SARASOTA, Fla. (WFLA) — It’s a fight for education.

The question is, what’s best for the kids: federal regulation or a more localized standard?

“Trump and musk are taking a sledgehammer to democracy and destroying public education,” Robin Williams said.

Support our Schools, a Sarasota-based public school advocacy organization, and the SEE Alliance, a youth-led advocacy organization, held a rally right before Tuesday’s school board meeting.

They said the idea was to spread awareness about the dangers to local schools if President Donald Trump ends the U.S. Department of Education.

“The U.S. Department of Education fulfills a very important objective which is to protect the civil rights of disabled people, economically disadvantaged, a whole slew,” said Support Our Schools co-founder Lisa Schurr. “If we don’t have the federal department of education to do these things, I have absolutely no qualms that the governor of this state and that the state of Florida are going to pick that up.”

President Trump, on the other hand, says the U.S. pays more per pupil than any other country and yet still isn’t competitive in education.

“What I want to see is education, number one,” Trump said. “I like choice.”

“We all like choice,” he continued. “But beyond choice, long beyond choice, I want to see it go back to the states where great states that do so well have no debt.”

So let’s take a look at the numbers.

The last school year with available data is 2022 and school district officials said, out of that budget, 3.88% of the $88 million was directly funded by the federal government and not earmarked.

School district officials told 8 On Your Side if changes were made that would potentially impact funding sources for future school years, there would be alternate arrangements from other agencies. For example, money for Food and Nutrition Services would likely come directly from the Department of Agriculture; all block grants would come directly from the appropriate agency.

School board member Bridget Ziegler disagreed with the idea that special needs kids and economically disadvantaged students would suffer without the U.S Department of Education.

“It costs on average about $80 billion… just operating costs to find the department of education,” she said. “That has been consistent for the last 10 years.”

“Those are the actual moneys that will be reduced, not the dollars that are geared toward those students,” Ziegler continued.

Click here for more information on the Department of Education funding.

Click here for a more on Sarasota County Schools’ budget.