More than immigration raids, school chief Andrew O’Leary fears the loss of language teachers and special needs programs as team Trump takes aim at the U.S. Department of Education.
This story was originally published in The New Bedford Light, a publication partner of Ocean State Stories.
NEW BEDFORD — Most of the walls inside Campbell Elementary were hidden behind construction paper artwork, book project presentations, and classroom photos when Superintendent Andrew O’Leary came to visit last week. Kids in the gymnasium vibrated with excitement as they waited their turn to pet a therapy dog — and the curly-haired poodle mix seemed even more excited to meet them.
This didn’t look like a school governed by fear.
In the previous month, President Donald Trump had very publicly reclassified schools as an acceptable location for immigration enforcement, rolling back a Joe Biden-era order that designated schools as “protected areas.” News outlets around the country had warned that public schools ought to prepare for standoffs with federal officials. And it seemed that elected officials and school leaders around Massachusetts had already dug their heels in opposition.
These kids at Campbell Elementary were supposedly at the center of the brewing storm. New Bedford has more than double the English learners (as a percentage) compared to the state and national averages. And the kindergarten through fifth graders in the gymnasium were celebrating the conclusion of their annual English proficiency exams.
The real threat to New Bedford’s students and schools is not a raid by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to district and school officials, but the dismantling of federal support for education that underlies the success of the students in Campbell’s gymnasium. Everything from special education teachers to parental rights to literacy programs could lose funding.
Cindy Surprenant, a longtime paraeducator, watched the Campbell kids bounce around after meeting the dog. She said she’s been attentive in case any students have been fearful at home, but she was not worried about anything happening to them at school. This was the safest place they could be. Other teachers around the room said the same.
Later, O’Leary commented that Surprenant’s job — as well as the jobs of other special education professionals, reading specialists, and many learning materials in the building — were made possible because of federal funding.
“It’s not as simple as saying that when the federal funding goes away, these people go away,” O’Leary said. But in an organization as large as New Bedford Public Schools, O’Leary said, where the over $200 million budget is composed of up to 10% federal funding, removing a major funding stream would have consequences.
In contrast, there has not been a single immigration raid at a public school anywhere in the country. Federal privacy laws for students are among the most rigorous protections available, and prevent even the sharing of data between federal agencies (including with ICE). State laws in Massachusetts similarly protect students, and the school buildings themselves are perhaps the safest physical environment where students could find themselves — with all building access in New Bedford limited to monitored vestibules with two sets of locking doors.
What’s more, students themselves are not a good fit for the immigration profile that President Trump himself has outlined: many children of immigrants are U.S. citizens, and very few — if any — elementary, middle, or high schoolers are violent criminals.
All the U.S. citizen students in Campbell’s gym who were celebrating their progress learning English — and the teachers who taught them — will feel the consequences of rolling back the federal government’s commitment to supporting education, O’Leary explained. That is the issue concerning this superintendent far more than immigration raids, which he says are “unlikely.”
Public schools “belong to you,” superintendent says
Working as a school administrator wasn’t supposed to be a risky job, but Andrew O’Leary was recently made aware of the new stakes for Trump’s second term. Shortly after the inauguration, O’Leary sent a letter to his more than 2,000 staff members on the hot-button topic of immigration. He stated plainly that the schools would follow the law: “State and federal policy is very clear that student and family access to schools shall not be disrupted,” he wrote.
When the letter was shared by a local Facebook page, more than one thousand comments overwhelmingly derided O’Leary and called for his arrest. “Great aiding and abetting he can be put in cuffs to [sic] for obstruction,” one commenter wrote. “Arrest anyone who gets in your way,” jeered another.
O’Leary said the current administration seems intent upon “generating a sense of fear and crisis around schools.” He said that a sense of crisis “is what’s allowing the current rollbacks to happen.”
Those rollbacks, like the proposed dismantling of the federal Department of Education, O’Leary said, would work directly against Trump’s stated goals of parents’ rights and budgetary efficiency. O’Leary’s knowledge comes from more than 20 years working up through the district’s finance department, where he found the federal government’s commitments to education made local schools more accountable, more efficient, and more responsive to parents.
fabricated sense of crisis about public education — including fearmongering on immigration — serves only to drive a wedge between the free public schools and the average Americans who benefit from them, according to O’Leary.
“The first step in supporting public schools is realizing they belong to you and you should hold on to them,” O’Leary said. “They are your asset.”
For example, the federal Department of Education is among the best tools to uphold parents’ rights, O’Leary said. One of the department’s primary functions for K-12 education is to run the Office of Civil Rights, an investigatory arm that responds to parent complaints and holds schools accountable. But since Trump took office, more than 10,000 investigations have been halted and employees have been “muzzled,” according to reporting from ProPublica.
“Student and family petition complaints are no longer being investigated, it seems,” O’Leary said. That means parents no longer have any mechanism to complain when special education plans or other accommodations are not met. Neither can families ask for an investigation into how the funds providing those services are being spent.
“The fact that that office is being diminished or frozen or shut down means that family, parent, and student rights are being taken away,” O’Leary said.
A second function of the education department is research, but the research arm has already seen $900 million of its contracts canceled. O’Leary says “that’s very harmful” and would make inefficiency more common in schools. “We really would be diminishing the quality of how we talk about our schools … What schools are doing the best work? What is the data telling us comparatively?”
“It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Well, here’s an allocation and it seems to be inefficient, therefore we’ll stop it,’” O’Leary said. “That’s not a substantive understanding of the Department of Education or how it works.”
There are other ways that students’ rights and education progress are under threat, but don’t necessarily belong to the U.S. Department of Education, O’Leary said. For example, New Bedford has benefitted enormously from U.S. Department of Agriculture funding to build new school kitchens and a new district-wide central kitchen (which is now slated to open this March). And USDA partnerships have also helped states, including Massachusetts, to offer free universal lunch to students — a benefit to farmers and students alike.
“There’s been some great success,” O’Leary said, “And there’s a general sense now that this is something that the United States gets right and leads the world in.” But the USDA is one of many federal departments that has been subject to large-scale layoffs. O’Leary is concerned that any rollback of USDA funds would hurt students and schools in New Bedford.
Dollars can outlast the department
The unpredictable political environment has ramifications all the way down to school subcommittee meetings in New Bedford.
This month, local school committee members began their finance meeting devising a strategy to ensure the coming year’s budget could weather potential price increases owing to tariffs. Barry Rabinovitch, New Bedford Public Schools’ acting finance manager, said that the district has already started to pre-buy materials like school furniture to defend against the fallout of a potential trade war.
Classroom furniture, like student chairs and desks, can depend on the global supply chain for steel — something administrators recently learned during pandemic disruptions.
This subcommittee also recently created a new “stabilization account,” which allows the district to save money for a rainy day. At a recent school committee meeting, O’Leary said the explicit purpose of this account was to prepare for any disruptions to federal special education funds. Another district official, Jen Ferland, said the district has been ensuring that a minimal number of salaried positions depend on federal grants.
Still, more than 60 special education jobs in New Bedford depend on Title I funding from the federal government, according to estimates from district officials. These jobs support the more than 3,000 special education students now receiving services in New Bedford Public Schools.
In an interview, O’Leary said the federal awards to Massachusetts and New Bedford are already set for the next year. “We can already forecast with some measure of confidence the awards for next year. That’s how the federal budget process works,” he said.
He added that some “disruption and chaos” in Washington has made the district and its partner organizations worried about the flow of already-approved federal money. But in terms of finances, the real threat is the federal government’s signal that it no longer sees public education as a worthwhile investment in the long term.
Federal spending on education is congressionally approved, and support for low-income students, women, and racial minorities originated in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and ’70s. O’Leary, a self-described history nerd, said it was “exciting to see the echoes of the Great Society still going on today.”
This federal spending — whether Title I supports for low income students or IDEA supports for special education students — would persist even if the federal government dissolved its Department of Education. It would take congressional action to fully undo these funding mechanisms. But it is possible; education advocates have long noted that there is no universal right to education in the Constitution or Bill of Rights — instead, federal policy only stipulates that where education is provided, it must be done so equally.
O’Leary said that the benefit of having the Department of Education is that all spending is coherently managed by one cabinet-level secretary. Through iterations and improvements from one administration to the next, that funding today is highly efficient, O’Leary says.
“It’s funding that prompts additional support for students from state and localities. So if you’re not meeting needs from your own local or state budget, then you’re somewhat ineligible for federal funding,” O’Leary explained. In short, “You have to show that local commitment to get the federal funding.”
“So, amidst all these purported calls for … smart targeted funding, all of that is already there,” O’Leary said.
In O’Leary’s opinion, the new administration’s stance on education means taking money away from an asset that belongs to and benefits the public. “This is your city. These are your students. This is your public school system. It belongs to the public,” he said.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
