Jennie Demizio, a special education teacher at Park Elementary School in Newark, stood in a crowd full of dozens of educators and union members and listened to speakers talk about the Trump administration’s threats to cut funding for education.

One by one, speakers listed the potential impacts of federal cuts on programs at New Jersey’s universities and colleges, health care, and research. Protesters yelled “shame” and “boo” after speakers detailed the effects of funding cuts on schools.

After the rally on Tuesday, Demizio held back tears and her voice cracked as she told Chalkbeat Newark how her students with disabilities rely on federal funding to get to school and for services such as speech therapy and classroom aides.

“Half of my students arrive in ambulances. They’re on oxygen, they have seizure disorders, and just their transportation alone to get to school costs thousands of dollars a year,” said Demizio as her voice cracked while holding back tears. “I’m just so worried we’re going to lose this funding.”

Demizio’s fears echo those of many educators in Newark and across the state who feel that students will lose essential resources because of the administration’s threats to education. The protesters hope school districts, higher education institutions, and local leaders will band together to fight looming cuts and protect students and staff.

The protest in Newark was part of the “” demonstration, a national day of action with protests in over 30 cities across the country. About 50 city educators and labor unions gathered in front of a bust of John F. Kennedy at Military Park on the windy Tuesday afternoon, where they held signs that read “hands off my students” and chanted “stand up, fight back.”

The protest in Newark centered on threats to health care, immigrants, research, and the Trump administration’s threat to withhold federal funding from school districts and universities that don’t eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs deemed unlawful by the administration.

Last week, federal officials gave the elimination of DEI efforts in schools or risk losing federal funding. That directive threatens for New Jersey schools, including $77 million for Newark Public Schools, the state’s largest district. That funding makes up around 5% of the district’s for the upcoming school year.

“There’s no way that municipalities can totally foot that bill,” said Demizio.“I’m in a classroom where there are nurses, aides, and, you know, I think I feel like special education teachers, especially, are vulnerable at this moment.”

Last week’s attack on DEI programs in schools comes days after federal education officials also announced they would revoke deadline extensions to spend federal COVID aid that had been approved by the Biden administration.

As a result, 20 school districts across New Jersey could lose an additional $85 million in federal funding for infrastructure projects already in progress. That includes Newark Public Schools, which was to finish installing artificial intelligence cameras last fall. Paul Brubaker, the district’s director of communications, did not respond to questions about the status of the district’s AI cameras project or budget plans if federal funds are cut.

For Shelby Wardlaw, a professor and vice president of non-tenure track faculty at Rutgers University, the attacks feel personal. International students are worried about getting their visas revoked, and immigrant students fear they might be targeted due to their legal status, Wardlaw said.

In recent days, roughly a dozen Rutgers students “in good academic standing” learned their visas were revoked “without explanation,” according to from Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway. Across the country, international students and recent graduates have had their legal status changed by the federal government.

Additionally, some Rutgers faculty members are concerned about cuts to DEI initiatives and the impact that could have on teaching and learning.

Melissa Rodgers, a professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, spoke to the crowd on Tuesday about the devastating effects funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health and anti-DEI initiatives will have on medical and scientific research. Rodgers, a biomedical professor, has been investigating the impacts of sex on kidney disease, research that’s now at risk under proposed cuts, Rodgers said.

Wardlaw and her colleagues want Rutgers and other universities in the Big Ten Academic Alliance Conference to band together to share legal resources and funds to combat federal funding threats to higher education. Last month, the Rutgers University Senate passed a resolution calling on those universities to form a “Mutual Defense Compact” to protect and defend “academic freedom, institutional integrity and the research enterprise,” according to , Rutgers student-run newspaper.

“Universities are bastions of knowledge and resistance that would oppose an authoritarian overreach, and they’re going to come after us first,” Wardlaw told Chalkbeat on Tuesday. “They’re trying to break us as a potential site of resistance.”

Protesters at the Newark rally also heard from union leaders, civil rights activist Larry Hamm, and gubernatorial candidates Sean Spiller and Mayor Ras Baraka, who urged educators, laborers, and immigrant rights activists to band together to fight federal threats.

“We must resist,” all three speakers urged the crowd on Tuesday.

“The same people that were trying to stop [workers] from having fair working conditions and a rise in their wages were the same people who were opposed to ending Jim Crow Laws, opposed to civil rights, and opposed to democracy and justice,” Baraka told protesters.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, also spoke on Tuesday and called the Trump administration’s move to cancel funding for and $400 million in grants to an assault on education. The AFT is a party to eight lawsuits against the Trump administration’s attacks on education, access to records, and public health, according to the group.

“We have young people engage in critical thinking and problem solving so they can discern fact from fiction, so they can stand up for themselves, so they know how to think,” Weingarten said. “That is what we do and what this administration is so fearful about.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Last month, the U.S. Department of Education  for any schools with race-based programming. In  sent to districts nationwide, the department ordered schools to stop using “racial preferences” as a factor in admissions, financial aid or any practice that treats students or workers differently because of their race.

Now Los Angeles teens, working with , are trying to preserve diversity, equity and inclusion programs in LAUSD by showing their support for them.  

Last month, students, parents and local education activists with the  gathered at Iglesia Luterana St. Marks, a church in South Central Los Angeles, to rally for LA Unified’s DEI programming. 

The event, billed as a cross between a protest and a town hall meeting, also aimed to open up conversation about the lack of protections for gay and minority students under the Trump administration, said Maki Draper, a student leader with activist group Students Deserve. 

“I’m here to stand up for my people,” Draper said. “Stand up for those who feel like they might not have a voice. Stand up for those who are under attack right now.”

In addition to the actions by the Trump administration, Draper said advocates were speaking out against a civil rights complaint filed by a Virginia-based organization, , against LAUSD’s , which gives certain schools extra resources.

The complaint argued that the BSAP violated federal law by “” and prompted the district to announce that it would stop using race as a factor in choosing which schools participate in the program.   

Draper said the BSAP provides opportunities for Black students after historical oppression. The program places counselors and social workers in about 50 schools with large populations of Black students.

Through the program, students have been able to tour Historically Black Colleges and Universities, participate in unique clubs and receive more mental health services.

“With BSAP, I kind of feel more supported,” said Devon Beard, a senior at George Washington Preparatory Senior High School, who also attended the coalition event at Iglesia Luterana St. Marks. 

“It gives students a reason to go to school, like they actually want to get up in the morning,” Beard added. 

In 2020, the coalition successfully advocated for the defunding of $25 million from school police which was then put into BSAP. 

This year, the coalition’s organizers want LAUSD to expand the BSAP budget by $100 million annually and reinstate race as a criterion for the program, despite the complaint filed and that administration’s recent actions. 

The coalition has launched a sticker campaign to push those goals. Students passed out stickers at Iglesia Luterana St. Marks that said “LAUSD must protect Black, undocumented, and LGBTQ students,” and put them on their laptops and water bottles. 

Threats by the Trump administration for an immigration crackdown  LAUSD, said Alexa Delgado, a junior at Edward R. Roybal Learning Center who attended last month’s event at Iglesia Luterana St. Marks.  

Delgado said a  across LAUSD schools earlier this month showed a desire to stand up against immigration enforcement and ensure immigrant students know their rights and are protected by their schools. 

“No child should walk out of their home and be scared that they’re going to be taken away,” Delgado said. “And no parent should be scared that the child isn’t going to get home at the end of the day.” 

This article is part of a collaboration between �鶹��Ʒ and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

On the surface, these are encouraging moments; democratically elected public officials investigating the facts of a terrible moment in American history and pushing towards public transparency and accountability. And yet, the excavation of the days leading up to the insurrection serves as a reminder of the weakness of our common faith in democracy (to say nothing of the House committee’s only Republican members being rendered pariahs in their party for participating). 

How to keep fighting now to shore up our democracy and make our country more fair? How to maintain some semblance of social hope? “Democracy has to be born anew every generation,” wrote American philosopher John Dewey in 1916, “and education is its midwife.” Put another way, American democracy is not safe simply because we still have regular elections, nor can it be saved by a committee report, however damning. 

That’s because it’s clearer now than at any other moment in recent memory that democracy isn’t defined solely — or even sufficiently — in terms of a constellation of institutions. Sure, if you don’t have regular elections, widespread access to voting, and power granted to those who get a majority of the votes, you certainly don’t have a democracy. But a country can also have those institutions and procedures . 

Democracy is more than that. It’s really a way of living — a series of cultural attitudes and patterns of behavior that coalesce into self-governance. We participants in a truly democratic community accept, seize and/or demand the privilege of having a say in determining how we all respond to the problems we collectively face. That’s the key. Sure, the particulars of our public institutions matter, but they are only truly democratic insofar as they adequately, reliably represent the popular will in charting our national course. 

So: Is our country still a ? In the days immediately after the massacre of children at school in Uvalde, Texas, that “the flagging of faith in our democracy does stem from the presence of evidence, but it’s not the historical record that’s to blame. Americans feel as though nothing can be done because we have grown accustomed to nothing being done.”

Indeed, our collective cynicism has been dearly bought through the clumsy national responses to the pandemic, climate change, gun violence and more. If we measure the health of our governing institutions by their ability to respond constructively to the problems we face, it’s clear that they aren’t living up to this project. After this year’s horrific, unspeakable violence in Uvalde, a decade after the Sandy Hook tragedy, — largely insufficient to have stopped that particular school shooting — and hoping that lobbyists for the gun industry don’t step in to make it uncomfortable for conservative lawmakers. This is the best we can do right now, which is both better than nothing and depressingly predictable. 

And yet, a road to healthier democracy is just there, waiting to be chosen instead of the cynical, despairing path we’re traveling. 

That is, the privilege of self-governance also bestows upon us collective accountability. Our institutions at representing the majority’s views on a range of questions, sure. And yes, our elections are increasingly foregone conclusions because of the twin perils of and campaigns with cash from . 

And yet, because we are a democracy, if our public institutions are , we, too, have a role in it. We cannot blame a king who ruled simply because his mother ruled before him. We cannot look to a religious authority to clarify what, precisely, our country should do next. If we’ve tolerated the profoundly corrosive gridlock of determined obstructionists, if we have permitted our elected officials to , if we’ve allowed them to hack away at campaign finance limits … well, all of this was done in our name by the people we chose to rule. 

There’s nothing fated about democracy, about whether it will survive or endure beyond one more electoral cycle or public crisis. No, the sustenance of our experiment in self-governance is ultimately up to us. Fortunately, that means that a better, more robust democratic community is always there, a choice for us to make, ready to be born anew. It’s a choice for the taking. It looks something more like last Saturday’s March For Our Lives in Washington, D.C. — the public assembling to alert their elected representatives to collective problems we face as Americans. As I wrote after Uvalde, there are so many reasons for them to expect that nothing can be done. Our institutions have failed them, failed us, so reliably for so many years on gun violence. Indeed, the rot in our political culture made an appearance at the D.C. rally — a man stormed into the gathering, threatening violence. 

It shouldn’t have to be like this. Traumatized, grieving activists demanding that their elected officials show they care about making communities safer shouldn’t have to face threats of further violence simply for raising their voices. 

But they came anyway, reminding the rest of us that democracy isn’t something you have, or somewhere you live. It’s something that you and your neighbors choose to do. It’s something that only thrives with energetic participation of those being pinched by the problems in our common life. And more of the March For Our Lives activists’ sort of insistence is the path back to something like democratic self-governance. At base, democracy rests upon nothing more and nothing less than our collective agreement that we deserve a voice in our political institutions’ shape and direction. No one and nothing else — not our leaders, not America’s past successes, — is going to do it for us.