JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — President Donald Trump set into motion the dismantling of the US Department of Education by signing an executive order Thursday.
Now, only on Action News Jax, Florida’s top education official is weighing in on the decision.
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The US Department of Education was established in 1979 and tasked with creating policy for, administering and coordinating federal education funding.
The department oversees programs like those for children with special needs and children in Title I schools, or those with high concentrations of poverty.
It also enforces civil rights protections like Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools.
WATCH the official signing of the executive order:
Now, many are wondering how those programs will be impacted.
“The funds that come from the federal government are appropriated by Congress and there’s multiple pathways that they can come,” said Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr.
Diaz told Action News Jax he expects there to be little disruption, and even argued the loss of the department will likely be a net positive for state and local level education operations.
“With the flexibility we can make a determination to work with our districts and our schools to get that funding where it needs to go and to allow them to have programming and benefits that actually could create educational progress, which is not something that the Department of Education has done since 1979,” said Diaz.
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But Andrew Spar, President of the Florida Education Association is concerned about the potential loss of oversight, especially when it comes to individualized education plans (IEPs).
“Second of all, our students who live in poverty who attend schools that are known as Title I schools, those schools have additional programs like after-school programs, before-school programs, enrichment programs, and tutoring programs,” said Spar. “All of those are run through the US Department of Education and could be impacted.”
But Diaz argued states and local districts are not only capable of spending federal funds properly on their own, he said he believes they’d actually be more effective at doing it on their own.
“To be able to use those dollars better without filling out a form every 15 minutes, right? Or without having districts to have whole departments where they’re constantly just filling out forms and coming back,” said Diaz.
Trump’s executive order may start the process of many of these funding programs being shifted to other federal agencies, but it would take an act of Congress to fully abolish the federal department of education as an entity.
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