“Disproportionate impact magnified: Rural America’s Children and Families as Collateral Damage?” brought together rural education advocates from around the country to discuss how current cuts are already affecting children in rural schools and how further cuts in fiscal year 2026–27 might affect rural education.
Moderator Julia Cunningham, ECMC Foundation program officer and former director of Rural Engagement at the U.S. Department of Education, set the scene with current statistics. Rural public schools educate one out of every five children in the country and are incredibly diverse.
“I also want to stress how incredibly interconnected many of our rural communities are, and how critical that is to consider when thinking about the impacts of policy in rural America,” Cunningham said. “This is a huge asset for our rural communities. Services can be provided more efficiently, students often receive more personalized attention — but it can also be a challenge at times. The school is the hub of the community — they host community events, they provide wraparound services, they support continued learning for adults. And so, if the livelihood of a rural school is at risk, so is the livelihood of the full community.”
Emily Moore, Voices for Virginia’s Children senior policy analyst, spoke about how the effects of these funding cuts are felt throughout the community. “When policymakers chip away at one support system, those ripples are felt across every aspect of a child’s life — from their doctor’s office, to their dinner plate, and eventually to their desk at school,” Moore said. “In order to realize this $990 billion in Medicaid cuts and $187 billion in SNAP cuts over the next 10 years, Congress has really made some budgetary decisions that are framed as addressing waste, fraud and abuse; but the reality is, that those provisions are creating more red tape and bureaucracy. They’re going to make it even more difficult for families to navigate applying for and maintaining these benefits.”
Kayla Patrick, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, talked about some of the challenges rural schools face regarding adequate funding, lack of nurses and other support staff, lack of advanced placement courses and difficulty in recruiting and retaining high-quality educators.
“For many children, the school building is the only place that they can experience a caring adult, or talk to a therapist, or get a hot meal, or access the internet, and we know that supports through ESEA [Elementary and Secondary Education Act] and Medicaid really help to provide in rural areas where one in three children rely on Medicaid. So, cuts to Medicaid mean thousands of students in rural areas just lose access to health care,” Patrick said.
She explained that some needy districts don’t qualify for Title I funds due to poverty distribution, so Congress created the Federal Rural Education Program to invest in addressing some of these challenges. She warned of the upcoming federal administration’s plan to collapse this funding stream with 17 others into one block grant to states.
“This block grant would eliminate the targeted purpose, guardrails and accountability for each of those individual programs, which will particularly affect small and high-need districts,” Patrick explained. “Block grants strip federal funding of its purpose, so those funds will no longer be required to be invested in rural areas. That means rural students can be easily overlooked, especially in states where education funding has been put on the back burner. States will have to weigh competing needs.”
She spoke about an “incredibly important aspect” of these communities: farmworkers. Roughly between one third and half of farmworkers in the country live in California, about 500,000 to 800,000 people. While 40 percent of farmworkers nationally are undocumented, 75 percent of California farmworkers are, Alvarez said. As unprecedented funding is poured into immigration enforcement, she noted that half of the state’s 9 million children has at least one immigrant parent.
“There is fear, instability within immigrant communities, and within the farmworker community,” Alvarez said. “We are hearing from schools reporting high rates of absenteeism as a result of these activities. We are hearing from providers that families aren’t showing up to visits, that aren’t doing their regular, everyday activities as a result of these fears. And these are going to be long-standing implications for the well-being of children. The cumulative impact of these policies on children is far-reaching. Beyond physical health, it’s the stress, the uncertainty that will spill over into education.”
And while a point of pride often spoken in rural education is that they can do more with less, National Rural Education Association Executive Director Melissa Sadorf warned there may soon be a tipping point. “Resilience can’t be a reason to underfund us,” she said. “Because when the floor falls out, it’s our kids and our communities who pay the price.”