By Gene Nichol

It was tough to learn that the new Trump crew had cut, immediately, some $90 million in federal grant funding for North Carolina public school teacher hiring, support, compensation and training programs.

The Montgomery County schools will reportedly lose $21.5 million over three years. A similar sum was axed from a project supporting teachers in Asheboro, Elizabeth City, Lexington, Mt. Airy and Scotland, Edgecombe, Vance and Warren counties. A Wake County program lost $11.8 million over three years and a Charlotte-Mecklenburg $7.7-million effort was eliminated. A $5.2-million grant sustaining a Winston-Salem State project to train aspiring teachers to help staff economically stressed schools in Winston-Salem and in Forsyth County was ended. And the list is much, much longer.

The cuts land most heavily on North Carolina rural and urban Title I schools — those with high concentrations of low-income students. Such high poverty institutions, of course, frequently have less experienced teachers and more elevated turnover rates than their wealthier counterparts. It’s harder to fully staff their faculties. The slashed grant programs were aimed at addressing these burdens. Now huge numbers of Tar Heel teachers will lose their jobs, or their promised incentives or their crucial support programs. For the Trump folks, paying attention to the needs of poor kids and those who teach them is too close to DEI.

North Carolina Title I teachers often follow what an experienced Wake County teacher, Brendan Fetters, once described to me as “a calling within a calling.” Their students know the trauma of coming home to the eviction notice or explain they couldn’t do their homework the night before because the electricity had been cut off. A long-time Durham Title I teacher, Nashonda Cooke, told me, unsurprisingly, many students come from single-family households where the mother, or less often, the father, works long hours, or the night shift, so that even third or fourth graders live largely unattended. Some have scarcely travelled out of their neighborhoods or gone to restaurants. One of my other heroes, Jessica Holmes, who grew up in intense poverty in Pender County, explained that many of her teachers were “committed to ending intergenerational poverty one student at a time.” They do our best work. And hardest.

Then I thought, almost inescapably, of the videos of Elon Musk, wearing his ridiculous shades and a black MAGA hat, wielding a chainsaw given to him by the President of Argentina, receiving a rock star welcome at last week’s C-PAC conference. It had “long live liberty” emblazoned on the blade. I’ll admit I don’t know if there’s a connection between Musk and the Department of Education cuts. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just Trump. But the vision of the richest man in the world taking such delight in wounding the world’s poorest is difficult to erase. And even if the link is only Trump, I’ll admit it makes me literally nauseous to see some of the most admirable people on the planet intentionally harmed by the most vile.

But it’s not just Trump and Musk. Our Republican United States Senators and Congresspeople know what these public school lacerations do to North Carolina. They know how they hurt our most vulnerable kids — kids who already suffer mightily from our grotesque and long-standing violations of equal educational opportunity. Still, they likely will not say a word, not offer a peep in protest. They aren’t allowed. No one could expect them to challenge the monster. Or monsters. Better to sacrifice their constituents’ children.

Gene Nichol is a professor of law teaching courses in the constitution and federal courts at the University of North Carolina School of Law.