Newark teachers rally to denounce Trump’s education and research cuts

Dozens of Newark teachers stood shoulder-to-shoulder in Military Park this week, their voices raw with fury as they denounced the Trump administration’s looming assault on education and medical research funding.

On Tuesday, April 8, 2025, workers and educators nationwide stood up to raise awareness and protest “devastating attacks on research, health and higher education,” organizers said.

Special education teacher Jennie Demizio fought back tears describing how her students—many arriving by ambulance, dependent on oxygen tanks and seizure medications—could lose critical services if the federal cuts gut programs for disabled children.

“These kids don’t have months to wait while politicians play games,” she said, clutching a sign reading ‘Hands Off My Students.’

Behind her, protesters roared “Shame!” as speakers described how $1.2 billion in New Jersey school funding is now at risk, with Newark Public Schools potentially losing $77 million—enough to erase entire special education programs.

The rally, part of a national “Kill the Cuts” day of action, came as the White House escalated its war on academia, revoking visas for hundreds of international students—including a dozen at Rutgers—while threatening to strip funding from universities refusing to dismantle diversity programs.

Rutgers professor Shelby Wardlaw warned the crowd that these moves aren’t just bureaucratic cruelty but a deliberate strategy to cripple institutions that foster dissent.

“They’re coming for us first because universities teach critical thinking,” she said, citing a new faculty resolution to form a “Mutual Defense Compact” against government overreach. Nearby, biomedical researcher Melissa Rodgers described abandoning kidney disease studies after NIH grants vanished overnight, a scenario playing out in labs nationwide as France actively recruits displaced American scientists.

The illegal funding cuts are being made without congressional consent, but Republicans are ignoring the executive branch’s power grab.

Civil rights activist Larry Hamm and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka drew parallels to Jim Crow-era attacks on education, urging unions to unite against what American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called a “full-scale assault on the mind of America.”

“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,” said Baraka, who is a gubernatorial candidate in the June 10 Democratic primary.

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Local advocates from more than 30 states joined similar efforts to stand up for tax fairness and tell their lawmakers about how devastating cuts to vital programs will impact their families.

Progressive firebrand Lisa McCormick blasted the cuts as an “economic suicide pact,” noting that every dollar slashed from research sacrifices $5 in future growth—a calculus ignoring the human cost of abandoned cancer trials and stifled innovation.

“Trump would rather fund tax breaks for billionaires than the PCR technology that saved millions during COVID,” said McCormick, referencing breakthroughs like the Internet and mRNA vaccines, all born from publicly funded research.

On Tuesday, April 8, 2025, workers and educators across the country stood up and demanded NO cuts to education and life-saving research.

Hundreds also demonstrated outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, urging congressional Republicans to rethink cutting programs vital to millions of Americans as a way to help extend President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

The previously scheduled rally, organized by the advocacy coalition Fair Share America, occurred less than an hour after House Republicans, by a narrow margin, adopted a budget resolution that paves the way for negotiations on deep spending cuts as Congress works on an extension of the 2017 tax law.

The advocates, who flew and bused in from 30 states to rally and meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, say the cuts would be devastating for low-income Americans who rely on government health care, nutrition and early education programs, among other benefits.

“This is personal to so many of us, and many of you are here from all over the country, Utah, Iowa, Florida, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan,” Fair Share America Executive Director Kristen Crowell told the crowd. “This is a national movement where we are the people we’ve been waiting for.” Lawmakers “need to look us in the eye while they do harm,” Crowell said.

Weingarten, a former civics teacher who has led the AFT since 2008, is sounding the alarm on the Trump administration’s cuts to the Department of Education.

“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.”

Twenty states, including New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, are currently suing the administration over the plan to dismantle the education department and slash its workforce by nearly 50%.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the cuts are needed for efficiency, accountability, and to allocate resources to those in need.

Nearly 26 million low-income students benefit from Title I money, which helps with after-school programs, summer school and reading specialists, for example, in communities that may not otherwise be able to afford them, she said.

As dusk fell, Demizio stared at the park’s statue of JFK—a president who championed science—and wondered aloud whether her students would ever see the breakthroughs they deserve. The answer, like their funding, remains in jeopardy.