Baltimore City Public Schools announced that it is canceling after-school activities and programs, including tutoring services, following President Donald Trump's spending cuts.
The development will mean the end of tutoring for 1,100 Baltimore students during the school day at 25 different sites by the middle of next week. The school system will close after-school programs on Friday, which serve 3,000 students at 44 different schools. The latter also includes one virtual program.
Baltimore Cuts Tutoring and Other Programs
Despite the end of the services and programs, no city school staff is getting laid off as the former are provided by vendors. However, some city school employees work in after-school programs to supplement their regular income.
Baltimore City became the first school system to announce efforts to immediately stem the spending on various programs and services. On Monday, the Trump administration said that it was reneging on a commitment to provide Maryland with up to $418 million in pandemic recovery funds, even as some of that money had already been spent, according to The Baltimore Banner.
The situation has resulted in at least a $305 million gap in the current year's education budgets, which is something that state and local leaders are trying to address. U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a letter last week that the federal government had changed its course.
She said that officials have decided that it should now have extended the time that schools had to spend the funding. When the letter arrived at 5:03 p.m., it already set a time of 5:00 p.m. for all reimbursements would end, which made it too late for the state to request any other payments.
Much-Needed Funding
City schools also announced they are pausing various efforts to upgrade door locking systems at the secondary schools because of a lack of funding. They added that they are working to identify other programs or projects that can be stopped to address the gap, Fox Baltimore reported.
The situation comes as the Trump administration threatened to pull federal funding from K-12 school districts and states if they do not certify within 10 days that they do not have unlawful diversity, equity, and inclusion practices being implemented.
States are required to sign and submit a certification form that asserts that each of their districts does not provide advantages to people based on their race. The form warned that states or individual schools could become subject to litigation or be required to pay back funds if they are found to have violated the law, as per NBC News.
