Even when you know bad news may be coming, it can feel like a gut punch when it arrives.
And the students and administrators at the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Pacoima are feeling that kind of pain after being notified by the U.S. Department of Education that the federal grant for the school’s GEAR UP programs to track, motivate, prepare and assist students from low-income communities to seek a college education will be terminated on Sept. 30.
The timing of the decision may be worse than the loss of revenue. In August last year, Vaughn Learning Center was one of 18 schools nationwide – and “the only school in California,” according to Special Programs Manager Vanessa Montano – selected to receive the federal Next Century GEAR UP grant for its 2024 fiscal year budget by the Biden Administration. The grant was for more than $2.7 million and could have been renewed annually for up to seven years for the same amount.
But the grant, said the center’s GEAR UP Director Cesar Perez, was deemed “discretionary funds,” meaning it could be terminated at any time and for any reason. And the Trump administration found a reason to do so.
“They yanked it because they could,” said Perez.
He said when the 2025 fiscal year was set to begin in August this year, administrators received a letter stating the department was determining if the funding would continue, and “we started to get a little worried about potentially not getting funded. And on Sept. 12, we were notified” that the grant funding was ending.
“On Sept. 12, we received a noncontinuation letter. Okay, so every program in the nation was waiting for the continuation award letter, which basically means you’re doing what you’re doing. So move on. You know you’re going to be funded for the upcoming year. Our fiscal year was supposed to end on Aug. 31. We’d received notification letting us know that they were extending it because they were still looking at whether or not, you know, they would be doing the funding. So that’s when we started to get a little worried about potentially not being funded. Shortly after, on Sept. 12, we did receive that notification letting us know that as of Sept. 30, our program would no longer be funded.”
The reason? “They basically looked at our application and found a minimal description that we would hire folks that would basically look like the students they served,” said Perez.
And just like that, the money was gone. There is no indication that it could or will be restored.
“We filed an appeal [on Sept. 17],” said Perez. “We’re reaching out to local representatives so that they can advocate for the program. [Congressmember] Luz Rivas’s office sent out a letter of support. We’ve been communicating with [Sen. Alex Padilla’s] office as well, so that they could offer support.
“Unfortunately, they haven’t any kind of timeline [to restore the grant]. We’re hopeful that we’ll hear something by Sept. 30, but we also understand that it could be months or even a year. So that’s kind of where we’re at. We want to know that we did everything we could.”
Perez sighed. “The last 12 days have been a little bit of a whirlwind, I guess.”
Montano describes the decision, which served more than 3,000 students last year, primarily sixth- and seventh-graders from the center’s Middle School for International Studies & Technology, as “devastating.”
“We provided academic tutoring during the day,” she said. “Provided any additional support that the students need. We also exposed them to a lot of college workshops, talked about the importance of keeping their grades and what college requirements looked like. We also took them to field trips, where students visited a variety of college and university campuses, including CSUN, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and Mission College.
“[The decision] definitely was devastating for our staff and for the academic tutors that we’d recently hired. They had been with us for just a few months. A lot of our program coordinators have been doing this type of work for many years. They are invested in the communities that they serve. Having to tell them that we were no longer funded, not only was it an impact to our students but it was an impact to their [and staff’s] families as well.”
She added that “between 27 to 30 persons” could be laid off once the funding runs out.
Fidel Ramirez, Learning Center CEO, continues to search for ways to restore some of the program funding from other revenue sources to offset the loss, at least for this school year.
“The first thing is to try and get over this devastating news that not only impacts our students and their families, and our employees that we consider family members, but also our communities,” said Ramirez.
“The goal [still] is to roll out a ‘culture’ of college-going that is not exclusive to our school but also inclusive of the other 12 charter schools and another 10 comprehensive LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] schools. If we really talk about the goals of the GEAR UP grant award, it’s to be able to prep our students to be ‘college-ready’ and beyond. The ‘beyond’ part is the one that worries me. We were granted [the funds] because there is a big need [for it] in the Northeast San Fernando Valley. We know that there’s a need, and we earned the award. We earned it.”
According to the edpartners.org website, the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) initiatives were designed to focus on increasing the college and career readiness of low-income students in communities nationwide.
Applicants, the website stated, identify entire groups of seventh-grade students enrolled in low-income schools – as identified by Free and Reduced-Price Lunch Program rates – to be provided services, including academic, social and planning support as students progress from the middle grades through high school graduation, and often into the first year of college. Drawing upon research, GEAR UP works to accelerate a student’s college-readiness through supplemental programs and expands the capacity of schools to create college-going cultures. There are two grant types – one focused on states, and another on local partnerships to ensure both breadth and depth.
In FY 2024, Congress appropriated $388 million for GEAR UP. But often, only a small fraction of eligible students can participate in the program. As a result of the growing demand for the program, access to GEAR UP has become extremely competitive. Less than one in five applicants are funded and the grants remain persistently out of reach for many communities, the website stated.
It’s a key reason why the Vaughn officials are frustrated by losing the funding.
“We’re motivators and dedicated to this community,” he said. “And we’re programmers, we’re practitioners – we can do it. The reality is, we need to find the time and the planning for it to occur. Again, we would have loved to have a transformational initiative like the one we just had. We have to go smaller scale to one school, and that’s the Vaughn school. As we have success, then we can expand it, grow it and share it with our community.”
Understanding that he cannot depend on the federal government’s assistance – at least for now – Ramirez is determined to regroup and start anew. He said he is in conversations with Vaughn’s educational partners and is also seeking available state funding. He does not want to lose the cohort of students that started the program last year to despair and indifference.
“The beautiful thing about my position is that I can determine, with the support of these two professionals, how we are going to initiate something like this,” he said. “We’re a ‘span’ school – pre-K to 12th grade – and we’re proud of that because everybody deserves a little bit of college awareness as early as pre-K. And the research does indicate that students, as early as fourth grade, start deciding about their post-secondary education. But we’re thinking we’re going to go as low as pre-K, and so by the time they get to middle school, they’re already talking the lingo, right? They’re already saying, Hey, I’m going to get a master’s too.
“So we know we can have an impact with that approach. And so again, right now we’re still trying to get over this huge news. Yes, I’d be able to mobilize around this idea of, that’s OK, we can still move forward.”
Montano added that families and communities should also make their voices heard.
“Definitely speak to their representatives,” she said. “Social media in our society right now plays a really big role. So being able to go on social media and post about what’s happening, what the U.S. Department of Education is doing by reducing and eliminating these funds in our community, we can really advocate for not only the reinstatement, but for additional funding sources; not just GEAR UP in itself, but other state funds that can support this effort.”