Parents of children with disabilities are growing increasingly worried as the Education Department shrinks and mechanisms for accountability seem harder to find.
The department laid off nearly half of its workforce earlier this year, is moving to reduce disability services even further and has 95 percent of its employees currently furloughed due to the government shutdown.
Parents say it’s getting harder to know who to contact for civil rights complaints and progress updates, and their fears are growing as Education Secretary Linda McMahon presses her calls for education to go back to the states while saying little about who will ensure oversight and compliance for the Individuals with Disabilities and Education Act (IDEA).
“It’s not just the families that are left high and dry, it’s our school systems. The fact is that the federal government has a role in the provision of public education in this country, and when that’s just stripped out with no warning, no information and no assistance, it leaves everyone affected powerless. Schools are without guidance, and students are potentially — and families — without the protections that they’re guaranteed under the law,” said Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates.
Alicia Reneé, who has two neurodivergent sons, says she has been fighting for years for her younger after his school failed to accommodate his Individualized Education Program (IEP), a document that lays out the legally mandated accommodations schools must make for those with disabilities.
Reneé has filed complaints on both the state and federal level, including dealing directly with the Education Department for years. But she says it has become more difficult since President Trump took office.
“They are slower. You don’t know who to email. I don’t know who to email when, prior to Trump coming into office, I had a designated dedicated attorney that was working my ORC [Office for Civil Rights] case,” she said.
“I would email him and send him new evidence or tell him and ask questions about where things are in my case, what additional information they needed,” she added “Right now, I don’t know who to call. I don’t have anyone to contact. No one has reached out to me this since my last outreach to the office in Atlanta … They were supposed to give me my point of contact of who my case had been assigned to, but I haven’t received anything.”
Reneé said other families have told her they have not yet received confirmation emails from their submitted OCR complaints as well.
The Hill has reached out to the Education Department for comment.
When the Trump administration laid off nearly half of the department’s employees in March, OCR was one of the hardest-hit offices. It is responsible for investigating civil rights complaints against schools, with many of the investigations revolving around students with disabilities.
Concerns are mounting over both the response time to OCR cases and the rate at which those cases are getting dismissed.
According to court documents, OCR dismissed 3,424 complaints over three months, from March to June, K-12 Drive reported. For the last three months of former President Biden’s term, only 2,527 complaints were dismissed.
JM, a parent of a child with disabilities who requested anonymity, said she had an investigator assigned to her in March to deal with her complaint that her child’s rights were being violated at school.
“She didn’t investigate anything, even the document that she produced was inaccurate,” JM told The Hill this week.
“They finished their investigation right before the shutdown,” they added, noting people can’t appeal once a decision has been finalized. “Per their manual, they’re supposed to notify the complainant whenever the respondent wants to resolve out of courtesy, out of transparency. I guess they don’t have to give me the details, I don’t have any say so, but they’re supposed to let the complainant know I didn’t receive any notification of anything.”
In the latest attempted round of Trump staffing cuts during the government shutdown, which has been at least temporarily frozen in the courts, the Education Department was looking to target OCR again, as well as other services for students with disabilities.
The Associated Press reported only a handful of top officials would be left to oversee IDEA before a court halted the sweeping reduction in force (RIF).
“The Democrat government shutdown has forced agencies to evaluate what federal responsibilities are truly critical for the American people. Two weeks in, millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid, and schools are operating as normal. It confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states,” McMahon posted on the social platform X.
“The Department has taken additional steps to better reach American students and families and root out the education bureaucracy that has burdened states and educators with unnecessary oversight,” she said. “No education funding is impacted by the RIF, including funding for special education, and the clean CR supported by the Trump Administration will provide states and schools the funding they need to support all students.”
Even while the RIF is paused, the intention to downsize IDEA staff raises alarms for parents who don’t see the states or local districts as proper spots for oversight or research initiatives.
The Education Department wasn’t “ever perfect but the reality is, just because it’s not perfect, removing it completely and not having any guardrails” isn’t the answer, said Parul Khemka, a school board member and parent of a child with a disability.
“I don’t think abandoning it completely — it’s like throwing the baby out with the bath water. That’s not how you solve issues,” she added.
