This Conservative County Lost Teachers after Administration Cut Key Grant

The Washington Post

11:52 JST, August 24, 2025

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, N.C. – Kylie Blankenship is everything this rural school district said it needed when it asked the federal government for a grant to help recruit and retain teachers.

The affable 26-year-old, a product of the district, has a biology degree and wants to give back to her community by teaching.

And they had her. She taught sixth- and seventh-graders at East Middle School for two years.

But the frustrations of working in a struggling system kicked in, and a Trump administration cut in funding took away her chances for another merit bonus of $4,500 or more.

As part of a $600 million slash to teacher-training grants, the Education Department in February took the $21 million award that Montgomery County had planned to use to provide bonuses and training officials hoped would lure and retain teachers.

School district officials said they believe their grant was rescinded because they agreed when they applied in 2023 to adhere to the Biden administration’s expectation that they would recruit a diverse workforce.

The 3,500-student school system started the fall semester last week with 10 fewer teachers, according to a district official, and fewer resources to attract new ones. For students, that means larger class sizes with more inexperienced teachers and fewer after-school offerings, district staff said.

Blankenship and others said the county school system – located in a conservative stronghold that voted 2 to 1 for President Donald Trump – doesn’t engage in diversity, equity and inclusion practices. She was already struggling with driving 40 minutes through the sparsely populated region to work in a district where teacher turnover is high and many of her co-workers were frustrated by the lack of resources.

After the district’s grant was eliminated, she took a job in a school district outside of Charlotte where she will earn about $42,500 plus a 12 percent bonus. That means she will likely earn about $3,000 more than if she had stayed in Montgomery.

“The fact that those grants were cut, it did push me farther,” she said. “It gave me that kick.”

More than half of Montgomery’s schools are considered low-performing, according to state data. The district, tucked into a forested region an hour and a half east of Charlotte, loses teachers to other places in North Carolina at a rate 72 percent higher than the state average, district data shows.

The schools need every teacher willing to show up and can’t afford to discriminate or play favorites, staff said in dozens of interviews. There was no favoritism to help racial minorities get hired and no DEI-based instruction was happening, teachers and administrators said.

The grant money the school system lost is equivalent to about half of the county’s operating budget. It helped Montgomery compete for teachers with neighboring counties by offering bonuses of up to $10,000 a year – nearly a quarter of the state-mandated starting teacher salary of $41,000.

Wade Auman, the former superintendent who applied for the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program, said it was a no-brainer for the county to agree to recruit a diverse workforce – districts that made that promise were given extra points in the grant competition, he said.

The district said in its grant application that it would address diversity by increasing its profile at job fairs and events at historically Black colleges and universities, identifying paraprofessionals to be candidates for teaching certificates, adding mentors for teachers and adopting a new framework that creates “equitable learning environments.”

None of that, in Auman’s mind, amounted to giving a preference to racial minorities.

On his first day in office this year, Trump signed an executive order promising to get rid of DEI and repealed Biden’s order that had called for advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities.

Auman fears that the Trump administration is now punishing the district for agreeing to the Biden administration’s enticement. The district appealed the funding cut but was denied, Auman said. “It was all the DEI stuff again,” he said.

The Education Department hasn’t provided any clarity about what Montgomery County could do to get its grant money back, he said. The agency did not respond to questions about why the district’s funds were cut.

Welcome to Montgomery County

To understand Montgomery County’s boom-bust history, dig no further than its motto: “A Golden Opportunity.”

North Carolina hosted America’s first significant gold rush following the discovery of a 28-pound nugget in 1803, a half-century before the gold rush out West. That same year, gold was found in Montgomery County.

The next boom came a century later, with textiles. Like thousands of Southern mill communities, Montgomery County spun cotton into something it could sell, mostly carpets and hosiery. A Fruit of the Loom operation employed as many as 700 people in 1976, according to a historic preservation application. After the North American Free Trade Agreement was forged in the 1990s, the county’s hosiery and undergarment manufacturing jobs went overseas, gutting the community’s commercial base. There’s still logging, but the money isn’t the same.

The median household income is about $55,000, according to the latest Census data. In December, the state designated Montgomery as being among the most economically distressed counties in North Carolina, primarily because its median household income has gotten so much worse.

Residents say it’s the kind of place where all 26,000 of them know each other or a cousin. There are five incorporated towns that curl around the forest, creating gorgeous mountain sunrises. There were five robberies reported in 2023.

And this isn’t the part of North Carolina contributing to the political purpling of the state. It is decidedly conservative: The community college has one of the nation’s four NRA-approved curriculums on gunsmithing and the high school offers a Bible history class.

Just under 70 percent of the county voted for Trump in 2024, including Rhonda Perkins, who teaches the Bible history elective. She said she doesn’t trust Trump in general, but she agrees with him moving quickly to cut what she views as government waste.

“I think he’s awful, but he protected my values,” she said.

That sentiment infuriates veteran teacher Katie Kimrey.

She said community members messaged her on social media when the teacher incentive grant was cut saying they were happy to see it eliminated. It felt like a slap in the face, she said. She felt that the $1,500 in funds she received were, for the first time in her 20-year career, recognition that she was good as her job.

“I resent being considered government waste,” she said.

Kimrey, who has eight years until she can retire, said she understands the teachers now looking to leave.

“If my kids were grown, shoot, I’d probably be gone, too,” she said last week, on the second day of school.

Some older educators in the district say they are more likely to retire early since the grant was cut because the potential annual bonus was going to increase their lifelong retirement payout. Retirement benefits for teachers in North Carolina are calculated using their highest-paid four consecutive years – meaning the grant dollars had the potential to generate, in some cases, five-digit boosts to three of their final years on the job.

Star Elementary principal Janet Deaton estimates she will now receive roughly $300 less per month during her retired life, which is set to start at the end of this school year. All of her grant money from the sole year the program existed in the county went toward a new heating system in her home, she said.

Kimrey gets more animated defending her fellow educators who are reeling from the financial blow, especially when she’s recounting tense discussions after the grant was cut.

“I’m not mad at anybody,” she said in her classroom last spring, where her door featured red-heart sticky notes of encouragement from her students. “I just don’t understand losing funding to keep and recruit quality educators right here in our community.”

‘Nobody new’

Montgomery’s high teacher turnover means students are often taught by a revolving door of new and inexperienced instructors.

The district’s parents had long learned to accept that reality.

“Sometimes I feel guilty I haven’t moved,” said Stacy King, a native of the area with two children. They live across the street from Troy Elementary School, where she served as head of the parent-teacher organization.

The grant was supposed to address turnover by luring instructors with the promise of more money and training. That’s why parent Lauri Russell was gutted when the grant was cut. She said she thought there was finally going to be a solution to problems she has witnessed.

An uncertified teacher has been instructing her son, a junior at the high school, for several years, she said.

“I think it’s horrible,” she said.

“Nobody new wants to come here.”