Educators and families in areas where Donald Trump's "America First" seemed to resonate the most could be hit with "catastrophic" cuts.
Tom Gambrel, the superintendent of Bell County, Kentucky, schools, joined most of his neighbors and cast his vote for Trump with his students in mind, but he told CNN that he hopes the president-elect doesn't carry through with his plan to cut federal education funding.
“I don’t think that anyone in our county wants to cut our school funding," Gambrel said, "and I don’t think that anyone voted for that."
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Gambrel said the proposed cuts would be “catastrophic," forcing teacher layoffs, packing more students into classrooms and getting less attention for vulnerable students.
A CNN analysis found that all 15 of the states that rely most heavily on federal support for public schools in 2022 backed Trump in November, while all but two of the 15 that receive the fewest federal dollars as a percentage of their overall revenue supported Kamala Harris.
“This is one of these cases where (Republican) policies are stabbing their base right in the heart and will directly impact their kids,” said Will Ragland, vice president of the Center for American Progress.
Trump hasn't shared many details of his proposal, although he has spoken in support of shutting down the Department of Education, and Republicans proposed an 80-percent cut in 2023 to Title I, which pays teacher salaries in low-income communities, and a 25 percent cut last year.
“You notice a trend here: A lot of these proposals are impacting the most vulnerable students,” said Weadé James, senior director of education policy at the Center for American Progress. “This is really just a pattern of making things worse for those who are already at the margins, and that’s concerning."
The Project 2025 blueprint for Republican governance calls for expanding school choice and turning federal school funding, such as Title I and programs that support students with disabilities into no-strings-attached block grants to states, which experts say would redirect funding away from marginalized communities.
“If we start putting public money in private schools, they become public schools," Gambrel said. "I just don’t think that taxpayer money should be distributed to private schools."