Our Chicago: Possible impacts of cuts at Dept. of Education
CHICAGO (WLS) -- Nearly half of the workforce at the U.S. Department of Education was fired.
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The department is responsible for overseeing the federal loans and financial aid that many students use to pay for college, among other things.
Also, the department provides funding for students with disabilities and those from low income families. In Illinois, that totals about $3.5 billion dollars.
"We want education to be moved back where the states run education, where the parents of the children, will be running education. Where governors that are doing a very good job, will be running education," President Donald Trump said.
Governor JB Pritzker expressed his outrage over the cuts at an event with Illinois educators.
"Instead of proposing anything to improve math and reading scores for students or to support those who work long hours to educate our children they're making it harder for working-class students and their parents to get ahead," he said.
Karen Moore is a teacher in Harvey School District 152. She teaches students with special needs.
"It's devastating, I'm very upset about it," Moore said. She added that they have yet to see a direct impact to schools. "It's the fear of what's to come."
"Our students miss out. We currently, under the federal government for the IDEA (Individuals With Disabilities Education Act) that was never fully funded to begin with," she said.
She explained that she works at a Title 1 school, meaning they depend on federal funds.
"We are a school that has free lunch and breakfast every day. If those funds go away, our students will not have access to nutritious meals every day," she said.
Another of Department of Education's key responsibilities are dispersing student loans, operating the FAFSA system.
The Federal Student Aid Office was impacted by the cuts at the DOE.
"The federal student aid gives out $120,000,000,000 a year, to over 4,000 institutions and some foreign institutions. And they were already understaffed," said Rich Hayes, Executive Director of Financial Aid and Scholarships at the University of Illinois Chicago.
"So now when you cut it by 50%, now you have an oversight issue, you have an administrative burden issue, and it's going to cause undoubtedly delays across the system when we're talking about higher education for students who just came off a rocky FAFSA year last year with the rollout 24-25 FAFSA."
He said students will likely see plenty of delays, fraud schemes.
"You had people in place to keep that from happening. You're also going to get delays of financial coming to the institutions, which is also going to cause delays for students to get their financial aid to cover their cost of attendance," he said.
Hayes said he's already received panicked calls from parents and students.
