with its priorities. But the practice historically has been rare. Grants slated for cancellation, according to the department spreadsheet Education Week obtained, include teacher-training programs, parent-led nonprofits that help parents navigate special education services, and organizations that supply technical assistance to educators and administrators.
Even for grants that were set to renew Oct. 1, waiting this long for an assurance of continued funding has been disruptive. The university faculty member who spoke with Education Week has indefinitely postponed seminar lessons for doctoral students that were supposed to start this week.
“I didn’t want to give more time to something that wasn’t going anywhere,” the professor said. Now the faculty member has begun joking with students, “I’ll get those [classes] on the books, we’ll get started.”
