Trump’s goop has hit the fan and educators and students will feel the spray.

The Trump administration is withholding $80 million from Colorado’s school districts. The withholdings affect important programs helping non-English-speaking students. That’s not a surprise. The lost dollars also impact teacher professional development and projects supporting students with disabilities.

Let’s examine some of the impending effects of the administration’s funding deprivation on the second largest school district in the state: Jefferson County schools. The district will lose $3 million federal dollars off the top. Much of the money that isn’t available would help orient and support new, non-English speaking students. The educators in those jobs provide help about 4700 “multilingual language learners (MLL)” and their classroom teachers. Those students are expected to be English language fluent in five to seven years. Jeffco will be responsible for that competence no matter the lack of resources.

State standardized tests and Jeffco district tests show that MLL students can use the help. Jeffco’s CMAS standardized test results show 20 percent of the district’s MLL students meet expectations across grades in language arts compared to 52 percent of all students. No doubt it’s hard to score well in English language arts when you don’t speak English.

As a reminder, school districts are required to educate all children whether they are undocumented, documented, citizens, non-English speaking or English speaking. That requirement is from the 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision by the US Supreme Court. As an FYI, Congress appropriated the funds to implement the English Language Learning provisions of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, a follow-up to No Child Left Behind. This Congressional appropriation is a large portion of what the Trump administration’s dissolving US Department of Education is sitting on.

Jeffco’s funding issues are larger than $3 million. Mary Parker, current chair of the Jeffco school board, says that managing the 2025-2026 district budget is a “hair on fire” task. The district is roughly $60 million short, even with the 2025 legislature’s ostensible full school finance funding scenario.

The district has lost about 5,000 students in enrollment since 2021. Colorado’s school finance dollars follow students. Diminished enrollment runs to about $60,000,000 fewer dollars. But costs for utilities, employee health insurance, PERA, building maintenance, transportation etc., continue to go up even though student enrollment goes down. Jeffco has closed 21 schools over the last few years to acknowledge lower enrollment. But those decisions have only reduced expenses by about $20 million. The district is trying to sell some of its retired building properties, but differences between appraised values and offered values are in the many millions of dollars lower.

The district is in the middle of negotiations with the Jefferson County Education Association. Parker and other board members face Jeffco’s historic problem: how to increase educator pay when school district revenues are declining. One option is to lay off staff including teachers, counselors, administrators, and support personnel. That would mean trimming over 550 positions to gin up about $21 million, with the remainder backfilled from the district’s reserves.

The district managed to increase teacher pay over the previous three years, but now the budget crunch from lower revenues has put the board in a vise. Additional pressure occurs from charter schools. Charters now receive about the same amount of money per student from district budgets as district schools, but the district does not control that money. So there’s a multimillion dollar difference between what the public and employees see as potentially available for salaries and how much is actually available for district staff compensation. Add it all up and the total missing dollars are about $63 million. The number will rise in the next school year. Given that a new baby boom is not anywhere on the horizon, budget declines are likely through the decade. That’s a grim future when revenue depends on enrollment.

Parker is running for a second board term because she doesn’t want to leave schools in the lurch with so much budget turmoil on the horizon. She and other board members are working with the district now to identify areas to trim dollars. Jeffco voters appear to believe, as usual, that administration costs are too high. Parker understands that administration expense requires transparency and explanation as to efficacy.

It’s impossible for the state and individual districts to deliver excellent public education with insufficient funds to implement excellence. The state can reduce district expenses by cutting back on standardized testing, slimming health insurance costs by including school district employees in state health care plans, and giving districts more authority over charter school viability and locations. These changes would improve ongoing stability for state school finance and school district budgets.

Larger questions stand out for the state and the nation. The Trump administration wants school vouchers. That will decimate public school finance across the nation. There’s a radical disconnect between the moral obligation this nation and state have to educate all students with some nod to equity and the money to accomplish that. It’s time to decide. Do we want good public schools — or not?