Education Week Staff Writer Caitlynn Peetz Stephens served as moderator of the Jan. 8 panel discussion described below among the four finalists for AASA’s National Superintendent of the Year award.
School district leaders are making contingency plans for federal funds that could be stripped by President Donald Trump’s administration in its quest to “return education to the states” and cut down on equity and race initiatives, according to the four finalists for the 2026 National Superintendent of the Year.
The contingency plans include advocating for state lawmakers to help offset any potential or anticipated funding cuts and ensuring they can prove the effect those dollars have on students, the superintendents said during a Jan. 8 panel discussion hosted by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, which runs the National Superintendent of the Year program. The discussion took place at AASA’s headquarters.
The winner of the National Superintendent of the Year will be announced Feb. 12 in Nashville at AASA’s National Conference on Education.
Demetrus Liggins, superintendent of Fayette County, Ky., schools, said he was just notified this month that a federal grant his district previously received would be eliminated “due to DEI.” It’s just one example of money his district will have to find ways to replenish in other ways, Liggins said, because the programs affected are ones his students have come to rely on.
Liggins plans to increase his advocacy at the state level to “ensure that we’re receiving quality state funding that will ensure we are having the services that our students still need.” The key, Liggins said, is inviting lawmakers into schools to see that the dollars are not just a line in a budget and that they benefit kids in the classroom.
“We can’t have that conversation [about the loss of federal funding] without having a very clear understanding that the majority of our funding comes from our states, and we need to ensure that they are fully aware of what is needed to educate the children each day,” Liggins said.
Baltimore Superintendent Sonja Santelises agreed on the value of proving the importance and impact of federally funded programs.
In her district, a large portion of children live in poverty, and federally funded programs allow them to access resources they might otherwise not get—like tutoring and after-school programs, she said.
“It’s not just a message of, ‘We need money because we have large numbers of poor children,’” Santelises said. “It is being able to show the return on the investment.”
For the Lamar Consolidated Independent school district in Texas, “any hiccup in [federal funding] is going to hurt us,” said Superintendent Roosevelt Nivens.
Nivens said he is lucky that his district is not yet seeing budget deficits, but neighboring districts are grappling with shortfalls of millions of dollars, he said. Those same deficits “will hit us eventually,” Nivens said, and Lamar leaders are “starting to talk about how we might assign fund balances when that happens so that the deficit doesn’t impact Tier 1 instruction.”
Ultimately, it’s superintendents’ responsibility to forge new funding paths—whether from state lawmakers or community organizations—and protect students from losing access to services that will set them up for long-term success, he said.
“To me, when students walk into my district, their last name becomes Nivens, and that means whatever they need is what we’re going to give them,” Nivens said. “Regardless of what the federal government does, regardless [of] what our state government does, my kids are going to be taken care of.”
The Gorham school district in Maine likely won’t be hit as hard by federal funding cuts as some other districts because it has a smaller population of students in poverty, said Superintendent Heather Perry. But she anticipates a reduction in Title II dollars, which fund professional development. Her district is in the early stages of crafting contingency plans for PD funding and “actively planning for what happens when we see those impacts,” Perry said.
“When we talk about all the things our teachers need to learn and understand—all the transformational changes that are going to come into our school systems—professional development is going to be the key to be able to attack and move those things forward in a good way,” she said. “And if that money goes away, then that’s going to be problematic.”
