Over the past year and summer, Stillwater school district has had to deal with a $5 million budget cut due to cuts to federal funding. The school board had to make adjustments to staff, classrooms and teachers. They have tried to make the transition as smooth as possible, and have received both positive and negative feedback from community members.
Over the past year, the Trump administration cut roughly $80 million from the department of education. These changes began in March of 2025 with Trump signing an executive order, planning to cut funding for education and moving educational responsibility to each state. Additional cuts were made in May. These cuts caused public school districts, like the Stillwater school district, to reevaluate budgets for this school year.
“We knew we were going to be about $5 million short … so we were pretty purposeful about the cuts we made,” Superintendent Michael Funk said. At the high school level it has also impacted students.
“Before school started I was trying to change my schedule and I wasn’t able to at all because my counselor couldn’t respond to me,” junior Selma Hultgren said.
The school board had to make changes based on these cuts to funding, and one of those changes is the loss of some staff positions. These positions include staff support positions at the administrative level. This means staff working at the district level have a heavier workload. It also includes school social workers and counselor contracts. These cuts were made due to an end to funding that was received as a result of COVID. This means students will have less support available for mental health and academics. Counselors, teachers and staff will have to take on some of these responsibilities that social workers had.
“[It has] been staff who help get students… connected to resources [to] provide emotional, mental health, all of those things…work is being shifted to others. [When] that work gets shifted, people aren’t trained to do that work, and so it just puts everyone into a bad spot,” counselor Sydney Piras said.
The board believed they had everything ready for the start of the new school year, but the Trump administration made additional cuts in July, causing the board to have to do some more rearranging. These cuts were to continue with the minimization of the Department of Education and to lessen federal spending. These additional cuts, around $500,000, caused the board to create some multi-grade classrooms at the elementary level. As a result schools started creating mixed classes for example, higher sections of fourth graders and lower sections of fifth graders are mixed together.
“What happened this summer was something that was not planned for… we had to take away those positions which we were going to use to lower class sizes, and we couldn’t use them because we weren’t available [to] pay for those people,” Funk said. He explained how some community members did not understand or agree with this change, and the board was not able to communicate this as well due to how close these changes were to the beginning of the school year.
Funk also described the school board’s plans for the future to help keep kids at school. Enrollment in PSEO has increased in the past few years, which caused the school to lose money paying for this tuition. The board wants to give students more options in schools to keep them enrolled in classes at the high school. Funk described possibly adding more electives and online courses in order to make this possible.
Funk described how he wants students to be able to have the ability to have college and career exploration at the high school so they will not need to enroll in PSEO.
He described how “[hopefully] if we provide more opportunities for kids, we will have more money” and how increased enrollment could help the school district increase funding.
The school board has dealt with multiple budget cuts for this school year. This has led to cuts in counselor positions, elementary classes and staff positions. The board also discussed plans for the future of what classes will look like. Through all these unsteady waters the school board did the best they could to keep things calm.
Funk said one of their main goals was to figure out “how can we adjust things to keep it away from impacting the students day to day from what they’re learning.”
