California and a coalition of other states continued on Thursday to block the Trump administration attempt to take up hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding intended to support the academic recovery of students whose education was disrupted by the Pandemic COVID-19.
The previously rewarded funding – including more than $ 200 million for California only – is currently used by schools for extracurricular and summer learning programs, student health services, new class technology and other infrastructure needs, which would all be in danger if the funds are deleted, California Atty. General Rob Bonta said in an interview with The Times.
Although the COVVI-19 urgency has ended, the negative impacts of school closings and online learning persist, students across the country are in academic train, Bonta said.
Biden administration had paid an extension to use funds. But the Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, announced last month that the funding would be immediately canceled because the pandemic is over. Bonta called “arbitrary and capricious” action and therefore illegal under federal law.
“The Biden administration has extended funding because funding is not linked to the state of emergency. It is linked to continuous challenges, such as the mental health challenges with which the students are confronted, which we all know and which have been well documented (and) the need to respond to the loss of learning,” said Bonta. “This is a complete error and a red herring to suggest that, since the state of emergency is over, funding should also end.”
The California trial, which he filed alongside 14 other states and the Columbia district before the New York Federal Court, alleges that the withdrawal of McMahon funding violates the law on administrative procedure, and calls on the Tribunal to pre -empt the serious damage that withdrawal will cause states to immediately restore access to funds until March 2026.
Neither the education department nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comments on Thursday. Los Angeles Unified said in a statement that he had “spent” his funds linked to the trash, so that the actions of the Trump administration “will not have a significant impact”. Other school districts in the Los Angeles region could not comment.
The letter from McMahon, on March 28, sent to the country’s school districts, was one of the last movements of the Trump administration to eliminate or recover federal funding previously allocated to the States – part of a wider effort from the administration to eliminate what it calls waste, fraud and excessive expenses by an inflated federal government.
Trump ordered McMahon to dismantle the United States Ministry of Education and, in early March, dismissed about half of the agency employees, which California and other states are also pursuing to stop. The Democrats criticized Trump’s declared declared intention to close the Department of Education as illegal and reckless – it would take an act of the Congress to suppress it entirely – and many in the Congress also exploded McMahon’s attempt to cancel the remaining COVVI -19 funds.
In his letter, McMahon wrote that school districts had had enough time to spend the funding, missed their original deadlines to do this and would therefore be stripped of it. The extension of the Biden administration to spend the financing “does not change anything” or prevents the cancellation of funds now, because the extension was “discretionary” and “subject to re -examination”.
“The extension of the deadlines for subsidies linked to the trash, which are in fact taxpayers’ funds, years after the end of the cocvid pandemic does not comply with the priorities of the ministry and therefore to a valid exercise in its discretion,” wrote McMahon.
She said new extensions would be taken into account “on an individual project specific to the project”, on request by the districts.
In their own letter of April 7, Democratic members of Congress – including Senator Alex Padilla (D -Calif.) And a handful of representatives from the California Chamber – called McMahon to overthrow the decision immediately, saying that many districts had received extensions more than six months before McMahon’s letter and had already allocated funding.
The legislators qualified McMahon as Move a “steep and chaotic review of politics” which was not “useful to students” and said that they were alarmed by the “lack of recognition of McMahon of the lasting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the students of our country”.
Legislators have underlined the recent national assessment of the results of educational progress, which has shown national scores below pre-countryic levels in all grades and subjects, and high rates of chronic absenteeism.
The legislators allegedly alleged that McMahon’s decision was “yet another way in which this administration seeks to go beyond educational opportunities for students in order to pay tax reductions for billionaires and large companies.”
Bonta said there could be a legal means for the White House and the Department of Education to carefully examine the funding of education and reassess individual subsidies, but McMahon’s radical decision – on the argument that COVVI -19 disturbances ended – was “no”.
Thursday’s trial is the 13th placed against the current administration of Trump by the Bonta office, not the first based on allegations according to which the Trump administration violated the law on administrative procedure.
“We believe that he has again violated the law here and, in the process, private children, American students, of critical funding,” said Bonta. “We are not going to defend him and we will see them in court.”
The funding in question was initially awarded under two measures of 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act and the Act on Additional Credits for Coronavirus and Rescue.
California was joined in the trial by Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and the Columbia district. The governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, also joined, although the State – represented by a republican prosecutor – did not do so.
Other disputes are also pending against the Department of Education.
A trial brought by the Council of Lawyers and Defenders of Parents and two parents last month alleged that the hollow of the Trump administration of the Department has hampered the investigations by its office for civil rights on school discrimination.
“Even if the OCR has generally stopped investigating the complaints of the public according to racial or sexual discrimination, it has selected icing and, on its own initiative, began to target surveys on alleged discrimination against white and cisgenres students,” said the complaint.
On Thursday, several parents and additional students with pending discrimination complaints joined the case, which asks the court to “restore the survey and treatment capacity of the OCR and treat the complaints of the OCR quickly and fairly”.
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