By Theo Meranze
Over the weekend The Trump Administration fired another large segment of the Department of Education, telling them that their jobs would be terminated on December 9th. The employees that have been cut mainly work within the offices of Special Education Programs and the Rehabilitative Services Administration — the two divisions that make up the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) — as well as much of the the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), and the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE). If these layoffs go through, these offices will be left essentially unable to function. It is important to note that this all is happening after the agency’s staff was cut in half at the beginning of this year as a part of the administration’s political agenda.
While the on-the-ground implications of these personnel cuts for students with disabilities are unclear, it is certain that they would be profound. The offices that were hit the hardest manage the distribution of funding for programs designed to help students with disabilities and oversee implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and other laws. If their removal is made permanent, schools would lose access to vital federal oversight, families would lose access to infrastructures which provide them guidance, and it will become harder to hold schools accountable for their treatment of students with disabilities.
The Office for Civil Rights, for example, enforces laws related to disability rights and takes complaints. If it is left severely understaffed, there would be no functioning federal infrastructure for a family of a mistreated disabled child to file an OCR complaint within. The processing of complaints would essentially grind to a halt.
If the OESE and the OSERS are left understaffed, there would be no governing bureaucracy in place to ensure that federal funding for disabled children makes it to states, leaving states who rely on this money unsure about what programs and staff they will be able to keep. In California this money is distributed by Local Educational Agencies (LEA’s) proportionally year-round, so the effects of these staffing cuts would be felt immediately, at the beginning of December.
These rounds of cuts are just as, if not more, political than their predecessors. They are the product of the ongoing government shutdown. The employees of these offices are clearly being used by the Republicans and The Trump Administration as bargaining chips in their bid to force the Democrats to end the current stalemate. Within this reality, however, there is a glimmer of hope. It is possible that these employees will be reinstated when the situation has settled itself.
There are also multiple ongoing lawsuits regarding the legality of such federal cuts, which are still being settled in court. If one of these were to succeed, it would force the administration to reinstate the previously cut employees. However, the law has not changed, and the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act remains a federally mandated statute. Parents and Students have the same rights as they did before this weekend; and States have the same obligations to implement the entitlements that qualified students with disabilities have under the law. California has its own legislative mandate for special education which provides students with disabilities and their families procedural and substantive rights, infrastructure and complaint enforcement mechanisms. Chaos and panic are two of this administration’s most relied upon tools of extortion and control: We cannot give into them. Things are not over yet.
We will continue to monitor and post updates about this situation.
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