MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) - As cuts to the U.S. Department of Education were announced Tuesday, Alabama State Superintendent of Education Dr. Eric Mackey wasn't too worried. After all, the department had informed him there would be no funding disruptions.
That attitude shifted on Wednesday, after staff tried to pull out $9 million in federal funds.
"There were funding disruptions, the portal we pull money from, the G5 portal, was closed," Mackey said.
The portal came back on after a few hours with no explanation, leaving the state confused and in the dark about what happened.
Dr. Mackey explains a lot of this federal money goes to vulnerable populations: "This is money that American taxpayers have paid into the system, Congress has said that money goes to support children in our schools, primarily special education and Title 1 funds are what we are unable to draw down today for a while, and that [also] pays for teacher's salaries."
According to Mackey, this outage is unprecedented. The state has the reserves to withstand future outages, but only for a short time.
"We have not just seen interruption like this before," Mackey explained. "For there not to be any notice, and then to be disruption ever after being said there won't be any disruption did cause a little anxiety around our department today and for me personally," he continued. "If we went for a quarter and didn't get money, this could be a real problem for the state."
While Linda McMahon has been confirmed as Secretary of Education, another complication that state education officials are dealing with is not having all of President Trump's education nominees confirmed.
"The main thing about not having the deputy and assistant secretaries confirmed, is had this happened on a day after they were confirmed I would have just picked up the phone and called one of them," Mackey said.
WSFA 12 News caught up with Governor Kay Ivey the same day, but before the outages were reported. She spoke in favor of the cuts to the U.S. Department of Education, saying "I'm all for shrinking government where we can, and truth be known every state has an education department and I know we've got a great one in the State Board of Education and local boards that can handle education very well, so I'm going to trust President Trump on this one."