THE EXECUTIVE ORDER PROJECT: EDUCATION - Funding for Charting My Path for Future Success Program in Spotsylvania Schools Stopped

Monday night, Spotsylvania County Public Schools learned that a federally funded research project that benefited 91 students and paid the salaries of five teachers was terminated.

By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash

The Department of Government Efficiency began Monday slashing education spending by targeting “researchers who collect, analyze and study data on the American education system,” according to a report in the Washington Post.

Spotsylvania County may have been one of the organizations affected by that decision.

On Monday night, Tamara Linkow, senior director of education evaluation studies at American Institutes for Research (AIR), sent an email to several members of the Spotsylvania County Public Schools staff saying AIR had “received a Termination for Convenience notice from the US Department of Education, effective … February 10, 2025 … to stop work immediately” on the Charting My Path for Future Success project which is “funded under the US Department of Education’s Evaluation of Transition Support for Youth with Disabilities Contract No. 91990019C0078.”

“The decision to cancel this grant will have a significant effect on our 91 students who are receiving services in the school division …. Particularly [because now they are] not being able to get the support as they transition from high school.”

— Superintendent Clint Mitchell

According to the Charting My Path for Future Success website, students voluntarily opt-in and are placed into one of two programs. The programs are identical, save that one includes mentoring.

Students taking part are taught to “set goals that help build skills to be successful in school and life; develop action plans related to those goals; and reflect on their progress toward the goals and adjust goals or action plans when needed.”

Students who do not join the program continue to receive existing supports and services each participating school provides.

This program allows AIR researchers to better understand which programs are most successful at helping students achieve their goals after high school.

“The decision to cancel this grant will have a significant effect on our 91 students who are receiving services in the school division,” Spotsylvania Schools Superintendent Dr. Clint Mitchell told the Advance in a phone conversation.

“Particularly [because now they are] not being able to get the support as they transition from high school.”

The program is fully funded by the AIR grant and supports five teachers.

“As a school division,” Mitchell said, “we are going to support these five teachers throughout the course of this year in our fiscal year 2025 budget, and … we will work on finding those five teachers affected by this grant other positions in our district through the fiscal year 2026 budget process.”

Parents of participating students were notified today.

The letter stated that because the funding had been pulled, “Your child will no longer receive the transition supports that were part of the federally-funded Charting My Path for Future Success Project.”

It went on to stress, however, that “Your child will continue to receive the district support that was provided to your child before they started participating in the Charting My Path for Future Success Project,” and that the cancellation of the grant “will not affect other services” the children currently receive.

The district joined the program in 2024, following a 4-2 vote at the May 14, 2024, School Board meeting.

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