After months of difficult financial news, the release of withheld federal funding will allow Green Bay school districts to breathe a little easier.
On July 25, the Trump administration announced it would release the remaining $5.5 billion of the total $7 billion in education funding it had withheld for nearly a month to school districts across the nation. Funding covered federal Title programs, which support English second-language learning, educator training, school technology and after-school programs for students in high-poverty schools.
Districts were told June 30 that the funding they’d been expecting on July 1 would be under review. Several across the nation had already spent the money.
For Green Bay and Brown County schools, that means the release of over $3.3 million that’ll maintain the programs families rely on. It could be more than that, though, as restrictions on spending mean some funds have a greater impact than their literal cost.
For example, the Green Bay School District receives about $2.4 million in Title funding. However, the district isn’t allowed to supplant funds, where it would replace some budgeted state or local funding with federal funding, so it has to spend more than the allocated amount on things like staffing. That means that ultimately, federal Title funding changes had an estimated $3 million to $3.4 million impact on the district, up to a million dollars greater than the dollar amount.
“These funds provide critical services to our students and their families, which were already contracted and staffed for the upcoming school year. Without these funds, difficult decisions would have been required to determine budget cuts that would have negatively impacted students and working families,” Green Bay School District Superintendent Vicki Bayer said in an emailed statement.
How will other Green Bay, Brown County school districts be affected?
Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction created a webpage to track how changes in federal funding impact Wisconsin. One new section provides data on how much school districts received in Title funding in 2024-25 and how much of each district’s total U.S. Education Department funding goes to Title programs.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Over $3 million in federal funding released to Green Bay, Brown County school districts
Reporting by Nadia Scharf, Green Bay Press-Gazette / Green Bay Press-Gazette
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