Trump Funding Cuts Hit Particularly Hard for Deaf and Blind Children

April Wilson is responsible for teaching 36 students this school year—not squeezed into a single classroom, but spread among 19 school buildings in 12 districts across rural southern Illinois.

For her job as one of only two itinerant teachers of the visually impaired, or VI, in all of Illinois, Wilson drives as many as 1,400 miles a month. Not only does she provide instruction for blind students from ages 3 to 21, she has to supply special equipment for them, too—and make sure they, and their teachers, know how to use it.

To help her brush up on some of the skills required for the job, Wilson enrolled this fall in a 10-month Braille training program offered virtually by the University of Massachusetts. Class started a few weeks ago.

“Some VI teachers can go years at a time and not teach Braille,” Wilson said. “When we get that student who’s blind in our district, we’d better get ready.”

But the future of her professional development is in jeopardy. On Sept. 5, after business hours on a Friday, the U.S. Department of Education abruptly announced it was discontinuing the federal grant paying for Wilson’s program, along with more than 30 other ongoing grants related to special education totaling nearly $30 million over the next three years.

Nearly a third of those grants were promoting efforts to support K-12 students who have both vision and hearing impairments—among the most complex and rare of all the learning disabilities.

In addition to Wilson’s program, federal funds for two other Braille training grant programs got the axe, as did grants for three university programs training interpreters to work with deaf people of all ages and four state deaf-blind projects, which help schools serve students who have both visual and hearing impairments.

Earlier this year, as part of a broader crackdown on federal funding for Columbia University, the Trump administration also canceled $2.5 million in scholarship grants for Columbia students training to become teachers of the deaf, as well as several National Institutes of Health grants for programs supporting deaf college students exploring science careers.

Now, the nationwide community of children with impaired vision, hearing, or both, as well as their families and the educators who support them, is on high alert.

“If our students don’t have the best quality of teachers, what are we really giving them?” Wilson said.

Federal funding supplies crucial support for vulnerable students

Advocates for all the affected programs say federal funding was a crucial lifeline for programs serving a small population of children with big, complex needs.

Out of more than 73 million children under 18 nationwide, roughly 630,000 are blind or visually impaired; more than 300,000 are deaf or hearing-impaired; and close to 11,000 are deaf-blind, meaning they have both hearing and visual impairments. K-12 students with those conditions qualify for special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

The special education field is already under strain. Widespread shortages of qualified teachers leave educators like Wilson responsible for dozens more students than they would ideally handle. This year alone, schools that serve deaf and blind students in Alaska, Arizona, and Indiana have weathered budget cuts, as have deaf studies programs at universities in Minnesota, New York, and Utah.

Discontinued federal grants supporting students with vision and hearing impairments—$3.4 million worth for the upcoming fiscal year, and another $3.1 million that was set to roll out in future years—came from programs under Part D of IDEA, and from the Rehabilitation Services Administration in the Education Department.

The grant terminations have all fallen under the umbrella of the Trump administration’s efforts to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives both within and outside the federal government.

The administration has also proposed that Congress eliminate IDEA Part D altogether, and instead increase investment in Part B formula grants for special education services in schools. U.S. House and Senate committees have so far rejected that proposal in budget bills that were advancing through their respective chambers before the government shutdown.

Programs losing funding have policies or practices that “conflict with the department’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education,” or “violate the letter or purpose of federal civil rights law,” wrote Murray Bessette, who currently leads the department’s office of planning, evaluation, and policy development in notices to grantees that their awards were ending.

Oftentimes, such notices have highlighted passages in grant applications that emphasize diversity-oriented goals—often because the department required grantees to include them when applying—but haven’t noted any problems with grantees’ performance or accomplishments.

The department didn’t answer a request for comment in time for publication.

Deaf-blind centers fill gaps for families in needs

Many state education agencies have offices that support deaf students or blind students, but state-funded services for the smaller population of deaf-blind students are few and far between, said Maurice Belote, who leads the National Deafblind Coalition, an advocacy group.

To fill that gap, IDEA mandates the existence of federally funded deaf-blind centers. Congress annually invests roughly $12 million for close to 50 of those centers. Funding has remained essentially flat for the last three decades, despite inflation.

Deaf-blind students are “the quintessence of the populations that gave rise to special education: they are an extremely low-incidence population, challenged as learners, and difficult to instruct under traditional conditions,” wrote the authors of a 2018 federally funded analysis of deaf-blind center programs and services.

Katrina Noyes didn’t know where to turn when, in 2023, her son Jasper, then 1 year old, failed a hearing test after having already been diagnosed with retinal damage that was impairing his vision.

“I was just like, ‘What am I going to do with a kid who can’t see and can’t hear?’ This is just wild. This is so insanely beyond what I expected,” Noyes said.

A quick Google search turned up the Massachusetts Deaf-Blind Center, so she emailed its director, Tracy Evans-Luiselli. The center, based at the Perkins School for the Blind outside of Boston, serves students in Massachusetts as well as Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

“She just replied, ‘I’ll be there next week, I’ll come see you,’” said Noyes, who lives an hour’s drive outside Boston. “She has been visiting us in person at least once a month since then.”

Evans-Luiselli has brought Jasper, now 3, toys appropriate for kids with his needs; accompanied Noyes to appointments with doctors and therapists; connected the Noyes family to a community of other parents of children with similar challenges; and helped coordinate services for Jasper’s preschool instruction at home.

Noyes has never paid Evans-Luiselli a cent and was shocked to learn recently of the Massachusetts center’s small budget.

“She’s definitely provided way more than what it seems like $1,000 per kid would get us,” Noyes said.

Grant cuts threatened highly-regarded and well-established programs

On Sept. 5, Evans-Luiselli received a notification from the U.S. Department of Education that the Massachusetts deaf-blind center’s grant would be discontinued after Sept. 30.

Identical notices went out to her deaf-blind project peers in Oregon, Wisconsin, and Washington state. The department also discontinued grants for four state education agencies and 20 universities investing in training educators working with students with disabilities; and for three nonprofit resource centers for parents of children with disabilities.

All of these cuts were part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to pull back hundreds of education grants it claims were clashing with administration policy priorities.

For some discontinued grants, agency officials have cited policies that state law requires grantees to have, or language the original grant materials, published before President Donald Trump took office in January, urged applicants to include.

According to the department’s letter, the Oregon Deaf-Blind Center lost its grant because Portland Public Schools, which serves as the center’s grant recipient, operates a Center for Black Student Excellence—even though it’s completely separate from the deaf-blind center.

“I know it’s there, but it doesn’t have anything to do with our project,” said Lisa McConachie, project director for Oregon’s deaf-blind center.

Seventeen U.S. senators—all Democrats—are urging U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to reinstate all the discontinued special education grants, and answer questions by Oct. 14 about her agency’s decision to nix them.

“This unprompted reallocation of funding places students, families, teachers, and schools at risk of losing access to critical services, programs, and technical assistance to meet the individualized needs of students with disabilities,” wrote the senators in a Sept. 30 letter to McMahon. Signatories include the ranking member of the chamber’s education committee, as well as all the senators from Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington state.

Non-continuation notices gave grantees one week to submit an appeal request to the department. Within four weeks of issuing the non-continuation notices, the Department of Education had already rejected appeal requests from all the defunded programs related to deaf and blind students, grantees told Education Week.

On top of the four deaf-blind centers, the Trump administration also discontinued seven grants—each worth $420,000 a year—fueling training programs for educators and others who work with deaf and blind people of all ages.

In addition to the Massachusetts program April Wilson is attending, the Trump administration discontinued the final four years of funding for the only other ongoing federal grants for Braille training, at the California State University system and the University of South Carolina. The department awarded those Braille training grants last year in the final year of the Biden administration, marking the first such awards in five years.

Similar cuts came down for four programs training interpreters to work with deaf children and adults.

At Western Oregon University, a federal grant for interpreter training was fueling efforts to conduct research and expand resources around “pro-tactile language”—a method of using touch to communicate words, ideas, and spatial information.

Amy Parker, an associate professor of special education at Portland State University, used some of those materials to help her students learn how to teach deaf-blind people to make maps. The Western Oregon instructor, herself a deaf-blind individual, even visited Parker’s class to walk them through activities face to face.

“It was just really beautiful and rare,” Parker said. “I can’t say how much of a loss this is to an already underserved community to have this knowledge disappear.”

Online course materials for the Western Oregon University training were due to expire on Oct. 1, but instructors managed to find another organization willing to host them on its website. But the program no longer has staff available to answer questions, project leaders wrote in an email to class participants announcing the federal cancellation.

More than 13,000 people participated in one of the university’s interpreter training programs or accessed the online modules during their nine-year lifespan, according to project leaders.

“May this grant only be the beginning of what comes next for those learning about the DeafBlind community and their language,” they wrote.

The department also discontinued interpreter training grants at Idaho State University; St. Catherine University in Minnesota; and the University of Northern Colorado. All four were expecting their fifth and final year of grant funding to flow on Oct. 1.

The department has said it plans to award the funds from the discontinued training grants to other Rehabilitation Services Administration programs. The agency hasn’t said whether it will continue funding Braille or interpreter training.

Parker added, “You can’t give a national Braille training grant to someone else and they’ll just pick up and take over.”

A glimmer of hope has emerged for some grant recipients

In recent weeks, an unexpected lifeline has emerged for the deaf-blind centers.

The Education Department rerouted the clawed-back funds from the four state-level programs whose grants it ended to the federally funded National Center on Deafblindness. That organization, in turn, offered to let the four state centers that had lost their awards serve as subcontractors to the national group.

In effect, those four centers can now continue their planned programming for the current school year. But all four will have to apply next year to regain their distinction as designated centers for their respective states.

“Families deserve consistency, they deserve equality, they deserve access to qualified staff and information so their kids can be in school,” McConachie, the Oregon center’s director, said. “We’re not sure of what’s going to come, but we’re hopeful.”

Other grantees serving deaf and blind students have a steeper path to continuing their work.

Some universities may be able to continue Braille and interpreter training using other funding sources. Western Oregon University isn’t among them—the pro-tactile language program there “will not be able to continue,” a spokesperson confirmed.

Spokespeople for the other affected universities didn’t return requests for comment in time for publication.

Wilson said her University of Massachusetts instructor has told students the course itself will continue, but original plans for participants to take the Braille knowledge they gain and spread it to others might be on hold. She and her fellow students also might not get the $2,000 stipend that was promised to cover child care and technology expenses.

The Columbia University professors who ran the deaf education program there said earlier this year that 24 aspiring teachers would lose training opportunities that were planned for the next three years.

“That doesn’t seem like a huge number,” the program’s co-director, Elaine Smolen, told KPBS in April. “But the impact of 24 teachers working with 30-plus students a year, that’s huge.”

Schools and students are already feeling ripple effects from the mere threat of disruption to all these programs.

Several state directors postponed community gatherings and training sessions they had already scheduled for September and October. Others froze long-term planning efforts as rumors swirled that cuts were on the horizon. One center had already seen several staff members depart for new jobs before the continuation award arrived, leaving openings that will be difficult to fill with qualified candidates.

Noyes worries about the long-term effects of reducing investment in nationwide efforts to support children like her son.

Jasper’s ventilator prevents him from being able to speak, he’s spent most of his life in a hospital, and he can’t use some of the devices designed for visual impairments because of his hearing challenges.

Even so, his mother said, “he also has a lot of potential and has shown an ability to learn and be interested in his environment and be really cheerful and happy. With the right help, we can only further that and move it along and make his life better. I really think he deserves that.”

“This is such a niche issue that the importance of a national network is so huge,” Noyes said. “The expertise is so limited that if you push this to the states, a lot of students are going to fall through the cracks.”