WMass officials welcome release of frozen US ed grants: ‘We should not have issues’
SPRINGFIELD – About $4.2 million. That’s the amount of money the U.S. Department of Education held back from the Springfield Public Schools as part of nationwide freeze of education grants, according to the Springfield mayor’s office.
That freeze appeared to have thawed.
“We have been informed by (the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) that the funds are no longer frozen and we should not have issues in the upcoming school year,” Mayor Domenic Sarno said in a statement issued by his office Monday, in response to questions from The Republican.
The U.S. Department of Education withheld the distribution of more than $6 billion in education grants nationally on the last day of June, saying it needed to review the awards to make sure they aligned with the policies of the Trump administration. The funds were appropriated by Congress and went towards after-school programs and adult literacy teacher professional development, for instance.
After initially saying it would release the grants for summer- and after-school programs, the Department of Education said Friday it would begin sending out more of the funds in the coming days, according to the Associated Press.
Sarno said the school district’s superintendent, Sonia Dinnall, and Patrick Roach, its chief financial and operations officer, told him the freeze would not impact operations, since the money is for programs that start in September.
Sarno also chairs the Springfield School Committee.
The money Springfield is slated to receive includes about $1.9 million for academic enrichment, $1.5 million for professional development, about $619,000 to work with English-language learners and almost $60,000 for work with immigrants, according to the mayor’s office.
Other education officials in the region said the frozen funds either did not significantly affect their operations or they are still awaiting word from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Matthew Brunell, co-executive director of the Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership, said it had about $52,000 for after-school programing that was temporarily tied up.
“The funds that were held back were very discrete, proportionately small, and school-year based ... so we didn’t feel the pinch like others have,” Brunell wrote in an email.
A spokesperson for the Holyoke Public Schools said that school district had about $1.1 million in education grants frozen earlier in July. Due to staff schedules, however, they were unable to confirm which grants were released.
Madi Biedermann, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education, said in a statement issued to The Republican that the Office of Management and Budget completed its review of five categories of education grants and it “has directed the Department to release all formula funds.”
A spokesperson for the Chicopee Public Schools did not return a request for comment.
The Collaborative for Educational Services, which operated 11 summer and after-school programs in the Pioneer Valley for 561 students in the 2025 fiscal year, receives about $1 million in federal grants a year to run the programs. Kathryn Levesque, director of business development, said it is waiting to hear from the state about the released funds.
As federal money for the next school year sat in limbo, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education provided the Collaborative with funding to keep its programs running for the rest of the summer and into the start of school.
The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Altogether, federal education officials held back about $108 million slated to go to Massachusetts schools, the Healey administration said.
In a lawsuit challenging the decision, a group of states that includes Massachusetts said the Department of Education’s decision to retain the money caused summer schools to shut down and threw “careful planning into chaos.”
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