Families of kids with disabilities warn Education Department changes could break a flawed system

For months, and sometimes longer, parents of kids with disabilities say they have waited for the Education Department to make progress on their complaints of bullying or other discrimination.

Now that the department is offloading civil rights enforcement and special education, some parents and advocates warn a process that has largely been stalled since President Donald Trump took office will see only more chaos and roadblocks.

“It’s to the point I don’t even check in anymore with the attorney,” said Nicole May, an Ohio mother. May filed a complaint in spring 2024 with the department’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging her teenage daughter was bullied over her hearing aids and was getting in trouble in class because she couldn’t hear her teachers. More than two years later, the case lacks a resolution.

Under the changes announced Tuesday, the Department of Justice will take over civil rights enforcement in schools, and the Department of Health and Human Services will oversee special education. The moves help fulfill Trump’s campaign promise to dismantle the Education Department. Linda McMahon, the education secretary, pitched the changes as a way to get more help to families of kids with disabilities.

Advocates said special education doesn’t belong in a health department, which usually treats disabilities as conditions to manage, instead of differences in how children learn. The top Republican on the Senate education committee agreed, saying he’d pursue legislation to keep special education out of Health and Human Services.

Some families already are taking discrimination cases elsewhere

For many, though, the response to the announcement was a sigh of resignation.

The Education Department’s civil rights office had long been the last resort for parents who believe their child is facing discrimination at school, with a mandate to review all complaints. Under Trump, the backlog of cases has ballooned, and resolutions have dwindled. Increasingly, attorneys say they are turning elsewhere to try to obtain justice for children.

The reaction is a marked change from a year ago, when parents and attorneys were in a panic as Education Department staff and attorneys were slashed.

The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services has shrunk by roughly a third since 2024, and the Office for Civil Rights is roughly 40% smaller. Meanwhile, in the Department of Justice, the Education Opportunities Section has shrunk by half, according to estimates provided by Justice Connection, a network of department alumni.

“I think a lot of people are mad, but they are like, ‘What are we going to do?’” said Emily Harvey, the co-legal director at Disability Justice, formerly Disability Law Colorado, who has watched her cases languish.

When Trump took office, she had a federal complaint pending, alleging some Colorado schools were illegally rejecting enrollment from kids outside their neighborhood boundaries because they had disabilities. Harvey also has a case pending at the Department of Justice, alleging a district south of Denver restrained and secluded disabled students hundreds of times, even though the practice is supposed to be reserved for emergencies.

“I feel like they’re probably collecting dust on a virtual shelf somewhere,” Harvey said.

In response to the federal backlog, she helped to push for a new state law that expands the types of civil rights cases Colorado education officials can pursue.

States across the U.S. already investigate various special education complaints, including when parents allege schools aren’t following a child’s individualized education program, or IEP. But the Colorado legislation, signed into law in May, allows the state to pursue the types of cases typically handled at the federal level, such as those involving allegations of discrimination and harassment.

Harvey said she didn’t think the federal civil rights office was ever perfect. “But I think it’s become even less help for people who are trying to resolve issues,” said Harvey, who worked as an Education Department civil rights attorney in 2020 and 2021.

Boston-area special education advocate Craig Haller said he’s heard nothing on a complaint he filed early last year with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. Ever since the Trump administration started dismantling the department, he has leaned more on Massachusetts’s state system for resolving special education matters.

He recently used that system to help a student whose high school didn’t take into account his special education plan when it suspended him.

“I got it fixed for my client,” Haller said. But without the federal Office for Civil Rights, “I can’t get it fixed systematically.”

Department workers say the dismantling has made their jobs harder

While only Congress can close the Education Department, McMahon, a billionaire and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, has signed 10 additional agreements to give department functions to other federal agencies.

So far, those agreements have not reduced the number of employees working on specific programs. But the union that represents department workers says staff have run into issues with equipment and access at their new postings.

“It’s hard to describe how inefficient the implementation of the (agreements) has been,” said Rachel Gittleman, the union’s president.

The Education Department said Wednesday the latest agreements will help the Office for Civil Rights run “more effectively and efficiently.”

“Compliance and enforcement of federal civil rights laws will remain a priority,” the department said in a written statement.

Taken together, the fracturing of programs, enforcement and oversight for disabled students across multiple agencies raised questions of what would fall through the cracks, special education advocates said.

Robyn Linscott, who directs education and family policy at The Arc of the United States, a major disability rights group, recalled attending a three-hour listening session the Education Department hosted in January. Families, educators and advocates described barriers to accessing proper support and services. Although they acknowledged breaks in the system, not a single parent advocated for moving oversight of special education to Health and Human Services.

Still, she isn’t surprised the Trump administration moved the program anyway.

“It has only been 24 hours, but I think we anticipated this move for over a year,” she said on Wednesday.

In Congress, senators from both sides of the aisle said they would try to stop the move to put special education in Health and Human Services.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said he would “publicly commit” to working with his Democratic colleague, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, on legislative action that would push the administration to change course. Cassidy, who lost a primary election this spring and has less than six months left in his Senate term, has personal knowledge of the education challenges faced by kids with disabilities: His wife co-founded a network of charter schools for students with dyslexia.

If special education is moved, he said Wednesday, it should go to the Labor Department. That agency, he said, is better positioned to support people with disabilities as they learn and work.

Ultimately, what matters to parents is whether they can get the services their children need, said Rob Harris, an IEP advocate in Colorado. Families spend an inordinate amount of time navigating systems that should be working together to serve children, but often aren’t. Harris has navigated those systems himself: His 19-year-old daughter is blind.

“Families don’t experience the government through organizational charts,” Harris said. “We experience it through the services our children receive.”

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Associated Press writers Bianca Vázquez Toness and Alanna Durkin Richer contributed to this report.

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