Vienna School District Undertakes 2026 School Year Without Community Schools Grant

CHICAGO — This fall, many Illinois educators and school officials faced a familiar but unexpected challenge while preparing for students to return to the classroom: how to do more with even less.

In December, the Trump administration cancelled approximately $60 million in awarded Full-Service Community Schools grants to Metropolitan Family Services and ACT Now Illinois which had been allocated to 32 schools across the state. After several months of short-term funding extensions, a federal judge declined to block the termination at the end of June, cutting off access to funding beginning July 1.

Schools that expected the funding heading into this academic year have had to make do without it, and litigation between the Department of Education, Metropolitan Family Services and ACT Now has continued since the summer.

In southern Illinois, Vienna High School District will lose $3 million in promised funding over the next three years, according to Superintendent Joshua Stafford, and now has to determine which of the programs it has built it can continue — and which it will have to eliminate due to the withdrawn funds.

“We’re still moving forward, and so there’s a lot of administrative-level risk of ‘do we spend this money and hope to get it back?’” Stafford said. “Do we not spend this money and then [the federal government is] going to say, ‘Oh, wait a minute! Well, you’re not spending the money. You have no needs.’ When there’s very clearly abundant needs.”

Stafford’s district was awarded the first part of their five-year FSCS grant in 2023, after months of community meetings and preparation during which they solicited input on which programs students would benefit from. Over the past two years, Vienna has used the grant money for everything from providing glasses to students from low-income backgrounds to ensuring that students in after-school programs have a way to get home in the evening.

“We’re trying to strengthen schools as a community hub, as a resource hub,” Stafford said, “because schools don't just reach kindergarten, pre-K through 12th grade students; they reach their parents and their grandparents, and their aunts, and their uncles, and all the community stakeholders, in really a very large way.”

The Full-Service Community Schools program was created in the 1970s to “improve the coordination and integration, accessibility, and effectiveness of services for children and families, particularly for children attending high-poverty schools.” Since then, the Department of Education has awarded approximately $670 million to schools across the U.S. to fund school-based community social services and program administration. 

Research has consistently shown that well-implemented community schools have positive impacts on attendance, school climate, academic achievement and access to social services. The elimination of community schools grant funding could result in devastating consequences for Illinois families, including the loss of childcare services, career and technical education programs and community food and healthcare programs.

“The impact is particularly devastating as food and hygiene closets now have to be drastically reduced,” Stafford wrote in February. In a district with many low-income and homeless residents, “these vital services now rely on community donations, which have already proven insufficient for the various student needs."

Since taking office in January 2025, the second Trump administration has put “returning education to the states” and ultimately abolishing the Department of Education at the center of its education policy, largely through the proposed elimination of statutory funding and a reallocation of the Education Department’s responsibilities. It has also fought to eliminate financial support for organizations and programming that fails to align with its ideological goals — typically because of support for diversity, equity and inclusion or LGBTQ+ individuals.

In the case of Metropolitan Family Services’ grants, “Department staff identified that the applicant has proposed project activities that conflict with the Department’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Murray Bessette wrote in a Dec. 12, 2025, notice of non-continuation.

The letter identified “[i]ntegrated student supports,” “trainings on gender and sexuality,” and “trauma-informed care and racial equity” as such conflicting activities.

But Stafford said that Vienna’s programs have nothing to do with the Trump administration’s disfavored perspectives.

“To have done all the work, to have checked all the boxes, and to be having success in a two-year implementation of a five-year grant, and to get a notice, not because we were not in compliance, not because we were not meeting the expected outcomes, not because we were doing anything wrong, but because the federal Department of Education has decided to discontinue it, that's devastating.”

Vienna will now have to figure out how to meet the needs of its students without a reliable source of funding and make difficult choices about which programs to prioritize. Stafford says the district is “actively pursuing every other funding source” to prevent as many cuts as possible.

However, despite the challenges he and other district officials across Illinois will face in the coming months, Stafford remains optimistic.

“I think that we’re trying to continue to be the hope people, right? Because that’s what we are as educators. That’s what we are at school,” Stafford said. “We’re that beacon. We are that lighthouse in the community, of hope, of pointing people to a brighter future.”