Last summer, 21-year-old Natalie Self moved across the country from Texas to take a job as a kindergarten teacher at Wildwood Forest Magnet Elementary School in Raleigh. Fresh out of college, she was excited to finally realize her lifelong dream of becoming an educator.
Self landed at Wildwood Forest thanks to Project LEADERS, a federal grant program that aimed to recruit more teachers to Wake County’s highest-need schools—those with relatively more minority and low-income students, lower test scores, and lower teacher retention rates. But now that the U.S. Department of Education has canceled the grant, Self is considering leaving after only one year—“which is crazy,” she says, “because just a couple weeks before this happened, I was completely planning on staying.”
The U.S. Department of Education announced last month it was canceling $600 million worth of “divisive teacher training grants” across the country, including $11.78 million for Wake County Public Schools (WCPSS) to implement Project LEADERS (Leveraging Employee Advancement to Develop Excellence and Reach Success).
According to WCPSS, the grant helped hire 133 new teachers across the system’s 24 highest-need schools since January 2024, leading to a 40 percent reduction in teacher vacancies in those schools.
“This grant made a real difference for students,” Wake County Public Schools wrote in a statement on its website after the funding cut was announced. “It helped schools hire teachers faster, reduced vacancies, and improved hiring processes so more kids could start the school year with a full-time teacher in place. The program was effective, well-managed, and delivered real results.” (WCPSS did not respond to a request for further comment.)
The Department of Education characterized the grants it canceled as promoting critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and anti-racism. In the case of Wake County Public Schools, the money covered $1,500 hiring bonuses, $2,500 retention bonuses, training sessions, and tuition assistance for beginning teachers.
When Self was applying for jobs last year, she got a couple offers within the Wake school system and ended up accepting the position at Wildwood Forest because of the incentives from the Project LEADERS program. The first few months of teaching weren’t exactly what she expected: “overwhelming” was the word that came to mind.
Although Self knew from the beginning that Wildwood Forest was designated a “low-performing” school by the NC Department of Public Instruction and qualified for federal Title I funding because of the proportion of students from low-income families it serves, she was still surprised at the level of extra support her students needed. Many were food insecure and living below the poverty line, and she found herself taking on the role of a counselor and social worker on top of her normal teaching responsibilities.
“I’m always trying to make sure that my kids’ basic needs are met,” Self says. “A lot of times, they’re coming in really tired because they didn’t get sleep, or they don’t have the right clothes for the type of weather that we’re having, or they’re frustrated or upset because their parents are fighting, and so they get a bad start to their day.”
Self found herself worrying, on weekends and during her school breaks, if some of her students were safe, if they were hungry.
“It’s been a burden that I didn’t fully expect,” she says.
The Project LEADERS grant funded specialized training sessions to help teachers like Self manage their classrooms and support their students.
“They really made a space for us [teachers] to connect and feel seen and cared for…and help equip us even more to teach to the specific context we were dealing with,” Self says. “We talked a lot about culturally responsive teaching, being in such diverse places.”
Now that the grant is canceled, there won’t be any more training sessions, Self says. Nor will she receive her $2,500 retention bonus, which she was expecting at the end of the school year. Just before the Department of Education terminated the Project LEADERS grant, Self applied and was approved for $1,000 in tuition assistance toward her teacher licensure classes—but the reimbursement never showed up in her paycheck.
Self, who lives alone in Raleigh on a teacher’s salary and has student loans to pay down, describes her financial situation as “making it, but barely.” The bonuses and tuition assistance would have made a big difference. Losing them has made her consider transferring from Wildwood Forest to another Wake County school.
“As badly as I want to stay, it’s just not realistic with the burden that comes with it, knowing that I could go somewhere else and make the same amount of money,” Self says. “It makes me sad, because staff turnover is a big issue at all of these [Project LEADERS] schools, and I think that these retention bonuses were going to be really big to help solve that problem.”
Self didn’t see the grant money going towards anything “divisive,” as the Department of Education phrased it.
“It was recruiting teachers and placing highly qualified educators in the places that need the most, where people don’t necessarily want to go without some extra push,” she says.
Of the Wake County Public School System’s approximately $2 billion operating budget, about 10 percent comes from federal funds. As the Trump administration and DOGE continue their slash-and-burn approach to reducing federal spending, and Trump looks to eliminate the Department of Education altogether via executive order, it’s likely that Wake schools, teachers, and students will continue to feel the effects.
Just last week, WCPSS announced a 90-day hiring freeze for some central office positions, in part because of uncertainty about ongoing federal funding.
For Self, the worst-case scenario would be losing access to Title I funds, one of the biggest pots of money Wake schools receive from the federal government.
“We use it for materials. We use it to pay salaries. We have support staff that are paid out of Title I so that our students can get extra intervention,” Self says. “I’ve seen so many benefits, so the thought of my students not having those resources is really scary.”
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Chloe Courtney Bohl is a corps member for Report for America. Reach her at chloe@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.