Newton Public Schools (NPS) faces the potential loss of up to $8.7 million in federal grants—the most of any department in the city—following directives from the Trump administration, the Newton School Committee said in its meeting Wednesday.
“We don’t know what the future is going to bring,” NPS Superintendent Anna Nolin said. “It’s very volatile.”
Newton’s budget for FY25 is just under $600 million, between $11 and $12 million of which comes from direct federal funds. Of the federal money used in Newton, $8.7 million is spent in Newton’s schools.
Though the funding makes up a relatively small portion of the NPS budget, Nolin said the district uses every dollar.
“It’s a serious amount of money—it’s millions and millions of dollars,” Nolin said. “This would be devastating to our district.”
Earlier this month, department secretaries under the Trump administration put forth memos stating the administration will eliminate all funds and programs related to climate change or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) goals.
Further, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Feb. 5 that the Justice Department will ensure sanctuary cities don’t receive federal funds.
In a Feb. 6 budget meeting, Newton Mayor Ruthanne Fuller also stated concern over a memo from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy which said the federal government will prioritize funding for communities that cut DEI, abolish mask and vaccine mandates, and “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”
“This is exactly what we’re worried about,” Nolin said. “And I know the city council is worried about it. The mayor’s worried about it.”
NPS has only been notified of one grant cut so far, Nolin said—for a program to coach special education high school students on college readiness called My Career and Academic Plan.
This would have been Newton’s first year with the grant, and the state will reimburse the city for its funding between Jan. 1 and Feb. 10, the day it was pulled, according to Nolin.
“We are disappointed that such a program would be pulled,” Nolin said.
The program would have aided Newton’s existing college preparation programming for special education students. It also came with new positions in the schools, which have now been terminated. The teachers who were supposed to take those positions have been reassigned within the district, per a contract with the teachers’ union, according to Nolin.
“We made sure that there were places for them to land back into their units, and we negotiated that prior to the removal of the grants, so they have returned to those positions within the Newton Public Schools,” Nolin said.
The greatest line item in Newton’s federal funding budget is the $3.5 million Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) grant, which is intended to ensure that students with disabilities receive a free education that meets their individualized needs.
“There’s been no word about that grant for next year, but that’s one of our largest grants that we have,” said Liam Hurley, NPS assistant superintendent and chief financial and administrative officer.
Newton provides free lunch for all students with the help of federal funding, but Hurley said the district could switch back to a paid system if the district ran low on funding. The state reimburses the school lunch program, but $1.5 million of that funding is from the federal government, according to Fuller’s statements in the Feb. 6 meeting.
“That would be a big change, obviously, for our families and students, but that’s something that we’ve talked about internally,” Hurley said.
The state has promised funding for Newton’s Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) program, a desegregation initiative that buses kids from Boston to suburban schools, according to Nolin.
Nolin said, however, that the state is only matching last year’s costs, not matching the real projected cost of the program for this year.
“That program, you know we will, we will run it with the same dollars as last year, even though we’ll have increasing costs,” Nolin said. “We know that will be true.”
And even state grants are precarious, because they may be intertwined with federal funds being cut, and the state may change its grant offerings depending on how much federal funding it loses, according to Nolin.
Nolin said this makes budgeting uncertain for the city.
“One of the volatility pieces for us right now is that even if we have state grants, we don’t know if they’re co-mingled with federal funds, and DESE [the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education] has not shared any of that information with us,” Nolin said.
Ward 6 Committee Member Paul Levy said he hoped that the political risk could deter the Trump administration from pulling grants like Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provides financial aid to school districts for children from low-income families. In addition, Title I is deemed a formula grant, which means that districts don’t compete for that money and it is distributed based on a predetermined formula.
Newton is set to receive $1.49 million in Title I funding in 2026.
“Perhaps we can hope that it would be politically unwise for somebody to meddle with that, but we’ll see,” Levy said.
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