Would-Be Rural Teachers See Their College Dreams Dashed by Trump Funding Cuts

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When a 19-year-old college freshman at the University of Nebraska Lincoln got an email last month asking her to meet in a classroom on campus with her fellow teachers-in-training for an announcement, she had a sinking feeling the news wouldn’t be good. 

She and 15 other students had started at the college that fall in the hopes of studying to become highly effective educators. Many of them planned to return to their rural communities after graduation to help fill a gaping teacher shortage. They were all recipients of full-tuition scholarships through the RAÍCES program, a three-year, federally funded project meant to diversify and increase the number of teachers in Nebraska and Kansas.

What they learned that February afternoon has left many of them reeling and questioning what comes next: Abrupt federal cuts from the Trump administration — meant to root out “DEI” practices — resulted in every one of them losing their scholarships, effective immediately. They’d be able to finish out the spring term, but as of May, the money would be gone. Of the 16 students, 14 are first-time freshmen, just beginning their higher education journeys.

“I knew we were going to get told something terrible, but I couldn’t put a stop to it,” said Vianey, who asked to be identified by her first name only because of concerns that speaking out in the media could have negative ramifications. “To me, this scholarship was my way out. It was my way to be something. To contradict all the odds that were placed on me,” she added as her voice broke and she began to cry.

“I’ve wanted to be a teacher my whole life. Now, with all of this happening, I don’t know if I can recover.”

Amanda Morales, associate professor at UNL and principal investigator on the RAÍCES project, said telling her group of undergraduate students about the funding cuts was “by far, one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”

“When you see young people’s dreams just shattered in an instant because of something you said or this message you had to give, how do you bounce back from that?” she asked. “What is happening to these projects and these programs is unprecedented, and it is really inhumane. There’s no other word for it.”

RAÍCES, whose name is derived from a Spanish word meaning “roots,” was one of many teacher preparation programs that suddenly lost their funding when the Education Department canceled more than $600 million in grants. The programs, meant to increase the number of teachers in high-need and hard-to-staff schools, were accused by the department of discriminating against certain populations and embracing “divisive ideologies” which aligned with diversity, equity and inclusion and “social justice activism.”

Eight attorneys general have since filed a lawsuit, alleging the cancellation of the congressionally approved grants was unlawful. On Monday, a federal judge ordered the administration to temporarily restore them in those eight states, which don’t include Kansas or Nebraska. Three teacher prep programs have also filed a similar suit. 

The scholarship, whose name stands for Re-envisioning Action and Innovation through Community Collaborations for Equity across Systems, had been promised $3.9 million through a Supporting Effective Educator Development grant, which sought to train more highly effective educators. It was housed at UNL and Kansas State University, which were required to match at least 25% of the federal funding.

RAÍCES was designed to be a comprehensive program that addressed the intractable teacher shortage in rural areas from recruiting novices to retaining veterans. It began with a high school-based program called Youth Participatory Action Research, providing students with the opportunity to explore careers in the classroom and investigate problems affecting their own education and communities. A number of students who ultimately received the full undergraduate scholarships, including Vianey, were recruited from this program. 

It also included funding for graduate-level scholarships, mentoring for teachers and ongoing professional development — meant to help educators stay in the profession long term. 

On Feb. 10, at 8:55 p.m., Socorro Herrera, professor and executive director of Kansas State’s Center for Intercultural and Multilingual Advocacy and the project’s lead principal investigator, received an email with an attached letter from the Education Department, telling her the grant would be terminated because it “is inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, Department priorities.” 

She was shocked. 

“My thought is,” she said, “it’s not ‘department priorities,’ but it is community priorities. It is state priorities. It is the priority of human beings who want to go back into those public schools in which they grew up to give back [and] to be the most highly qualified teacher they can be for all students — but also for students who are like them.”

Morales said the letter and “blanket termination” of all SEED grants “left all of us just reeling with no clarity, no support, no one to call. Even our program officers are inaccessible. We were just left in the lurch — left to just flounder and try to pick up the pieces of this shattered project.”

‘[The] teacher that I wish I had’

Vianey was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. as a toddler with her parents and three siblings. The family spent their first decade or so in Washington state, where Vianey attended school as an English language learner. Even as a kid, Vianey was aware of the shortfalls of her school’s program and the negative impact it had on her and her English learner classmates.

“I just want to be that teacher that I wish I had when I was growing up to others,” she said.

She noted it was particularly challenging to not have any teachers who looked like her or shared her life experiences. At the time, this made her feel like her dream of becoming an educator might not be attainable, a narrative she hopes to combat.

“It gives you a sense of belonging when you see somebody that looks like you in the classroom,” she added.

When Vianey was in high school she moved to Nebraska with her mom, where she attended Lincoln High School and participated in the youth action program, which allowed her to do research on English language programs in her state. Eventually this led her to the RAÍCES scholarship at UNL, where she’s studying secondary education for Spanish, in the hopes of eventually returning to her own high school. 

As of December 2024, Nebraska schools had about 670 unfilled teaching positions, meaning they were staffed by someone other than a fully qualified teacher or were left totally vacant. About half of districts that responded to the state’s request for data reported complete vacancies. 

At roughly the same time, Kansas had almost 2,000 open teaching positions — an 8%  increase from the previous spring, according to the teacher licensure director for the Kansas State Department of Education.

Nationally there were almost 42,000 teaching vacancies, according to the Learning Policy Institute’s most recent analysis, likely a significant undercount because only 30 states and Washington, D.C. publish such data. 

Research has shown that rural schools face distinct difficulties filling their teaching positions, and that teacher turnover is especially common in high-poverty rural schools. And hiring foreign language and bilingual education teachers is especially hard.

“The money, explicitly and intentionally, was about increasing the number of teachers in rural schools,” said Herrera. 

Vianey had acute ELL teacher shortages in her own district in mind when she decided to apply to RAÍCES. Getting accepted into the full scholarship program “meant everything” to her and to her parents, whose formal education ended after third grade. 

“[My mom] felt like she succeeded and she was finally being able to achieve what she came here to do, and that is to give us a better life,” said Vianey.

‘We’re not rolling over here’

Vianey is among the at least 70 high school students, 26 undergraduates and 40 master’s students across the two universities who have been impacted by the cuts, along with the almost 1,000 teachers in partnering districts who were receiving ongoing education and professional development.

The ripple effects are far-reaching, potentially impacting thousands of students whose chances of getting a highly qualified, fully certified teacher have now been diminished.

When the funding runs out this spring, Tiffaney Locke — a 42-year-old career changer who has spent the past 12 years working in community mental health — will be just two courses shy of her master’s degree. 

She said as a Black student in Kansas City schools, she was able to find success because of educators who believed in her. Her plan was to return to a similar school to be that teacher for kids who look like her. She quit her full-time job to complete what she thought would be a fully funded program and is now scared about what comes next but hopeful that her teaching career is still within reach.

While the population of the scholarship recipients is diverse, the only requirement for application was that students come from one of the six partner districts in Nebraska and Kansas, all identified as difficult to staff and, in most cases, rural. One of the districts they partnered with had almost 120 vacancies.

Of the 16 undergraduates at UNL who were supposed to receive full scholarships — including housing, meal plans and a laptop — one quarter identified as white and half identified as Hispanic or Latino, according to Morales. Three-quarters were first-generation college students and over half came from rural communities. They were all high-achieving high school students and 15 of the 16 had GPAs just over 3.5 in their first semester, well above the program’s 2.0 requirement.

“The fact that the government doesn’t think you’re worthy to be here is tragic,” Morales said.

Morales and Herrera are now scrambling to find external funding, making any attempt they can to keep the program alive, but “this may be the end of the road for many of [the students] because just loans and Pell grants wouldn’t be enough to see them through,” Herrera said.

These across-the-board cuts have also had a chilling effect, she said, making those at the university level scared to speak out for fear of retribution from the federal government. Their concern is not baseless: the Trump administration recently pulled $400 million in funding from Columbia University and halted payment on some $56 million in grants to the University of Maine system.

“Everybody’s in this silent mode, like ‘Don’t call attention to yourself, go under the radar, keep doing the work,’” she added.

But the leaders of RAÍCES aren’t done.

 “We’re not rolling over here,” said Morales. “We’re not tucking our tail and just saying, ‘OK, I guess this is just the way it is.’ We’re fighting on every front we possibly can and [are] continuing to fight up until the very last moment. I’m not giving up.”

And Vianey isn’t quitting either. She wants to send a clear message to the people who took away her scholarship: “It’s not going to stop us from achieving our dreams. We will find a way out … my purpose is to become a teacher — and I’m not going to stop until I’m able to.”

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