Outrage has grown after the Trump administration proposed budget cuts to education, and specifically Special Olympics.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos came under fire for the proposed cuts, which were about $7 billion.
The cuts include getting rid of all the federal funding for the Special Olympics, totaling about $18 million.
Local educators are upset.
"Obviously, any cuts that come from the federal government impact what we are doing, and our ability to continue to do it," Special Olympics A8 Area Director Anne Goudie said.
"Let me just say again, ... we had to make some difficult decisions with this budget," DeVos said earlier this week.
DeVos says that the Special Olympics organization benefits from "private philanthropic support," and has donated to the organization herself in the past.
But that doesn't make people involved in the organization feel any better. As the area director for both Ingham and Eaton counties, Anne Goudie says they rely on that money for programs.
"We have so many things in public education these days that we need to take care of and we need help. And when we get that help and the funding is pulled, then we have to struggle to see where we are going to be able to come up with that," she said.
If approved, the cuts will impact programs like the Unified Champions Program, which teams up kids with and without intellectual disabilities.
"We stop talking about it as 'special ed' and 'gen ed' and 'people with intellectual disabilities' and 'people without intellectual disabilities' and we just talk about people in general. If we start that at our school-aged students and if we implement it in our schools, it becomes a natural part of who we are."
Goudie says it can be easy to think that decisions being made far away won't have effects here, but she says that's not the case.
"It actually impacts people here in Lansing, Michigan. And it does come down to your local students right here in the greater-Lansing area. And programs will be cut, and opportunities that they've had in the past won't be available to them," Goudie said.
There are 350 schools across the state that have the Unified Champion Schools program. Michigan will get $200,000 in 2019 from the federal government to fund those programs.
The Special Olympics organization also receives money in sponsorships from private companies like Toyota, Proctor and Gamble, and United Airlines.
