Last Thursday President of the United States, Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the Education Secretary, Greenwich’s own Linda McMahon, to the process of closing the US Dept of Education, formed back in 1979 by Congress.
President Trump has said his plan is to close the Dept of Education and return education control to the local educators and states.
The Dept of Education was already diminished after March 11 when the department announced that as part of its “final mission” a reduction in force impacting nearly 50% of the department was initiated, with impacted staff placed on administrative leave beginning Friday, March 21.
When President Trump was inaugurated, the department’s workforce stood at 4,133 workers. After March 11, the workforce was reduced to about 2,183 workers.
In the March 11 announcement, Secretary McMahon said the reduction reflected the department’s “commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.”
“This is a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system,” she said.
Response was quick from Connecticut’s elected officials including William Tong and Governor Lamont.
“The president’s executive order threatens the strength and stability of our public schools by undermining the federal government’s role in supporting education,” Lamont said. “Programs like Title I, IDEA, Pell Grants, and Impact Aid are essential to ensuring that all students have access to a high-quality education, regardless of their family’s income.”
Nick Simmons, who took a run last November at State Senator Ryan Fazio’s 36th district Senate seat for Greenwich, and parts of Stamford and New Canaan, said during a recent interview with Greenwich Free Press that now is the worst time to cut the Education Department.
Simmons, who worked as senior advisor to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona during the Biden administration from 2021 to 2023, said, “We’re 26th in math and that’s the lowest we’ve been globally, and we’re still recovering from the pandemic. We should be investing more in these critical times, not cutting back.”
Simmons, who also served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Governor Lamont from 2019-2021, warned the move to eliminate the Dept of Education would do great harm to the country’s education system.
“It would make us one of the only developed countries in the world not to have a strong central department of education,” he said, adding that the department’s budget had allowed more investment in teacher programs and to Title I schools to support students with special learning needs.
“It was a relatively small department,” he said. “It was the smallest federal agency by far. There’s not a lot of bureaucracy.”
And, heading into the age of Artificial Intelligence, Simmons asked, “Why leave it up to a local administrator to figure out when there are national experts who are going to think about this issue 24/7.”
“We want to compete with China, and globally – AI is a complicated topic that everyone is trying to figure out in schools,” Simmons said.
Simmons said the department had done valuable work during the pandemic.
“I was part of the White House Covid team that issued guidance about safely reopening schools nationwide,” he recalled, emphasizing the word guidance.
“We administered guidance that schools were begging for. Why should an elementary school principal have any idea how a complicated infectious disease works? That was a perfect example of schools working with experts on how to protect kids from a deadly disease.”
And, given the detrimental impacts on student learning from the pandemic, he added, “We also oversaw boosting investments in tutors, and recruiting and retaining and training the best teachers so every kid had a great teacher in the classroom.”
While the President has said the solution to the “failed” department was returning education control to the states, Simmons disagreed.
“We have a Dept of Agriculture to support our farmers, and the Dept of Defense to coordinate and lead our nation’s defense system. And we have the Dept of Health and Human Services to weigh in on healthy foods, diet and healthy lifestyle, and oversee pharmaceuticals. We should have a strong Dept of Education.”
Also, Simmons said the federal funding for education was critical in Connecticut, including $175 million in annual funding for students with disabilities – nearly 1 in 5 of all children in the state – and $155 million in funding just for low income students at Title I schools including in Greenwich Western middle School, Julian Curtiss School and New Lebanon School. Also Connecticut receives nearly $10 million to support ELL, which reflects 50,000 students in the state.
He warned that reduced funding could mean having to cut back on hiring, worsen teacher-student ratios, decrease support for students with disabilities and special education. And, for higher education, it could mean less money for Connecticut students to access and attend colleges and universities.
“We have $20 billion in federal student loans for a half a million borrowers in Connecticut,” he continued. “In Connecticut we have 64,000 students with PELL grants. That’s $290 million in total until the student graduates or leaves college.”
As for eliminating the federal government’s role in students’ education, Simmons said, “The reality is we have 14,000 school districts in the US, and 200 school districts in Connecticut. When I was in the department, I heard from all the states and districts – red and blue – they constantly reached out to us to seek help – support in investing in special education, helping them recruit and train teachers, creating workforce development programs for students.”
“You can go out and survey teachers principals, superintendents and probably most parents – when something completely new and dangerous happens that deeply affects our schools, do they want to figure it out themselves or have a group of national experts spend their time studying the problem and making recommendations to keep kids safe? Would you rather have experts say figure it out yourself or offer suggestions based on research?”
“In Republican circles the department has become a villain, a scapegoat for education policies they believe are over-emphasizing things like DEI,” Simmons said. “In this day and age of polarized politics, people like to have a scapegoat. The department became collateral damage.”
On Monday a coalition including the National Education Association and NAACP announced they were suing to stop the Trump administration from dismantling the Dept of Education.
“Gutting the Department of Education will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more out of reach, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections,” warned the teachers union president, Becky Pringle.
Simmons on Monday said the NEA was correct in their description of the Project 2025 plans for the Department and Zeus public education in general.
“There are so many student loan borrowers in Connecticut with billions of dollars outstanding of loans, and they need a strong Dept Of Education to be able to communicate with for all the questions and support.”
Simmons added that students and their families will be filling out FAFSA forms for college financial support and he feared there will be no Department to process the work or support the families.
“Funding will start to dry up for critical programs like teacher recruiting and training, workforce training programs and investments in supporting schools to plan for AI in the classrooms,” he said.
Asked if he had plans to run for office again, Simmons, whose his son was born during his campaign, said he had been making up for lost time with his family and doing consulting work to support social impact investment funds in Connecticut and nationally.
“In 2026, I’m not ruling anything out – wherever I can be useful to make Greenwich as great as it can be,” he said.