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On the shores of Lake Ontario in northern New York, the 430-student Sackets Harbor Central School District depends on Rick Bice, the technology coordinator, to keep the internet on.

“We wouldn’t be able to function as an organization without him,” said Superintendent Jennifer Gaffney. “A lot of what students, teachers and our office staff do is centered around the use of technology and data systems. He is the backbone of all that.”

But now Gaffney doesn’t know how much longer she can rely on the federal dollars that pay his salary. The Rural Education Achievement Program is among the 17 funding sources that the Trump administration wants to roll into a $2 billion block grant. Congress approved $220 million for REAP this year, but under the president’s plan, governors and state education chiefs would decide whether rural districts would get extra money.

“Money rolled into a block grant would be swallowed up by the bigger schools as their needs are much greater than ours,” he said. That would leave “small rural schools looking to find answers in different places without a clear picture as to where those resources would come from.”

During her testimony with the Senate appropriations committee in late April, Education Secretary Linda McMahon faced several questions from both Democrats and Republicans about the future of the program. She suggested that REAP was underutilized.

“A lot of rural schools do not have grant writers, cannot bring in the resources other states might have or other cities might have,” she said. “A lot of states never participated in any of the grant funding.”

Under a consolidated program, she said, all states would receive a portion of the block grant and officials would decide “how this money should be spent in their state, where the greatest needs are, whether that’s in rural communities.”

Officials with years of experience in rural education say that isn’t how REAP works. States or districts don’t write grant proposals for the funding, said Steven Johnson, superintendent of the Fort Ransom Public School District, which operates one elementary school in southeast North Dakota. Districts eligible for the funds, based on size and location, receive an invitation to apply. And most do, Johnson said.

“It’s rarely about capacity or lack of grant-writing ability. If anything, what we’re seeing is the opposite,” he said. “Rural districts rely on REAP because it is simple, direct and does not require extensive administrative capacity.”

Abigail Swisher, who previously worked on the REAP program at the department, said where rural districts struggle is applying for large, competitive grant programs.

“Applying for competitive federal grants is time-consuming and complex. Larger districts are hiring grant writers who have the specialized expertise and who have time,” she said. “That’s exactly why we have the REAP program. It was designed by Congress to help fill that gap.”

There were efforts to help rural districts access those other programs, she said, but those ended with the new administration.

‘Testing and reporting standards’

Districts that qualify for Small, Rural School Achievement funding, one of the two REAP programs, have fewer than 600 students and are located in an area their state defines as rural. Others, with 20% of students who live below the poverty line, qualify for the Rural and Low-Income School program, and some are eligible for both. This year, 17,873 were eligible for one or both programs.

Last week, Kirstin Baesler, the assistant secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, reminded rural districts that they have considerable leeway to use federal funds for programs like tutoring or after-school programs.

But Johnson said that flexibility was “one of the original core concepts behind REAP.” His district, for example, didn’t have enough poor students to qualify for Title I funding, but under existing law, he was able to use federal funds to provide students with reading and math tutoring.

Congress created REAP as part of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal accountability law that set strict expectations for school improvement, and reauthorized the program as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Despite their small size, rural districts were not exempt from NCLB’s mandates, Johnson said.

“Small, rural schools were expected to meet the same testing and reporting standards as larger systems but often lacked the staffing and resources to do so,” he said.

A 2023 report from AASA, the School Superintendents Association, showed that districts most commonly used the funds for technology, followed by staff training, compensation and expanding programs like STEM and arts for students. When Johnson asked other administrators across the country, they listed bullying prevention, special education assistants and support to help students graduate among the ways they use the funds.

“Rural districts piece together budgets with many smaller sources,” said Margaret Buckton, a school finance consultant in Iowa. Although REAP “isn’t a huge sum, when combined with other small grants, it likely makes a difference.”

In her exchanges with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican who has made rural schools a priority, McMahon questioned whether the program has a positive impact.

“Many of these programs have lost their efficacy and they really are not returning, giving the returns that we hope to see for rural schools,” McMahon said.

The Department of Education did not respond to questions about what data McMahon was referring to when she said the program wasn’t effective. But Melissa Sadorf, executive director of the National Rural Education Association, said because districts can use the funds in a variety of ways, the department looks primarily at compliance issues rather than impact on students.

“There is no single, consistent student outcome measure applied across grantees,” she said. “The program has not been the subject of a comprehensive federal evaluation in close to a decade, which makes any sweeping claim about effectiveness difficult to substantiate from the data.”

That 2018 report was mostly a summary of the challenges facing rural schools, like transportation and teacher recruitment, and what the department was doing to support them.

The department also tracks whether districts comply with the rules for using the funds.

A 2023 monitoring report in the Custer County, Colorado, district, for example, discovered an accounting error because a staff member entered data using hand-written notes. The same issue came up in Indiana’s Attica Consolidated School Corporation in 2022. The department’s website doesn’t list any reports conducted since McMahon took office.

The administration pitched the same block grant idea last year, and Congress ultimately rejected it. With the appropriations process likely to drag out for months, it’s unclear whether lawmakers will be more receptive this year.

But for rural districts like Sackets Harbor, the site of an important naval base during the war of 1812, the continued uncertainty over federal funding is “unnerving,” said Gaffney, the superintendent.

The district’s annual Patriot Pride Day, in which students fanned out across the historic town for service projects, like gardening and polishing headstones, is popular with local residents. The school board asked voters to approve a nearly 8% tax increase, which they did. But with increases in English learners and students with disabilities, Gaffney said the district is still under “a great deal of financial pressure.”

“That is precisely why every dollar matters to us, including REAP funding,” she said. “These resources are vital in helping us maintain programs, services and opportunities for our students.”

Linda Jacobson is a senior writer at The 74. @lrj417 Linda@The74Million.org