The Pittsgrove district in New Jersey gets about $40,000 in Title II funds for professional development already on the runway for the upcoming school year.While losing that small amount of funding isn’t catastrophic for a district with an operating budget of $30 million, it does mean the district now isn’t getting the money it had budgeted for that purpose. “Now we’ll have to go back to the drawing board,” said Darren Harris, the district’s business administrator and board secretary.Title III-A funding—$890 million a year nationwide—covers a wide range of services for the nation’s English learners, who number roughly 5.3 million in total and represent the nation’s fastest-growing population of public school students. Under civil rights law, school districts have to ensure that students who are still learning English have equal access to education, as their peers do.The $1.3-billion Title IV-A funding stream is a block grant of sorts for academic enrichment and student support that replaced a group of smaller programs Congress consolidated a decade ago. Because it funds a wide variety of priorities, rather than supplying resources for a particular group of students or type of school, “it’s harder for any one group to raise a ruckus” on its behalf, said Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee on Education Funding, a nonprofit advocacy coalition. Cuts to Title II-A and Title IV-A could cause acute challenges for rural school districts. The thousands of school districts nationwide that receive federal funds from the Rural Education Achievement Program, or REAP, also get extra flexibility to spend funds from those two broader programs as they see fit., The money on hold represents more than a tenth of federal education funding for all states and territories, according to the Learning Policy Institute, an independent education research nonprofit., The Trump administration’s abruptly announced decision to withhold $6.8 billion in federal education funds approved four months ago by Congress touched off a frenzy of chaos, confusion, and cost .