ORLANDO, Fla. — The kids inside the classroom at the Boys & Girls Club in Pine Hills noisily debated strategy as they learned the rules of an age-old game: Spades.
It was an intense preparation session. They would soon be competing against other students. The pride of Pine Hills was on the line.
Their teachers smiled as they watched the activity. They knew the real reason that was putting these kids’ minds to work.
Spades was a secret math lesson.
“To be able to process in different ways, making sure that we don’t have the learning loss over the summer that most kids have when they’re not in school,” Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Florida CEO Jamie Merrill beamed.
Despite the program’s success – Merrill said her students had a 95% on-grade reading rate, compared to the typical 33% for 4th graders – the program’s existence was at risk.
Without warning this week, the Trump administration decided to withhold nearly $7 billion in education-related funding just as the new fiscal year began for many organizations. Administration leaders said the funding was under review to ensure it aligned with the president’s priorities.
The problem, though, is that Congress already approved the funding. Advocates immediately decried the decision as unconstitutional.
According to the National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE), the funding broke down as such:
- Migrant education: $375 million.
- Teacher development: $2.2 billion
- Programs for English learners: $890 million
- Student enrichment: $1.3 billion
- Before and after school programs: $1.4 billion
“It’s not going to be a long period of time before there are jobs lost and the funding deficit is going to create programs lost and kids not being served in the same way that they’re used to being served,” she said.
She mentioned this would be a hardship for low- and working-class families, who will have to find a way to get their kids cared for or cut down on their working hours, further reducing their household income.
Others worried about the broader impacts.
“It’s going to affect essentially every single teacher in a classroom,” NABE President Margarita Machado-Casas said. “There’s not one classroom that doesn’t have a student that is learning English as a second language, or that’s a multilingual student, or they need some of these special programming that’s available.”
Both Machado-Casas and Miller hoped the mounting public pressure would cause Congress to act or the Department of Education to reconsider.
“Our number one plan is to raise awareness,” Machado-Casas said. “How is it that all the different school districts and communities will be affected? That’s the number one goal. Then, from there, we’ll see what happens.”
Click here to download our free news, weather and smart TV apps. And click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live.
©2025 Cox Media Group
