That moment carried more than joy. It carried years of waiting lists, missed explanations, language barriers and advocacy in systems that were never designed with her family in mind.

Sofía’s story is not unique. Across the country, Latino families navigating special education often encounter structural barriers that make access more complicated than federal law intends. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, schools are required to provide timely evaluations and ensure meaningful parent participation. Yet the lived experiences of many multilingual families suggest that implementation is uneven.

In 2022, launched , a community-based research initiative that trains Latino parents to document and analyze the realities facing families like their own. Parents are not research subjects in this model; they are the researchers. Two years later, ISLA — working within its parent-led research model, Padres Investigadores, and supported by research consultants — trained a new team of Latino parent researchers to design and conduct a statewide study examining how families in North Carolina navigate special education.

highlight important gaps in communication and access.

For many Latino families, entering special education means navigating two unfamiliar systems at once: disability services and English. Parents in our study described four stages in their journey: recognizing developmental differences, securing evaluations and diagnoses, accessing services and navigating schools, and managing communication challenges that created delays, confusion and stress.

More than half of parents were the first to notice developmental concerns in their children, not teachers or doctors. Yet many said those concerns were initially dismissed. While IDEA establishes timelines for evaluations, over 40% of families in our study reported waiting six months or longer. Nearly half identified language as their biggest barrier to accessing quality services.

In early childhood, time matters. Delays in evaluation and intervention can shape long-term educational trajectories. When families do not fully understand what services exist, what documents they are signing or what rights they hold, special education becomes harder to access equitably.

Language access is not simply a courtesy; it is essential for meaningful participation. Families described inconsistent interpretation, incomplete translations and meetings that moved forward without ensuring comprehension. One father told us, “They talked about my child’s future in a language I couldn’t speak.”

Importantly, families were not disengaged. They attended meetings. They asked questions. They took notes. What they sought was clarity and partnership.

The parents in our study consistently named three priorities: clear multilingual information, culturally responsive communication and timely access to evaluations and services with reliable interpretation. These requests align closely with on effective special education practices.

One of the most powerful findings from this work is that when parents are included as partners in research and problem-solving, trust grows. Padres Investigadores shifts the dynamic from extraction to collaboration. Parents design questions, gather stories and interpret findings within their own communities. In doing so, they reveal insights that might otherwise remain invisible.

Natalia, who once felt overwhelmed when she heard the word “autism” connected to her son, is now one of those parent researchers. She supports other Spanish-speaking families navigating the same systems she once struggled to understand. Her leadership did not emerge from policy alone; it emerged from access to information and genuine inclusion.

Sofía’s first word through a device represents possibility. But possibility should not depend on a family’s fluency in English or familiarity with educational terminology.

Equity in special education is not only about compliance. It is about ensuring that families understand the process, feel respected in it and are able to participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their children.

When language access, cultural understanding and parent partnership are treated as foundational, not supplemental, special education systems move closer to fulfilling the promise embedded in federal law.

Listening to families like Sofía’s is not an act of charity. It is a necessary step toward building systems that work as intended — for every child.

New of these schools, shared exclusively with The 74, was published Thursday by Education Reimagined, a national nonprofit that helps schools implement . It’s an approach where young people have ownership of their education, learn in their communities and show their knowledge through multiple ways, not just tests, according to the nonprofit. 

Over the 2024-25 school year, Education Reimagined studied in St. Paul, Minnesota; in LaFayette, New York; and in Mukwonago, Wisconsin —  a mix of urban, suburban and rural communities that enrolled a total of 388 K-12 students. More than 45% had individualized education programs or 504 plans — documents that spell out how needs will be met under the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

“In all the sites we studied, the systems are designed to fit the learner and their needs, not the other way around,” said Khara Schonfeld, one of the organization’s researchers. “They’re seeing differences as the norm as opposed to the exception. That means learners are showing up.”

That included mindsets that shifted how staff understood learning differences and student potential; different organizational structures; and key daily practices for student support and success.

The approach has produced positive academic results. At Norris School District, students with IEPs increase reading performance by an average of 8 percentage points and math by 4 percentage points per trimester. Avalon students with IEPs consistently for students with IEPs on math and reading tests. 

In the LaFayette Central School District, the opening of LaFayette Big Picture in 2008 correlated with graduation rates for students with IEPs in the district rising from a range of 50% to 70% to a scale of 95% to 100%.

Students who enrolled in these schools also experienced a decline in behavioral incidents and became more engaged in their education, according to the research.

“A lot of the learners came with past trauma, including education trauma — they had a hard time in previous schools,” she said. “So it all really focused on this idea of healing and making sure that they felt safe and cared for. We had a couple of alumni say, ‘I went to the school. I can talk to anyone about anything that I want to get or find out because the school taught me how to do that.”

Schonfeld said common accommodations students with disabilities need in traditional classroom settings are provided to everyone — a key factor in the learner-centered system’s success.

In Minnesota’s Avalon School, staff begin each day with a session where students and their advisors connect in a sensory-friendly setting  — an environment that reduces stimuli like harsh lighting and loud noises. Norris School District’s single campus, where 75% of the students have IEPs, celebrates small accomplishments that might go unnoticed, such as a student’s ability to hold an entire conversation, the case study said.

Leadership structures are also different at these schools. Avalon, a charter school, has a teacher-majority board that allows educators to redesign schedules and positions. LaFayette Big Picture School pairs students with mentors, while Norris School District has staff meetings every day.

Some daily practices include offering internships onsite to ensure students don’t have to be “ready” to travel outside the building to experience career education. The schools also interpret disruptive behavior as communication about unmet needs rather than misconduct, according to the research. For example, Avalon School uses a strategy called relational repair, where educators ask reflective questions after a disruptive behavior to build trust with students. At Norris, students are taught to name feelings to help staff find the right support during a behavioral incident.

This learner-centered framework has a positive ripple effect with families and educators, Schonfeld said. Parents of students at all three schools have shared they no longer have to fight for their child’s special education accommodations. 

Teachers also feel more supported and satisfied with their jobs, the researchers found. Avalon School has maintained a 90% year-to-year retention rate over two decades, with current teachers averaging 10 years of experience. At LaFayette, more than half of the staff have been at the school for at least nine years.

After a , the department’s Office for Civil Rights said the district must create a new division focusing on students with disabilities, improve transportation services for those students, and take steps to better identify and accommodate their needs.

“The district must take immediate action to remedy their violations and protect the rights of current and future students to a free and appropriate public education,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement. 

The proposed resolution agreement also requires the district to train staff, including bus drivers, on any updated policies. If officials don’t agree to the terms, OCR “may initiate enforcement,” the announcement said. 

The district, which said from the outset that it would cooperate with the department, is “carefully reviewing” the findings, a spokesman said, adding that OCR makes important points about providing clear information to parents and getting their children to and from school. 

Neither the department nor the district, however, has made the full results of the investigation available.

With OCR largely focusing its resources on investigating districts that allow students to compete in sports or use bathrooms based on gender identity, the D.C. investigation is one of the few disability-related cases it has launched and completed since President Donald Trump returned to office. A from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which sparked the probe, found that the district has one of highest rates of special education complaints in the nation. An advisory committee to the commission determined that young children in the district were under-identified for special education services or accommodations for disabilities and that parents were often encouraged to file lawsuits in order to get their children help. 

“That obviously favors those who have means, can hire an attorney and know how to get through the system,” said Craig Leen, former vice chair of the advisory committee. A civil rights attorney who served in the Labor Department during Trump’s first term, he also struggled to get services for his daughter. Now a senior at a charter school in the district, she has autism and an intellectual disability.

The bus was often late or didn’t arrive at all, creating disruptions to his daughter’s routine, Leen said. Since the investigation began, he said he’s seen improvements. The bus comes on time, and to keep parents updated, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which oversees transportation for students with disabilities in both DCPS and charter schools in the city, is developing a bus .

The district, according to the spokesman, is working with the state agency to “improve real‑time visibility into bus delays to make certain students do not lose instructional time or access to required services.”

Leen said he’s not concerned about Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s plans to transfer OCR or the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services to another federal agency as she continues efforts to phase out the department. 

“My main concern is that they have a designated agency addressing special education,” he said. 

Many of the advisory committee’s recommendations were based on testimony from Maria Blaeuer, director of programs and outreach with Advocates for Justice and Education, Inc., The organization trains parents and provides to families who haven’t been able to get services for their children.

The organization is “thankful that OCR is paying attention to the many challenges that students with disabilities in the District of Columbia are facing,” Blaeuer said. But she added that it would be premature to comment on the department’s announcement “without access to the actual determination” or until a resolution has been reached.

Imagine knowing exactly what you want to say, but the words don’t make it from your brain to your lips. You know how you want to move, but your body fails to comply. You’re thirsty, but your hand refuses to reach for your cup. You see the traffic but can’t stop your feet. 

It’s what I refer to as a brain-body disconnect. My brain knows what I want to do, say or stop doing, but my body doesn’t usually comply.

This is the reality of millions of people living with autism who have unreliable or minimal speaking skills or can’t speak at all. This is the reality of living with something called full-body apraxia, a term I hadn’t heard until recently, despite my 30 years of being diagnosed with this and or that disorder. But apraxia perfectly sums up my lifelong struggles.

Apraxia is a neurological condition that affects an individual’s ability to plan and carry out intentional movements, even though the physical ability and desire to complete the action are present. It’s a disorder that can very easily deceive onlookers into believing the individual lacks an understanding of the most basic concepts of danger or human emotion, or that they fail to comprehend the simplest instructions — or are choosing not to comply. 

Most well-meaning autism professionals are creating and implementing therapies based on these inaccurate and dangerous assumptions: the assumption that their student’s inability to complete their assigned tasks are due to either a behavioral or cognitive impairment. This is despite the fact that many of us have the correct diagnosis of motor planning and/or sensory processing disorder. Many treatment providers fail to recognize how these motor and sensory differences might manifest when implementing hours of behavior training or when assessing our cognitive abilities. 

These dangerous assumptions lead to children with autism enduring hours of dehumanizing and at times abusive therapies. And these assumptions rob us of our right to receive an adequate education and limit our access to and acceptance of alternative therapies. 

We are burdened with the impossible task of proving our intelligence with bodies that are not fully connected to the intentions and instructions of our brains, with bodies that not only fail to move how we want, but in many cases, take over and do what they want. Often instead of what I intend, my body will say what it wants, point where it wants and complete loops that I have little to no control over. 

Because educators and treatment providers fail to understand this, our basic human rights are withheld until we are able to prove our intelligence, emotional awareness and worth. We are often not treated with dignity until we can prove that our outward appearances and actions are not a true reflection of our minds and hearts.

I was a victim of those dangerous assumptions for 30 long years. Educators and doctors repeatedly told my parents that I had the intelligence of a 4-year old, and I was relegated to living out my days in a windowless warehouse called a day program. These are programs designed to house those who society believes don’t know, understand or feel enough to recognize the inhumanity of the system in which they exist. 

This system holds overwhelmed families hostage, forcing them into accepting only their approved options. The experts running these systems are blind to our needs, and often dismiss parent questions and concerns, treating them as if they are unfamiliar with their own children.

That was my life, a lesson in patience and surrender. I was resigned to accept my bleak and uncertain future until my family learned about . This is a motor-based communication method that understood that my inability to communicate was due to a motor challenge rather than a cognitive one. 

It’s a therapy designed to support my regulation and my body movement, and has taught me how to override my body’s automatic actions and create new ones. It taught me how to coordinate my eyes with my hand in order to accurately point to letters on a letterboard to spell my thoughts. It’s a therapy that, within a year, had changed my life beyond recognition. It was no easy task. 

If my family would have taken my behavior as communication, which is common when you have nothing else to rely on, we wouldn’t have made it past the first few sessions. My body rebelled. The prospect of finally being able to communicate overwhelmed my system with excitement. I spent the first several months screaming and shaking uncontrollably, but with the skilled guidance and quiet determination of my practitioner, I slowly progressed from one large letter to all 26, from answering questions with only one possible response to spelling out my thoughts. 

It’s been a long journey but worth every moment. I’m now able to express my love for my family and my dreams and desires. And I can give my family strategies for helping me. This seemingly has changed everything about my life. 

I’m writing this article, pointing one letter at a time to my letterboard in the hopes of reaching the parents of nonspeaking autistics and the professionals supporting them. I am asking you to put aside everything you’ve been taught about your autistic child or student, everything you’ve been told or think you know, and imagine you might be wrong. Imagine they are in there, understanding everything but unable to show it. 

There is a growing community of parents, therapists and teachers who have discovered just that. They are uncovering what decades of experts have missed. Everything about my life changed when I was given a reliable means of communication. I am sharing my story because I am able to. I am one of the lucky few who have been freed from my prison of silence.

This piece was initially published in the .

In 2016, my 10-year-old neurodivergent son was physically restrained and secluded twice at his Maryland public school. Being physically restrained and dragged down a hallway by school staffers and left in a room all alone led to a lot of fear and anxiety for my son and our family. We decided to homeschool him for the next two years.

In 2018, my son decided he wanted to go back to school to be with his friends. Though my family worked with staffers at his new school to ensure that what had happened at his previous school wouldn’t happen again, his excitement and our hopes soon turned to despair. 

During the first 15 days in his new school, my son was repeatedly restrained and secluded, despite strong state laws in Maryland limiting the use of restraint and seclusion to situations where a child’s behavior poses an imminent threat of serious physical harm. His fear and anxiety returned, and honestly, I was afraid to send him back.

A few days following the final incident, I made a simple promise to my son. I told him I would do everything I could to make sure this would not happen again to him, or to other kids like him.

That vow led me to start the , a national nonprofit that works with families, educators and advocates across the country who have had similar experiences. The alliance is on a mission to inform changes in policy and practice that reduce and eliminate the use of punitive discipline and other outdated behavioral management approaches, and to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.

When I first started the alliance, my goal was to help families like mine know they were not alone and that they could drive change. In the first few months, I focused on my son’s school district, and in summer 2019, the school board voted to phase out seclusion and reduce the use of restraint.

Today, the alliance is a community of over 35,000 parents, self-advocates, advocates and professionals, including volunteers from 23 states, working together to create positive change. We have 21 affiliate groups and collaborate with many national and state organizations, focusing on legislation, education and support.”

In terms of legislation and policy, we work at the local, state and federal levels. We have collaborated with individual school districts to influence changes in policy and practice. In Vermont, for example, we partnered with the superintendent of a small school district to change its policy to prohibit seclusion and prone restraint. Over the subsequent four years, the district saw a 90.6% reduction in restraint use and a 100% decrease in seclusion.

We have met with lawmakers and provided written and oral testimony in support of efforts to create stronger laws in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington. In my home state of Maryland, we helped draft and pass legislation in 2022 banning seclusion in all public schools.

That same year, I testified before the House Education and Labor Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education in support of federal legislation to end the use of seclusion and dangerous forms of restraint. While that effort was unsuccessful, we continue to meet with congressional offices to advocate for a federal law.

Today, much of our work is focused on education. We advocate for schools to move away from compliance-based methods that depend on rewards, consequences and coercion, and promote practices that emphasize safety, connection and student voice instead. 

We often present at conferences and events and provide guest lectures for university classes on topics related to reducing and eliminating restraint and seclusion. Over the last year, I have led more than two dozen in-person presentations and panels on restraint, seclusion and trauma-informed practices in Maryland, Missouri, Oregon, Kansas, New York, Georgia, Washington, D.C., as well as online sessions for audiences nationwide. Last year, we also hosted two virtual conferences that reached thousands of parents and educators from across the world.

Finally, we offer support and guidance to parents and professionals. Every week, we hear from families around the country who reach out for help when their child is experiencing restraint or seclusion. Educators frequently contact us for guidance about how to move their school or district away from these practices. These one-on-one conversations fuel a broader movement by equipping parents and educators with tools and strategies to make schools safer and more supportive for all.

The use of seclusion and restraint is a civil rights, human rights and disability rights issue. There are no federal laws governing the use of these practices in schools, but there should be. Recently, Congress reintroduced bipartisan legislation, the , to prohibit seclusion and dangerous forms of restraint and fund trauma-informed alternatives. Congress must pass this bill, and the president must sign it.

America’s schools can and must end seclusion, reduce restraint and improve outcomes for students, educators, families and communities.

These moves raise significant concerns that the federal government won’t be able to meet its legal obligations to students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ().

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has numerous times that federal special education funding will continue flowing, no matter where the office and programs land within the government. But what she has not acknowledged — and what is troubling — is how moving the program to an agency like HHS inevitably shifts the focus of special ed from education to health care, thus pathologizing disabled students.

This is especially true considering HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made about children with autism, calling them tragic and doubting their ability to lead full and meaningful lives. His statements indicate a belief that a medical diagnosis absolutely leads to tragic outcomes — which is simply untrue. 

Framing students with disabilities solely in medical terms hinders their potential for growth by narrowly confining them to a diagnosis and perceived limitations — resulting in low expectations in school. As recently as the , this allowed most states to exclude disabled students from academic assessments. Many schools encouraged their parents to keep their children at home on testing days.

Since then, the country has steadily moved away from low expectations for students with disabilities. Under the Biden administration, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services issued specifically focused on setting a high bar for these children. The guidance included a focus on inclusive education practices to ensure students with disabilities have access to high-quality education with the opportunity to meet challenging goals. It also offered details about how states and districts could leverage federal funding to achieve those ends. 

Inclusive education practices are flexible and creative. Using such an approach, a team determining appropriate classroom settings during an Individualized Education Program meeting might decide that instead of placing a student in need of behavioral support in a segregated class of peers with disabilities, the student could be put in a general-education classroom, assisted by a paraprofessional or special education teacher. operates this way. Teachers or paraprofessionals accompany students with disabilities to general-education classes, providing behavioral and academic support in real time, innovatively and effectively meeting a child’s unique education needs. Instead of limiting children with disabilities, guidance and practices like these help students look to an expansive future. 

But between moving special education to HHS and the longer-term to convert IDEA grants into formula block grants, it will fall to the states to ensure that their special education laws and regulations are robust. IDEA includes minimum requirements for supporting disabled students. States can and should do more, including developing their own laws and guidance on issues like inclusion, challenging academic standards, teacher and service provider support and training, and requirements to provide services in an equitable manner to all students.

Families and advocates can work to hold states and districts accountable by, for example, pushing for state-level disaggregated reporting on timely provision of services, restrictive class and school placements, and disproportionate disciplinary practices. Additionally, states must work toward timely resolutions of and for any violations of disabled students’ civil rights. 

Leaving schools without timely access to federal funding to provide legally mandated services means students will unnecessarily struggle, and their lack of progress will be used as an indication of the failures of the current program. There have already been that shifts of education programs to other federal agencies have tied up resources in even more layers of bureaucracy. 

Shifting responsibility for specific IDEA and special education programs to HHS means that when states come looking for guidance, the staff with deep understanding of the interplay among civil rights, disability and education will no longer be available to help them. What guidance they do receive could be limited and unsupportive of students’ true intellectual, cognitive or physical capabilities.

Burying special education deep in the can only make things more difficult for children with disabilities. Finding essential services that families are desperate to reach will be like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of IDEA. What should be a time for celebrating milestones in increasing inclusivity and accessibility in America’s public schools has instead been fraught with fear and fights to retain the unique supports provided to disabled children through the Department of Education. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn’t. 

Harold Hinds, is a civil rights attorney and Ph.D. student at the New School’s School for Public Engagement, also contributed to this essay.

The , published Jan. 13 from the , analyzed records from more than 1.7 million Michigan K-8 students who switched from a district to a charter school between 2013 and 2018. 

The nonprofit concluded that while students with disabilities spent more time in general-education classrooms and received less intensive services than their peers in traditional public schools, their standardized test scores increased along with those of their classmates who didn’t qualify for special ed.

Charter enrollment for students with disabilities has historically trailed behind that of public schools. While parents sometimes charter schools after poor experiences with traditional districts, charters also have a regarding special education. One found that charter schools may discourage parents from enrolling their children with disabilities because of concerns about how special education students impact overall academic performance and budgets.

But the results in Michigan show that children who receive special education services do well academically with fewer supports when they enter charter schools, “suggesting charters may have adopted, identified and developed approaches to teaching students with disabilities that warrant further study,” the research says.

“Charter schools can be a useful educational tool for parents with students with disabilities,” said Scott Imberman, one of the study’s authors. “They shouldn’t be quick to rule it out, because it does seem that, for at least a substantial segment of disabled students, charter schools are helpful for them — at least for their academic performance.”

The study found that math and reading test scores improved for both special education and general education students for at least two years after they enrolled in a charter school. Absence rates also decreased.

These findings match a in Boston, which revealed that children with disabilities who were accepted at a charter school through a lottery system were more likely to meet college-ready benchmarks than special education students in traditional public schools.

Imberman said that because children with complicated special education needs tend not to enroll in charter schools, the study’s results suggest students with less severe disabilities can thrive alongside the general-education population.

The study used students’ individualized education plans to see how special education services changed after enrollment in a charter school. Before switching, all students spent an average of 2.3% of their school day in a special education setting. The rate dropped to 1.2% immediately after entering a charter school but rebounded to pre-charter levels by the third year of enrollment.

Identification rates for special education students also mostly stayed the same — around 14.5% — when students switched, but then gradually increased. Two to three years after charter school enrollment, special education identification rates increased 1 to 2 percentage points.

The study also analyzed the use of resource and cognitive programs, two areas of special education services that are tailored to specific student needs. Resource programs often provide services to students who spend most of their school day in a general education classroom, while cognitive programs include more costly and intensive therapies, and students usually work with a designated special education instructor, according to the study. 

Once Michigan students with IEPs switched from a traditional public school to a charter, participation in resource programs increased by 4 percentage points, while cognitive programming decreased by 5 points.

A key limitation of the study is that the research only shows what was written in students’ IEPs and what changed post-enrollment in a charter. It does not reveal whether the school actually followed through with required services. 

“Our data also does not reflect the perspectives of students and families,” the study said. “It is essential that students with disabilities are included in future research on school choice to understand whether their needs are being met in different choice contexts.”

Recently, charter schools in and were found to have violated special education laws, and one in suspended students with disabilities at three times the state average.

Imberman said many charter schools aren’t set up to effectively serve some special education students, especially those with severe disabilities that require costly therapies and assistance.

“This is a large concern in the back and forth with traditional schools and charter schools, particularly when it comes to students with disabilities — that even if students with disabilities are entering charters, the ones who are most expensive are the ones who remain in the traditional public schools,” he said. “That creates a disproportionate burden on the traditional public schools.”

This story was originally published by . for their newsletters.

Sleep is a rare commodity at Lindsay Crain’s house. Most nights, she and her husband are up dozens of times, tending to their daughter’s seizures. The 16-year-old flails her arms, thrashes and kicks — sometimes for hours.

But these days, that’s not the only thing keeping Crain awake. The Culver City mother worries about how President Donald Trump’s myriad budget cuts could strip their daughter of services she needs to go to school, live at home and enjoy a degree of independence that would have been impossible a generation ago.

“Every family I know is terrified right now,” Crain said. “We still have to live our everyday lives, which are challenging enough, but now it feels like our kids’ futures are at stake.”

Trump’s budget includes to Medicaid, which funds a wide swath of services to disabled children, including speech, occupational and physical therapy, wheelchairs, in-home aides and medical care. All children with physical, developmental or cognitive disabilities – in California, nearly 1 million – receive at least some services through Medicaid.

Meanwhile, at the U.S. Department of Education, Trump has gutted the Office of Civil Rights, which is among the agencies that enforce the 50-year-old law granting students with disabilities the right to attend school and receive an education appropriate to their needs. Before that law was enacted, students with disabilities often didn’t attend school at all.

“We have a delicate web of services that, combined, support a whole child, a whole family,” said Kristin Wright, executive director of inclusive practices and systems at the Sacramento County Office of Education and the former California state director of special education. “So when the basic foundational structure is upended, like Medicaid, for example, it’s not just one cut from a knife. It’s multiple.”

Republicans have also suggested moving the office of special education out of the Department of Education altogether and moving it to the Department of Health and Human Services. Disability rights advocates say that would bring a medical – rather than a social – lens to special education, which they described as a major reversal of progress.

Trump has chipped away at other rights protecting people with disabilities, as well. In September, the U.S. Department of Transportation said it that requires airlines to reimburse passengers for damaged or lost wheelchairs. Trump has also repeatedly used the word “,” widely considered a slur, who say it shows a lack of respect and understanding of the historical discrimination against people with disabilities. It’s all if the administration plans more cuts to hard-fought rights protecting people with disabilities.

Fewer therapists, less equipment

The Medicaid cuts may have the most immediate effect. People with developmental disabilities typically receive therapy, home visits from aides, equipment and other services through regional centers, a network of 21 mostly government-funded nonprofits in California that coordinate services for people with disabilities. The goal of regional centers is to help people with disabilities live as independently as possible.

More than a third of regional centers’ funding comes from Medicaid, which is facing deep cuts under Trump’s budget. The money runs out at the end of January, and it’s unclear what services will be cut.

Schools also rely on Medicaid to pay for therapists, equipment, vision and hearing tests and other services that benefit all students, not just those with disabilities. In light of , it’s not likely the state could backfill the loss of Medicaid funding, and schools would have to pare down their services. 

Uncertain futures

For Lelah Coppedge, whose teenage son has cerebral palsy, the worst part is the uncertainty. She knows cuts are coming, but she doesn’t know when or what they’ll include.

“I go down this rabbit hole of worst-case scenarios,” said Coppedge, who lives in the Canoga Park neighborhood in Los Angeles. “Before this happened, I felt there was a clear path for my son. Now that path is going away, and it’s terrifying.”

Coppedge’s son, Jack, is a 16-year-old high school student who excels at algebra and physics. He loves video games and has a wide circle of friends at school. He uses a wheelchair and struggles with speech, communicating mostly through eye movements. He’ll look at his mom’s right hand to indicate “yes,” her left hand for “no.”

Coppedge and her husband rely on a nurse who comes four days a week to help Jack get dressed, get ready for bed and do other basic activities. Medicaid pays for the nurse, as well as other services like physical therapy. Even though Coppedge and her husband both work and have high-quality private health insurance, they could not afford Jack’s care without help from the government.

They also rely on the local regional center, which they assumed would help Jack after he graduates from high school, so he can remain at home, continue to hone his skills and generally live as independently as possible. If that funding vanishes, Coppedage worries Jack will someday end up in a facility where people don’t know him, don’t know how to communicate with him and don’t care about him.

“It feels like we’re going backward,” Coppedge said. “Half the time, I put my head in the sand because I’m just trying to manage the day-to-day. The rest of the time I worry that (the federal government) is looking at people like Jack as medical problems, not as unique people who want to have full, happy lives. It feels like that’s getting lost.”

The current uncertainty is stressful, but it’s even harder for families who are immigrants, Wright said. Those families are less likely to stand up for services they’re entitled to and are facing the extra fear of deportation. English learners, as well as low-income children, are disproportionately represented among students in special education, .

“That’s the other piece to all this — how it’s affecting immigrant families,” Wright said. “It’s a whole other level of anxiety and fear.”

Decades of progress on the line

Karma Quick-Panwala, an advocate at the nonprofit Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, said she worries about the rollback of decades’ worth of progress that was hard-won by the disability rights community. 

The , the 1975 law that created special education, actually predates the federal Department of Education. In fact, Congress created the department in part to oversee special education. Removing special ed would be a devastating blow to the disability community — not just because services might be curtailed, but philosophically, as well, Quick-Panwala said. 

In the Department of Education, special education is under the purview of education experts who promote optimal ways to educate students with disabilities, so they can learn, graduate from high school and ideally go on to productive lives. In the Department of Health and Human Services, special education would no longer be overseen by educators but by those in the medical field, where they’re more likely to “look at disability as something to be cured or segregated and set aside,” Quick-Panwala said.

“The disability rights community has worked so hard and gave so much to make sure people with disabilities had a right to a meaningful education, so they could have gainful employment opportunities and participate in the world,” Quick-Panwala said. “The idea is that they wouldn’t just be present at school, but they would actually learn and thrive.”

For the time being, Wright, Quick-Panwala and other advocates are reminding families that federal funding might be shrinking, but the laws remain unchanged. Students are still entitled under federal law to the services outlined in their individual education plans, regardless of whether there’s money to pay for it. The funding will have to come from somewhere, at least for now, even if that means cutting it from another program. And California is unlikely to roll back its own special education protections, regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C.

An imperfect but successful routine

Those reassurances are scant comfort to Crain, whose daughter Lena will rely on government support her entire life. Born seven weeks prematurely, Lena has cerebral palsy, epilepsy, a cognitive impairment and is on the deaf-blind spectrum. But she has a 100-watt smile and a relentless spirit, Crain said. Even after the whole family has been up all night, Lena insists on going to school and getting the most out of every day.

Funny and assertive, she has a few close friends and, like many teenagers, plenty of opinions about her parents. She loves her English teacher and spends most of her day in regular classrooms with help from an aide. Her favorite book is about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist who won a Nobel Peace Prize for fighting for girls’ right to an education.

Between school and home visits from aides and after-school therapists, Crain feels the family has pieced together an imperfect but mostly successful routine for Lena.

“Our entire lives are about teaching her self-advocacy, so she can have the most independent life possible,” Crain said. “Just because you need support doesn’t mean you can’t have a say in your life. There’s been so much work around the culture and the laws and the education system to make sure disabled people can make their own choices in life. We’re absolutely terrified of losing that.”

This article was and was republished under the license.

It’s a role this deejay is thrilled to fill at a school that encourages him to express himself any way he can. The magnetic and jovial Omoloju, a student at The International Academy of Hope, is legally blind, hearing impaired and nonverbal. But none of that stopped him from playing by Buckwheat Boyz mid-lesson on a recent morning.

“OK, Josh!” his teachers said, swiveling their hips and smiling. “Let’s go!”

iHOPE, as it’s known, was established in Harlem in 2013 for just six children and moved to its current location blocks from Rockefeller Center in 2022. It now serves 150 students ages 5 through 21 and is currently at capacity with 27 people on its waitlist, according to its principal. 

The four-story, nonprofit school offers age-appropriate academics alongside physical, occupational and speech therapy in addition to vision and hearing services. Every student at iHOPE has a full-time paraprofessional, who works with them throughout the day, and at least half participate in aquatic therapy in a heated cellar pool. 

The school has three gymnasiums fitted with equipment to increase students’ mobility, helping many walk or stand, something they rarely do because of their physical limitations. 

Its 300-member staff includes four full-time nurses and its six-figure cost averages $200,000 annually depending on each child’s needs. Parents can seek tuition reimbursement from the New York City Department of Education through legal processes set out by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, arguing that the public school cannot adequately meet their child’s needs.   

iHOPE focused primarily on rehabilitation in its early years but is now centered on academics and assistive technology, particularly augmentative and alternative communication devices that improve students’ access to learning. Mastery means users can take greater control of their lives. Shani Chill, the school’s principal and executive director, said working at iHOPE allows her to witness this transformational magic each day.

“Every student who comes here is a gift that is locked away inside and the staff come together to figure that out, saying, ‘I can give you this device, this tool, these tactiles’ and suddenly the student breaks through and shows us something amazing about themselves,” she said. “You see their personality, their humor, and the true wisdom that comes from students who would otherwise be sitting there in a wheelchair with everything being done for them — or to them.” 

Some devices, like the one Omoloju uses in his impromptu deejay booth, track students’ pupils, allowing them to answer questions and express, for example, joy or discomfort, prompting staff to make needed modifications. 

Because he’s unable to speak, Omoloju’s parents, teachers and friends assess his mood through other means, including his laughter, which arrives with ease and frequency at iHOPE. It’s a welcome contrast to what came before it at a different school, when a sudden eruption of tears would prompt a call to his mother, who would rush down to the campus, often too late to glean what upset him. 

“One of the things we saw when we first visited (iHOPE) was that they knew exactly how to work with him,” Terra Omoloju said earlier this week. “That was so impressive to me. I don’t feel anxious anymore about getting those calls.”

Yosef Travis, father to 8-year-old Juliette, said iHOPE embodies the idea that children with multiple disabilities and complex syndromes can grow with the right support. 

Juliette has a rare genetic disorder that impacts brain development and is also visually impaired. She squeals with joy with one-on-one attention and often taps her feet in excitement, Chill said. 

“Juliette has grown in leaps and bounds over the past three and a half years and the dedication and creativity of the staff played a significant role,” her father said. “When she is out sick or on school vacation, we can tell that she misses them.”

Travis said his family considered many options, both public and private, before choosing iHOPE.

“iHOPE was the only one that could provide a sound education without sacrificing the necessary supports and related services she needs for her educational journey,” he said. 

iHOPE currently serves one child from Westchester but all the others are from New York City. Parents are not referred there by their local district: They learn about it from social workers, therapists, doctors or through their own research, the principal said. 

Those seeking enrollment complete an intake process to ensure their child would be adequately served there. Parents typically make partial payments or deposits upfront — the amount varies depending on income — while seeking tuition reimbursement from the NYC DOE. 

iHOPE does not receive state or federal funding but some organizations that aid its students by the Trump administration, reducing the amount of support they can provide to families in the form of services and equipment. 

Principal Chill said her school is devoted to giving children the tools they need, even if it means absorbing added costs. 

“We’ll get it from somewhere,” she said, noting iHOPE can turn to partner organization and to its own fundraising efforts to pay those expenses so that every child, no matter their challenges, can learn. 

‘He knows he is in the right place’

Omoloju’ symptoms mimic cerebral palsy and he also has scoliosis. He’s prone to viruses and other ailments, is frequently hospitalized and has undergone surgeries for his hip and back. 

“He is also very charming,” his mother said. “He likes to have fun. He loves people. I feel very blessed that he is so joyous — even when he’s sick. He is very resilient. I love that about him. He teaches me so much.” 

This is Omoloju’s fourth year at iHOPE. He’s in the upper school program — iHOPE does not use grade levels — which serves students ages 14 through 21. 

He has made marked improvements in his mobility and communication since his enrollment. And his parents know he loves it there: Josh’s father, Wale, saw that firsthand after he dropped his son off at campus after a recent off-site appointment.

“I wish I had a video for when Keith [his son’s paraprofessional] came out of the elevator,” his father said. “[Josh] was beside himself laughing and was so excited to see him. He absolutely loves being there. I know he is in the right place and we love that.”

Principal Chill notes many of these students would not have been placed in an academic setting in decades past. Instead, she said, they would have been institutionalized, a cruel loss for them, their families and the greater community. 

“These kids deserve an education and what that looks like runs the spectrum,” she said. “You can have classrooms that feel like a babysitting facility with kids in wheelchairs given colored paper and crayons, which makes no sense. Or you have a place like iHOPE, which takes advantage of the age in which we are.”

Chill notes that assistive and communication-related devices have improved dramatically in recent years and are only expected to develop further. She’s not sure how AI might transform their lives moving forward, but highly sensitive devices that can be operated with a glance or a light touch could be life changing, for example, allowing students to activate smart devices in their own living space.

“This is a great time when you look at all of the technology that is available,” she said. 

‘Moved to tears’

Miriam Franco was thrilled about the progress her son, Kevin Carmona, 16, made in just his first six months at iHOPE, she said. 

Kevin, a high-energy student who thrives on praise from his teachers, is also good at listening: Ever curious, he’ll keep pace with a conversation from across the room if it interests him. 

Kevin has cerebral palsy and a rare genetic disorder that affects the brain and immune system. He has seizures, hip dysplasia and is fed with a gastronomy tube. 

“He was able to receive a communication device, which opened an entirely new world for him and allowed him to express himself in ways he could not before,” his mother said. “He also became more engaged and independent during his physical therapy and occupational therapy sessions. His attention and focus improved when completing tasks or responding to prompts, leading to greater engagement and participation.”

His enthusiasm for the school shows itself each morning, Franco said.

“You can see how happy he is while waiting for the bus and greeting his travel paraprofessional,” she said. “It starts from the moment he wakes up and continues as he gets ready for school. In every part of his current educational setting, Kevin is given real opportunities to participate, with the support in place to make that possible.” 

Principal Chill said she cherishes the moment parents visit the site for the first time, imagining all their child is capable of achieving. 

“They  are moved to tears, saying, ‘Now I can picture what my child can do someday,” she said.

It was 1969. Two men from the Pennsylvania Association of Retarded Children made an appointment to meet with the young lawyer with a reputation for taking pie-in-the-sky cases more experienced attorneys wouldn’t touch. Gilhool was five years out of Yale Law School, practicing out of an office that was no wider than his desk — barely large enough to receive the visitors. 

Wedged in sideways, the men handed him a report they had commissioned on conditions at the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, the state’s notoriously overcrowded asylum for the mentally retarded. They were hoping to use the courts to better the lives of the people confined there. (In the interest of historical accuracy, in portions of this article The 74 uses terminology now recognized as offensive.)

Gilhool had never heard of the organization, now known as The Arc of Pennsylvania, but he knew more than most people about Pennhurst. At the time, children could be deemed retarded for a host of reasons: for having an intellectual disability, but also for seizure disorder, cerebral palsy, birth defects, bad behavior, even not speaking fluent English. 

Public school was often the first stop on a short path to institutionalization. Children would enroll, quickly be deemed “ineducable” and consigned to places like Pennhurst, where forced labor, neglect and violence often cut their lives short. 

Gilhool’s brother Bob had been committed to the asylum, the attorney told his stunned guests.  

By the meeting’s end, Gilhool had taken the case — never mind that the three were still uncertain exactly what the case would be. The lawyer asked for a little time to think. Nine months later, he reappeared, grand design in hand. 

Eventually, they should ask the courts to close the facility. But the first task, Gilhool told his new clients, was to establish disabled children’s right to an education. 

Prohibiting schools from using asylums as dumping grounds was the initial step toward shutting down the pipeline of new residents and triggering the creation of alternatives — including the classroom instruction that would help children fulfill their potential. 

Providential, indeed. 

The cultural and political waters had been warmed up by a decade of Kennedy family activism. Rosemary Kennedy, sister to John F., Robert F. Sr. and Ted, had been born with a developmental delay, lobotomized as a young woman to a tragic result and institutionalized. JFK had to push for a new era for people with intellectual disabilities. 

Indeed, upon touring New York’s notorious Willowbrook asylum in 1965, RFK Sr. . “We have a situation that borders on a snake pit,” he said. “The children live in filth …  many of our fellow citizens are suffering tremendously because of lack of attention, lack of imagination, lack of adequate manpower. There is very little future for these children who are in these institutions.”   

The ARC, the Council for Exceptional Children and other organizations pushing for more humane conditions knew it was time — and that the moment called for someone with an audacious vision.  

“They knew they needed a lawyer who was prepared to imagine with them, and dream,” Gilhool, who died in 2020, recalled in a series of interviews that are preserved as an oral history at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. “And act on those dreams with them to kick over the traces and to restructure the world which had so thoroughly confined them.” 

The 1971 case Gilhool filed and won, PARC vs. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was swiftly copied by disability advocates in dozens of states. The settlement — which anticipated the sundry ways in which children like Bob Gilhool were excluded from school — became the template for one of the strongest of the era’s civil rights laws, enacted by Congress in 1975.    

Fifty years after passage of what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it’s hard to overstate the law’s impact. Originally titled the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, but better known as Public Law 94-142, it said no child could be declared ineducable. Advocates celebrated the end of the school-to-asylum pipeline. 

Today, however, people with disabilities see flashing warning lights. In the sweeping proposals advanced by President Donald Trump, they see the start of a new era of institutionalization. And in the dehumanizing descriptions of disabled children made by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who grew up visiting his aunt at her asylum — they hear echoes of past rhetorical justifications. The same groups that tapped Gilhool half a century ago today are suing to protect the law.

Pennhurst was not built to care for people who could not live independently. Like most asylums, the motive for its construction was crystal clear: Eugenics.

The era’s dominant belief was that disability, poverty and race were matters of poor breeding. In the parlance of the time, “normal” children needed protection from exposure to disordered ones. “Idiotic, imbecile or feeble-minded persons” should be , the Pennsylvania legislature proclaimed. State after state mandated confinement, and many went so far as to order the sterilization of anyone deemed defective. 

Conditions at Pennhurst were wretched.

“Large numbers of retarded persons have been herded together to live as animals in a barn, complete with stench,” said the report that ARC leaders gave to Gilhool. “Many are forced into slave labor conditions; deprived of privacy, affection, morality; suffering the indignities of nakedness, beatings, sexual assaults and exposure. Some are doped out of reality with chemical restraints while others are physically deformed by the mechanical ones. Many are sitting aimlessly without motivations, incentives, hopes or programs.” 

In 1965, researcher Burton Blatt and photographer Fred Kaplan used a miniature spy camera to secretly take pictures at five unnamed asylums in four Eastern states. They self-published their photos as Christmas in Purgatory, shocking the public and policymakers.

was hardly a secret. But without services to help care for their children or classrooms where they could learn, families struggled to stand up to authorities who pushed institutionalization. Which is how Bob Gilhool ended up at Pennhurst.  

The third child born to Tom and Mary Gilhool, Bob was social and curious. As a result, he was not diagnosed as intellectually disabled until it turned out he was also slow to talk and toilet train. For a little while, he went to a special school, but only for two hours at a time, twice a week. The rest of the time, he was home.  

At the time, a child’s developmental disabilities were viewed as the parents’ deficit. “The diagnosis was very wrenching to my mother and father,” Gilhool would tell the UC Berkeley oral historian. “The learned understanding that it was, of course, the parents’ fault; that these things were genetic … and that they should be embarrassed and ashamed and feel guilty.”

Gilhool’s father was taunted and shamed at work for having a disabled child, to the point that he had what was then called a nervous breakdown. Still, the family resisted experts’ recommendations to institutionalize Bob, who was 10. A few years later, dying of pancreatic cancer, the older Tom urged his wife to consider sending her youngest away. 

“Probably, you’d have to look around and find a place for Bobby,” Gilhool recalled his father telling his mother one night. “Because surely … you will not be able to keep him at home.” 

It was 1954, and Tom Gilhool was 13. It was his job as an older brother, Gilhool later recalled believing as a child, to set aside his anger at what was happening and focus on keeping his mother’s spirits up. 

Whatever Bob understood, he did not complain. 

During the nine months when attorney Tom Gilhool was exploring ways for the ARC to take on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, he heard, over and over again, about the role schools played in funneling children to Pennhurst.

Like Mary Gilhool, sometimes parents were simply unable to provide around-the-clock care unassisted. But often, families would enroll their children in school, only to have them rejected. Commitment, social workers and other experts would argue, wasn’t just in the best interest of the retarded children; it was to protect their siblings and spare their parents experiences like that of Gilhool’s father.

A Catch-22 for Parents

In 1955, around the time Bob Gilhool was being institutionalized, Minneapolis Public Schools opened an experimental school in a former orphanage and polio hospital. on The Sheltering Arms’ first five years provides a vivid illustration of how school was frequently the first step toward confinement in an asylum. 

Today, to guard against children languishing, IDEA requires schools to assess individual students’ needs, identify strategies for meeting them and document progress, or lack thereof. But in 1960, Sheltering Arms’ administrators were free to dismiss pupils they believed were neither “educable” or “trainable” for a variety of general and subjective reasons. 

An outburst-prone 8-year-old, for instance, was dropped for being “unable to adjust” despite having gained six IQ points during his seven-week school trial period. “His family situation was also a ‘problem’ one,” evaluators wrote, so they called in county welfare officials to arrange “institutional placement.”  

Another 8-year-old was excluded for behaviors that included wanting “maternal-style closeness” with his teacher. During his trial, he learned to “play happily” with other children and formed “some meaningful social relationships” with adults. But in the evaluators’ opinion, “These gains seemed too small to justify the time and attention he was consuming in the classroom.”

Though they were often vague when it came to documenting their own efforts, the Sheltering Arms evaluators were quick to scrutinize students’ home lives in search of justifications for institutionalizing a child. 

In administrators’ opinion, parents who said they faced minimal issues at home often were in denial: “Their discrimination will also be affected by the degree of their defensiveness about the fact of the retardation,” the program report explained. “A parent unable to accept this emotionally may very well proceed, in her diary, to deny all problems and describe the child as ‘perfectly alright.’ ”

Sometimes, children were excluded because evaluators felt the break their family got while they were in class only postponed a painful, inevitable decision. “This was a situation in which we felt that school attendance was permitting the family to just barely survive the situation so that, in effect, a disservice rather than a service was being done to the whole family unit,” Sheltering Arms reported in one case. “These parents were highly realistic and competent people, and his exclusion from school led to institutional placement rather promptly.”

The report declared the overall effort a success. Children gained independence, communication and socialization skills and behaved better. Still, it recommended institutionalization as the long-term outcome for most “trainable” children, and parent education as key to achieving it. 

“We think that great harm is done by the casual provision of classroom experience for children with no effort to interpret to parents in what ways and for what reasons this experience differs from that which their normal children are having in school,” they wrote. “We see this kind of provision as a step backward.”  

Of the 54 children enrolled in the five-year experiment, 23 were subsequently confined to institutions in Minnesota, while 16 were sent home with no possibility of future education. 

PARC v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 

On Jan. 7, 1971, Gilhool filed a federal against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and 13 school districts with the backing of numerous advocacy groups, most notably the Council for Exceptional Children, the American Association on Mental Deficiency and the National Association for Retarded Citizens.

Gilhool’s goal was to get the court to outlaw the classification of any student as “ineducable.” To that end, the stories of the 13 children named as plaintiffs were representative of the array of excuses schools used to justify their exclusion.  

Citing Brown v Board, in 134 numbered paragraphs that the state’s failure to educate all children violated the U.S. Constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses: 

On Aug. 12, the court was scheduled to hear preliminary statements from seven witnesses. In the afternoon, after just four had testified, the three-judge panel hearing the case stopped the proceedings. Gilhool and his opposing counsel agreed to turn their efforts to drafting an order for the court to approve. On Oct. 7, the judges signed off on the document. 

“This landmark agreement commits the state to a program of identifying, locating, evaluating and placing of all children adjudged to be retarded,” Gov. Milton J. Shapp said at a news conference the next day. “In the long run, this agreement will save the taxpayers money because it is a known fact that many children adjudged to be retarded can lead normal and productive lives if given the proper kind of educational assistance early enough. In the short run, this agreement seeks to put as many children as feasible into the public school system.”

The New York Times weighed in with an editorial: “The court ruling is humane and socially sound. Whatever the cost of educating retarded children, the cost of setting them adrift in the world without giving them the means to lead useful lives is far higher.” 

The suit and settlement were quickly copied by advocates in 26 other federal court cases, pressuring Congress to act. In 1975, lawmakers passed what was then known as the Education for all Handicapped Children Act, guaranteeing the right to a free, appropriate public education for all students, including those with severe disabilities.

On Dec. 2, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the bill, but reluctantly, noting both that Congress promised states more money than it actually appropriated and complaining, in essence, that Gilhool’s checks and balances — the oversight required by the law to keep schools from shirking their obligations — were burdensome. 

“Everyone can agree with the objective stated in the title of this bill — educating all handicapped children in our nation. The key question is whether the bill will really accomplish that objective,” . “It contains a vast array of detailed, complex and costly administrative requirements which would unnecessarily assert federal control over traditional state and local government functions.”

Ford was right about the first part. Congress promised to fund 40% of IDEA’s average per-pupil cost but has never appropriated anything close to full funding. Right now, states get 13%. 

But as for the checks and balances, Gilhool was correct in anticipating that states and school districts — historically poor enforcers of civil rights — would need continuous federal oversight to deliver on the law’s central tenets: that children with disabilities have a right to a “free and appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment” possible. 

Creating Special Education

By the time the PARC case went to trial, Brown v. Board of Education had been the law of the land for 17 years. Yet from coast to coast, communities had to return to court to try to force districts to take even baby steps toward integrating schools racially. 

Anticipating similar resistance to desegregating students with disabilities, Gilhool asked the court to give the Pennsylvania defendants one year to find kids who were not being served by schools — and to continue to identify children who might have unmet needs. 

The clause became one of IDEA’s most important provisions, a duty known as Child Find. It requires school systems to seek out and evaluate students who may need special education services — no excuses. It applies to children from birth to age 21, whether they are being homeschooled or are enrolled in a private school, are migrants or without homes.  

When IDEA became law, Linda Stevens was one of a very small number of educators trained to work with children with disabilities. A speech pathologist with a master’s degree — rare for a woman at the time — she taught a class of  “18 educable mentally retarded students” in Florida’s Alachua County Public Schools. 

“So much of retardation can be attributed to a language problem,” she was quoted as saying in the April 1974 newsletter of the local chapter of the Council for Exceptional Children. “If you can get the students to master the oral skills first, the difficulty of other tasks is then reduced.” 

To that end, her class played phonics-heavy games with puppets and enjoyed homemade books on tape. Stevens’ efforts were so admired that the University of Florida sent special education teaching candidates to learn in her classroom.

When the federal law passed, Stevens and an art-teacher neighbor were tasked with figuring out how to fulfill the district’s Child Find obligations, according to her daughter, Elizabeth Clark, now a teacher in the same school system and a member of the Council for Exceptional Children. Working together, Stevens and her neighbor canvassed the community, showing up at doctor’s offices, PTA meetings and other places families congregated. 

“At the dinner table, my mother would talk about having spent the day going door to door … to let families know that their kids with exceptionalities, moderate to severe, were not only now allowed to come to school, but would have supports,” says Clark. 

The shame of having a child with an intellectual disability that had visited the Gilhools was still prevalent, so the women had to do a lot of coaxing. If a family wouldn’t agree to a home visit, Stevens would invite them for coffee. After each conversation, she would ask whom else she should reach out to.

The hardest part of the job was persuading people that schools would heed the law instead of finding justifications to exclude their children. “Sometimes she would have to visit with a family three times to convince them,” says Clark. “People were in disbelief.”

Once, a parent got up mid-sentence and called a relative: “There’s a lady here that says so-and-so can go to school even though he can’t use the toilet by himself,” the father said. “And that he’s going to be okay.” 

At the same time, in Illinois, Pam Gillet was using every conduit she could think of to find families with children who were not in school. She placed announcements in newspapers and tacked handwritten notes on grocery store bulletin boards. 

A member of the Council for Exceptional Children, Gillet, too, talked to parents who were reluctant to tell a stranger they had a disabled child, but also many who had tried to register their kids for school, only to be turned away. 

“Now we were going back to those parents trying to build trust with them to say, ‘Now we’re going to welcome you,’ ” she recalls. “We capitalized on the legal mandate that the parent must be an equal partner in the planning process and must agree to what the school district was recommending.”

Unlike before, a district could not say it lacked the resources to meet individual students’ needs. If a service was included in the Individualized Education Program, or IEP, that parents and teachers agreed to, the school must find a way to provide it.  

Just as Gilhool had hoped, Child Find put bottom-up pressure on the entire school system to find the classrooms, research the strategies and recruit and train the staff to be able to offer meaningful opportunities. Even as they were trying to find their sea legs, educators like Stevens and Gillet got pressed into service to envision and build out entire programs. 

Of the 33 fourth graders Gillet taught in 1968, her first year in the classroom, five had the word-recognition skills expected of first graders, while another five had some ability to read but not to comprehend. Often, kids who were behind academically were funneled into vocational programs in eighth grade, so there wasn’t much fuss when students were allowed to languish. 

Gillet turned to her principal for help, but didn’t get much. The school had an after-school program, but it was an informal effort, organized by concerned teachers, working without pay. Often, they grouped children according to where each was academically and assigned them to an educator who was strong in that subject. 

Frustrated, Gillet enrolled in a new university program that promised to train teachers to work with children with disabilities: “I thought, ‘Well, even if I don’t get a master’s in special education — because I wasn’t even sure what all that was — I’d at least maybe get some help with the children I was going to have for the rest of the year.’ ” 

Fast-forward six years to IDEA’s passage, and Gillet found herself running a federally funded initiative to train general educators to teach special ed. Using empty classrooms in a school in the northwest part of Cook County, near Chicago, the program enrolled 20 to 25 teachers per term for two semesters. 

During the first term, they would take intensive classes with instructors from five area universities. For the second, the teachers would work alongside highly qualified special educators. The goal was two-fold: to be able to staff special ed classrooms quickly and to expose faculty from different teacher preparation programs to colleagues with expertise in a variety of areas. 

Federal officials were watching. Every three years, the Office of Special Education Programs — a division Congress created to provide expertise and monitor IDEA’s implementation — would visit every school in the district. Still trying to figure out how to get the right staff in the right places to meet students’ varied needs, Gillet valued the feedback from the visits. 

As newly trained special educators opened classrooms throughout Illinois — rising to the challenge of educating children whom schools had never before attempted to accommodate — she sat back and considered how much had been built, and how quickly. “All of those evenings and weekends that we all spent together, and all of the tough times that we said, ‘We’ll never be able to do this,’ we did it,” she recalls thinking. “Kids are in school, they’re learning. They’re having opportunities that some never had and may not have had if it had not been for this law.”

Ignoring the Experts

The doctor who diagnosed Brianne Burger as deaf at age 2 warned her parents that she was unlikely to graduate from high school. They ignored him, becoming zealous advocates out of necessity. 

About 1 million U.S. children under 18 are blind, have limited vision, are deaf, hard of hearing or deaf-blind. Laws requiring publicly funded programs to educate them date, in one case, to the 1800s. Services are expensive, however, and states are quick to target them for cuts when budgets run lean. Because of this, the money, oversight and technical expertise required to keep them running is laid out in IDEA.  

Burger is living proof both of states’ tendency to try to restrict access to costly programs and of disabled children’s academic and career potential. When she was diagnosed in the early 1980s, her family lived in Stamford, Connecticut, 90 minutes’ drive from the state’s only school for deaf children — and the only option state officials offered. 

Burger’s parents, however, were unwilling to put a toddler on a bus for three hours a day. By word of mouth, they learned of two schools for the deaf in New York. One was just 15 minutes from their home. Connecticut had to pay the New York tuition. 

Burger got an excellent education there. When her family moved to Massachusetts, long a disability-friendly state, she was placed in a general-education classroom where her parents advocated for her to have an interpreter. 

She ended up at a California university with strong services for deaf students, and later at Emerson College for graduate school. After a stint in vocational rehabilitation, helping people with disabilities find and settle into jobs, she went to work managing federal grants for Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. 

Her timing could not have been better. President Barack Obama had pledged to increase the number of people with disabilities employed by the government. Burger worked in disability policy for several federal agencies, landing at the U.S. Department of Education in 2016. 

For nine years, she monitored a number of congressionally mandated institutions that provide expertise or services states don’t have: the American Printing House for the Blind; the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center; Gallaudet University; the Helen Keller National Center for the Deaf-Blind; and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. 

In March, despite the fact that the law requires her position to be filled, Burger was one of more than 1,300 Education Department employees fired as Trump attempted to close it. Since his second inauguration, millions of dollars in funding for at least a dozen programs to support deaf and blind students has been eliminated. 

Shortly after Burger’s firing, South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds introduced legislation to transfer the department’s responsibilities to other federal agencies. Under the bill, oversight and support for the organizations she oversaw would be assigned to the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Labor.

During the Great Recession of the late 2000s, Rounds — then governor of South Dakota — attempted to close the state’s residential school for the deaf, which was established in 1880. Federal stimulus funds saved it, albeit in a drastically curtailed form. 

A task force appointed by Rounds recommended that its functions be assigned to individual districts, which can draw on the school for support. But without the pressure to staff a residential school, services have ebbed. In 2016, for example, the last university degree program for deaf educators closed, choking off the supply of interpreters able to work in regular schools. 

This year, schools that serve deaf and blind students and universities that train their educators have been or threatened with closure in . At the same time, offices like Burger’s — created to ensure states and districts don’t shirk their obligations — have been hollowed out. 

In March, a group of educators, school districts and public-sector unions , hoping to stop the Education Department’s dismantling and reverse the mass firings. (The Arc of the United States has since joined the suit.) A Massachusetts judge issued an order halting the administration’s efforts, pending further legal proceedings, but in July, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that ruling, at least temporarily allowing the dismantling of the department to proceed. 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has since laid off more of the department’s employees, although some have been temporarily rehired. 

If Trump and McMahon eventually succeed, the department’s Office of Civil Rights, which investigates violations of disabled students’ rights, will have shrunk from 446 employees to 62. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services — one of the divisions Congress explicitly required in IDEA — will retain just 14 of its 135 employees.

Echoes of a Dark Past

Over the last year, disability advocates have repeatedly warned that the Trump administration’s policies — and the president’s use of the slur “retarded” — open the door to a return to the dark past. Most visibly, as health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeated false claims about the causes of autism and promoted an unproven “cure.”

“These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date,” he said in April of autistic children. “Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

Indeed, one of was to eliminate the Administration for Community Living, the HHS division that oversees programs that help people with disabilities and the elderly be as independent as possible. The office’s responsibilities, he announced in March, will be handled by other parts of the agency. 

Perhaps ignorant that Pennhurst and other asylums forced residents to grow their own food, Kennedy has also proposed the creation of “work farms,” where hard labor will supposedly heal people struggling with addiction, mental health issues and even attention deficit disorder. 

In July, Trump opened the door to re-institutionalization with an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” It calls for “the reversal of federal or state judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees” that limit broad institutionalization, threatening to withhold federal funds from states and municipalities that don’t adopt and enforce “maximally flexible” commitment standards. 

Like the laws that justified confining in asylums people perceived as dangerous, the edict proposes to “restore public order” via the “civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.”

A statement from the American Bar Association raises Gilhool used to frame PARC: “The order raises serious constitutional and civil rights concerns — particularly regarding due process under the Fourteenth Amendment and the rights of individuals with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Its proposed standard for commitment — encompassing not only those who pose a risk to self or others but also those who are merely unable to care for themselves — falls short of established constitutional safeguards.”

Hoping “,” in 2010 a group of advocates and former residents formed the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance with the intent of acquiring the abandoned facility and turning it into a national museum of disability history. 

But a businessman by the name of Robert Chakejian beat them to it, paying the state of Pennsylvania $2 million for Pennhurst in 2008. Chakejian was struggling to turn a profit on a composting business he had started on the grounds when his teenager suggested he convert the asylum — and its abandoned cribs, beds, wheelchairs and an electric shock chair — into a haunted house. 

After they sued and lost, advocates tried to persuade the entrepreneur to at least populate the attraction with vampires and monsters instead of mental patients. But when the haunted house opened in September 2010, it had an asylum theme, complete with a fictional backstory involving a made-up Austrian scientist (named Dr. Chakajian, an intentional misspelling of the owner’s name) who experimented on Pennhurst’s prisoners. 

These days, there’s a late-night paranormal tour — complete with actors in gory makeup who lunge at visitors — and holiday events like “Crazy Christmas” and “Bloody Valentine.” Because it’s too scary, children and pregnant women are not allowed to tour. Active members of the military get discounted admission. 

Between 1908 — when Pennsylvania built what was originally called the Eastern State Institution for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic — and 1987, nearly 11,000 people were confined to Pennhurst. About half died there, historians estimate. 

After Pennhurst’s closure, some 150,000 people moved out of institutions nationwide. Since then, an estimated half a million have been spared institutionalization. 

In one of the longest-running to date, researchers at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Temple University stayed in touch with 1,156 people who were at Pennhurst in 1978. Each got a visit once a year, aimed at answering a single question: “Are the people better off than they were at Pennhurst?” 

They were. None wound up homeless or in jail. They lived an average of six years longer than those confined had, and their care cost 15% less than in the institution. Many moved into small group homes in the community. 

Bob Gilhool was among those who eventually lived independently. Long after the trial that began the process of emptying the asylum, Tom Gilhool asked whether his brother wanted to tag along on a visit the lawyer was making with a group of Japanese disability activists. 

No way, was the quick response, Tom Gilhool told an interviewer compiling for Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities. But he was proud.

“As Bob tells me often,” Gilhool said, beaming, “ ‘You and I closed Pennhurst.’ ”

Those resources apparently include the more than 250 OCR employees that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been trying to fire since March. 

Three weeks after Richey was sworn in, the department is telling laid-off staff to report by Dec. 15 to temporarily work through a backlog of civil rights complaints, according to an email sent out Friday. 

In a Monday statement, Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents department staff, said she’s “relieved these public servants are finally being allowed to return to work” and that keeping them sidelined has “wasted more than $40 million in taxpayer funds.” She accused McMahon of playing politics. “Department leadership allowed a massive backlog of civil rights complaints to grow, and now expects these same employees to clean up a crisis entirely of the Department’s own making.”

OCR has complaints to work through. In federal court updates as part of over the cuts, officials said that they were dismissing the majority of the complaints filed since the March layoffs. shows that staff have resolved 165 cases this year, but that’s well below previous years. 

The call back to work is the latest twist in a legal saga that has been a rollercoaster both for OCR employees and families waiting for action on their complaints. In October, a allowed the department to move forward with the layoffs as the lawsuit challenging them continues. Now, with the possibility that they could still ultimately lose their jobs, the attorneys, investigators and other OCR staff members must get back to work. 

“The department will continue to appeal the persistent and unceasing litigation disputes concerning the reductions in force,” Julie Hartman, press secretary for legal affairs, said in a statement. “But in the meantime, it will utilize all employees currently being compensated by American taxpayers.”

‘Drastically reduced staffing’ 

The department’s admission that it needs help to carry out its legal obligations is at least the third time officials have recalled staff after eliminating them. In May, a House appropriations subcommittee that she had rehired 74 people. 

“You hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon testified. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.” 

In August, the department brought back employees, placed on leave in late January. Many had on diversity, equity and inclusion during the first Trump administration, an activity that made them a target for the administration’s aggressive anti-DEI agenda. While the union filed for arbitration to challenge the firings, Madison Biederman, a spokeswoman for the department said the staffers were recalled because “the agency determined they are an asset to the workforce.” 

Last week’s development is further evidence that “the federal government cannot fulfill its civil rights mandate to students with such drastically reduced staffing,” said Amanda Walsh, deputy director of external affairs for the Victim Rights Law Center, a legal advocacy group that sued over the cuts to OCR. The organization represents victims of sexual assault. “We have not had any movement on our cases nor have we even heard where they’ve been assigned, demonstrating that the caseloads are too big for the reduced staff to manage.”

In March, the department shuttered seven of the 12 OCR regional offices, and during the government shutdown, tried to lay off another 137 OCR staffers. A the layoffs, and the agreement to reopen the government forced the secretary to bring the employees back to work, at least until the end of January. 

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, opened doors that were once firmly shut for students with disabilities.

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the IDEA, we reflect on how far we’ve come, and the work yet to do, to protect students with disabilities.

— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov)

One advocate for students with disabilities, whose cases make up the bulk of OCR’s work, suggested that Richey has contributed to the sense that “things are moving forward.”

Callie Oettinger, who publishes , a blog, highlighted Richey’s recent marking the 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Along with leading OCR, Richey is serving as acting assistant secretary for the office that oversees special education. Both offices, she said in an accompanying video, are “committed to vigorous enforcement.”

“This is not the language of an agency sunsetting a program,” Oettinger wrote. She told The 74 she found Richey’s video “a breath of fresh air, passionate and positive.” 

The department did not say whether recalling the staff was Richey’s idea. But one current OCR staff member, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retribution, said “she seems interested in us doing our work.”

But here’s the truth: Policies don’t teach kids, teachers do. For these new laws to make a real difference, schools have to pair them with the right tools. That means making sure teachers have the training, curriculum and ongoing support they need to turn policy into progress and to help every child become a confident reader.

Like , my son has dyslexia. That means I know firsthand how frustrating it can be for kids when they don’t have the tools needed to succeed.

As early as preschool, I could see my son was challenged in a way other children weren’t. Although he was bright, curious, and articulate, he couldn’t connect letters and sounds. At first, I was told that this was normal for boys his age. “Wait and see,” his school said. When I insisted something was wrong, he was placed in a 12-week remedial reading program, but the instruction he received emphasized guessing words from context instead of decoding them. I remember sitting in on one session and seeing the interventionist praise him for reading “b�Dz���” from context clues instead of the word on the page, canoe.

In the end, my son was diagnosed with dyslexia, dysgraphia and ADHD; but crucial time had been lost, and a new struggle to find suitable support for him began. Sadly, my story is not unique. It is the story of countless children across our nation, and the impact on children’s life trajectories can be extreme: of learners with dyslexia don’t even graduate high school.

The nation’s new literacy laws recognize what parents and advocates have known for years: Too many children are struggling to read, not because they can’t, but because their teachers never had the right frameworks to teach them effectively.

With that in mind, here are five evidence-based strategies district and school leaders can use to ensure that the promise of new dyslexia laws translates into real-world benefits for students.

1. Screen Early and Universally

Early identification saves years of frustration. Also, students at risk for reading difficulties when they receive intervention early, compared to students who have to wait. Districts should implement universal K-2 literacy screening to flag reading risk factors before gaps widen. These screenings don’t diagnose dyslexia, but they help educators intervene before the problem becomes entrenched and the child is years behind grade-level reading. The goal is simple: no more “wait and see.”

2. Train Every Teacher in Structured Literacy

Teachers need to understand both the how and the why behind effective reading instruction. Training in Structured Literacy, grounded in the science of reading, gives educators the knowledge and confidence to teach decoding explicitly and systematically. If schools can give every K-2 teacher this foundation, fewer students will slip through the cracks, whether they have dyslexia or not.

3. Align Instruction Across All Tiers

Reading intervention shouldn’t depend on luck or location. Districts must create tiered instructional systems that use consistent, evidence-based methods whether students are in a general classroom, a pull-out intervention or a special education setting. A student shouldn’t encounter three different reading approaches in one day. Consistency and repetition across all tiers of instruction are what help struggling readers make lasting progress.

4. Build Accountability for Implementation and Impact

Legislation has impact only when it’s paired with leadership and accountability. Districts need tools to measure both implementation fidelity and student growth over time. This means tracking whether teachers are applying what they’ve learned and whether students’ reading skills are improving as a result. To the extent possible, data should support decision-making. And as new systems and practices are rolled out, it’s equally important to identify and stop using those that aren’t working. Letting go of ineffective programs or outdated methods creates space, financially and mentally, for what truly moves the needle on student learning.

5. Collaborate Across Roles and Keep Parents at the Table

Real, lasting change doesn’t happen in silos, it happens when we come together. District leaders, teachers and parents each play a vital role in shaping how children learn to read. Parents are often the first to recognize when a child is struggling, and their insight is invaluable. When schools and families work side by side, grounded in trust and open communication, they create the momentum that sustains progress. It’s this shared commitment, rooted in collaboration and care, that will carry us toward lasting, nationwide literacy success.

Schools have reached a pivotal moment in the movement to transform literacy instruction. Across the country, evidence-based strategies and resources are finding their way into classrooms, giving more students the opportunity to become confident, capable readers. But now, the real work begins.

I hope education leaders will look beyond policy victories to the classrooms where those laws take shape. The legislation that has passed represents a powerful promise to our students, but a promise only matters if it’s fulfilled. It’s time to turn legislative intent into lasting, measurable progress in literacy for every child.

Since 2020, the Hawaiʻi education department has offered the largest bonuses in the nation to special education teachers to address staff shortages. But the state has seen limited improvements in filling special education teacher positions, according to recent data from the department and the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The Hawaiʻi Department of Education introduced bonuses — also known as pay differentials — for teachers working in special education and other hard-to-fill positions in 2020. It’s a strategy that has become popular in other parts of the country. In 2025, 85 districts offered financial incentives for special education teachers, up from 63 in 2022, according to a .

Hawaiʻi continues to offer the largest bonuses to its special education teachers, with local educators receiving $10,000 annual salary increases. On the mainland, Atlanta Public Schools in Georgia provides a $3,000 bonus to special education teachers, while Jackson Public Schools in Mississippi offers $5,000 pay bumps over three years, according to the national report.

In some parts of Hawaiʻi, special education teachers also qualify for hard-to-staff bonuses, further boosting their pay. All Hawaiʻi educators working in schools that are geographically isolated or significantly struggle with vacancies receive pay bumps ranging from $3,000 to $8,000, meaning that special education teachers in these schools can earn up to $13,000 to $18,000 in annual bonuses.

But a  on teacher pay commissioned by the DOE shows the bonuses did not fix the shortage. Statewide, the percentage of licensed special education teachers has increased since the bonuses began, but schools still face many unfilled positions.

Vacancy rates for special education teachers fell in 2020, the first year the bonuses were introduced, then rose steadily during the pandemic. Those rates have since improved but remain roughly at or above pre-pandemic levels for most schools in the state.

The only improvements to special education vacancies were in the Nānākuli-Waiʻanae and Hāna-Lānaʻi-Molokai complexes, where teachers earned the maximum $18,000 annual salary boost. In those schools, vacancy rates for special education teachers fell from 14% to 5% over the past seven years.

The proportion of unlicensed special education teachers in those schools also fell from 14% to 6% since 2019, according to the salary study.

Statewide, special education vacancies have made up a smaller proportion of unfilled teacher positions since the bonuses began. In 2024, special education positions accounted for 20% of total teacher vacancies, compared to 30% before the pandemic. 

As a disabled American, it’s hard to express how profoundly this piece of legislation has impacted my life. Without it, I would likely be living in an , deprived of the rights and opportunities I have now. As the IDEA turns 50 this month, attacks from the Trump administration threaten to undermine the protections it provides millions of Americans like me.

The IDEA stems from the Supreme Court’s decision, which quashed the racist “separate but equal” doctrine and heralded the desegregation of American public schools, with Chief Justice Earl Warren segregation as a “denial of the equal protection of the laws.”

Disability advocates took notice of the decision, arguing that segregation based on disability is also inherently unequal. This led to a case called Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children (PARC) v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1972, where a federal court ruled that disabled children have a right to education. Three years later, the IDEA was passed.

Thanks to the new law, I attended public school from pre-K through 12th grade, receiving vital services that prepared me for college and a robust career. Each year, my parents and I met with teachers and other specialists to carefully negotiate services and develop an individualized education plan, or IEP, that ensured my experience at school remained equitable.

It wasn’t until high school that I realized how important these meetings really were. From accessible buses to physical therapy to participating on my high school track team, the IDEA funded services so that I could continue learning alongside my non-disabled peers. It even ensured that I received adaptive driver’s education training during my junior year. Without the support these services provided me during my formative school years, I have no doubt I’d be in a much different place today.

Alarmingly, the Trump administration is now trying to eliminate the protections and services that the IDEA guarantees. For example, racial minority students with disabilities are often when they’re young and in later years, leading them to miss out on key early interventions. This can lead to Black and brown disabled students being placed in segregated classrooms and receiving punishment at higher rates.

In 2016, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services finalized a rule requiring states to follow procedures to improve monitoring of schools that are disproportionately identifying and punishing disabled racial minority students. In August 2025, the Trump administration’s Department of Education to reverse that rule. If successful, it would likely mean a spike in educational discrimination against disabled Black and brown students who are already struggling.

The current administration is also attempting to eliminate IDEA funding by consolidating funding with other programs in a block grant and letting states decide how to spend those dollars.

Obtaining IDEA evaluations and services is already difficult, since it often requires parents to fight on behalf of their children. My parents spent countless hours pushing schools to provide the right services so that I could attend and fully participate in school and after-school activities. I was lucky enough that my parents had the resources and knowledge to fight for my rights under the IDEA.

Many don’t have the time, resources, or knowledge to successfully negotiate with schools, which leaves many disabled students to navigate their education through significant barriers.

My education led me to become the senior director at a policy think-tank in Washington, D.C. I’ve had the privilege of speaking before Congress and even a vice president to advocate for disabled people. But I fear the opportunities afforded to me may vanish for the next generation of disabled students in the U.S.Disabled people are already twice as likely to be and live in than non-disabled people. Obtaining an education is ways to help disabled people secure a stable income—and by weakening the IDEA, the Trump administration is trying to take those opportunities away. As the rates of rise, it’s more important than ever for us to protect and fund this essential civil rights law.

NEW ORLEANS — A decade of court oversight of special education services in New Orleans public schools, the result of a legal settlement, will most likely cease by the end of the year, the judge presiding over the legal settlement said Wednesday.

The decision, if it comes to pass, would come at the request of the Louisiana Department of Education and the Orleans Parish School Board, which have been subjected to intensive monitoring under a . The agreement settled a 2010 class-action lawsuit that alleged the city’s charter schools discriminated against special education students in their application processes and did not provide them appropriate educational services, as federal law requires.

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The case was brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of parents and guardians of special-needs students in New Orleans schools. Though problems with special education continue to be identified at some New Orleans charter schools, the consent decree was intended to address systemic issues — whether the state and district are catching those issues and implementing plans to correct them — not individual students’ experiences, said U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey.

For the past eight years, an independent monitor assigned by the court has found the defendants — the Department of Education and OPSB — in substantial compliance with all provisions outlined in consent decree. Citing those findings, the state and school board earlier this year an end to the agreement.

The plaintiffs , arguing that the state and NOLA Public Schools district have not created sufficient monitoring, oversight or complaint systems. Their opposition hinges on a 2024 from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor that found faults in the state’s monitoring of special education programs — most districts self-reported their compliance with federal rules dictating education plans, without on-site monitoring. (However, some of those problems resulted from the fact that much of the state’s monitoring capacity has been directed toward New Orleans schools, possibly as a result of the consent decree, .) The audit also noted that the agency reduced the number of workers dedicated to special education between 2012 and 2019.

Lauren Winkler, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said her team has asked the district to make it easier for parents to bring issues about schools forward to the central office through creating an open complaint system on their website. That was never implemented.

“[There are] really simple solutions that are not super costly,” Winkler said. “We tried to meet with them to agree to some and they just wouldn’t.”

Winkler said noncompliance still exists in the schools. More than people contacted the Southern Poverty Law Center about their negative experiences with New Orleans schools’ special education programs ahead of this week’s hearing.

“If we didn’t have any parents coming forward with issues, we’d maybe have a different position,” Winkler said. “With the breadth of issues in the amount of people that came to us, as we’ve been preparing for this, I think that’s indicative of the systemic issues that are still here.”

But in a , Zainey wrote that the court anticipates ending federal oversight by the end of the year.

“The consent judgement was a temporary measure and was never meant to be a permanent fixture of the school system,” Zainey said in court. “Things have been much improved from how they used to be in Orleans Parish.”

Zainey invited parents to share their experiences with the court and representatives from the Louisiana Department of Education and Orleans Parish School Board during informal hearings on Nov. 12 and 13. Most parents asked the court to continue the federal monitoring of New Orleans schools, but it’s unclear whether their statements will change Zainey’s plans. Zainey encouraged the state’s ombudsman, who connects families with resources and informs them of their rights in relation to special education, to connect with parents following their statements.

But most of the parents speaking at the informal hearing were those who had already tried, and were still trying, to seek recourse through communication with district or state officials.

Grace Thompson spoke in front of the judge Wednesday morning about her son’s experience at Audubon Gentilly. According to Thompson, her son was supposed to receive speech therapy and a one-on-one aide to help in class, but never received them. Thompson said she’s tried to seek help through the district’s accountability office, which, she said, has offered little guidance and has been “slow” and “inconsistent” in its communications.

“I’ve literally been calling them for the last year and a half,” Thompson told the judge. “They know who I am.”

Steve Corbett, CEO of Audubon Schools, said Audubon Gentilly has provided students with all necessary services and has been found fully compliant with federal special education law. The most recent state special education found “no unresolved areas of noncompliance” at the school.

Other parents also spoke of slow communication with the district and the schools their children attend. They said their children weren’t receiving the services outlined in their individualized education plans, that their learning has regressed, that schools were slow in performing evaluations and reevaluations, and that oversight was only afforded to children with parents that could be there to actively fight for them.

District Superintendent Fateama Fulmore and state representatives were present at the hearing. In response to hearing parent concerns, Fulmore said she appreciated the opportunity to hear from them directly and that her team will follow up.

“We have an obligation to every child in this system to get this right,” Fulmore said. “We are doing better.”

Lyric Lee, a former student at Morris Jeff Community School who had an Individualized Education Program and graduated last year, said she learned at a young age how to advocate for herself, her brother and other students who have special needs. She said the consent decree should continue.

“I’ve learned when people are not kept on a watch, they feel like they don’t have to do it, and they’ll do everything possible to make sure they don’t have to,” Lee said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

A decade of court oversight of special education services in New Orleans public schools, the result of a legal settlement, will most likely cease by the end of the year, the judge presiding over the legal settlement said Wednesday (Nov. 12).  

The decision, if it comes to pass, would come at the request of the Louisiana Department of Education and the Orleans Parish School Board, which have been subjected to intensive monitoring under a . The agreement settled a 2010 class-action lawsuit that alleged the city’s charter schools discriminated against special education students in their application processes and did not provide them appropriate educational services, as federal law requires. 

The case was brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of parents and guardians of special-needs students in New Orleans schools. Though problems with special education continue to be identified at some New Orleans charter schools, the consent decree was intended to address systemic issues — whether the state and district are catching those issues and implementing plans to correct them — not individual students’ experiences, said U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey. 

For the past eight years, an independent monitor assigned by the court has found the defendants — the Department of Education and OPSB — in substantial compliance with all provisions outlined in consent decree. Citing those findings, the state and school board earlier this year an end to the agreement. 

The plaintiffs , arguing that the state and NOLA Public Schools district have not created sufficient monitoring, oversight or complaint systems. Their opposition hinges on a 2024 from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor that found faults in the state’s monitoring of special education programs — most districts self-reported their compliance with federal rules dictating education plans, without on-site monitoring. (However, some of those problems resulted from the fact that much of the state’s monitoring capacity has been directed toward New Orleans schools, possibly as a result of the consent decree, .) The audit also noted that the agency reduced the number of workers dedicated to special education between 2012 and 2019. 

Lauren Winkler, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said her team has asked the district to make it easier for parents to bring issues about schools forward to the central office through creating an open complaint system on their website. That was never implemented. 

“[There are] really simple solutions that are not super costly,” Winkler said. “We tried to meet with them to agree to some and they just wouldn’t.”

Winkler said noncompliance still exists in the schools. More than people contacted the SPLC about their negative experiences with New Orleans schools’ special education programs ahead of this week’s hearing. 

“If we didn’t have any parents coming forward with issues, we’d maybe have a different position,” Winkler said. “With the breadth of issues in the amount of people that came to us, as we’ve been preparing for this, I think that’s indicative of the systemic issues that are still here.” 

But in a , Zainey wrote that the court anticipates ending federal oversight by the end of the year. 

“The consent judgement was a temporary measure and was never meant to be a permanent fixture of the school system,” Zainey said in court. “Things have been much improved from how they used to be in Orleans Parish.” 

Zainey invited parents to share their experiences with the court and representatives from the LDOE and Orleans Parish School Board during informal hearings on Nov. 12 and 13. Most parents asked the court to continue the federal monitoring of New Orleans schools, but it’s unclear whether their statements will change Zainey’s plans. Zainey encouraged the state’s ombudsman, who connects families with resources and informs them of their rights in relation to special education, to connect with parents following their statements. 

But most of the parents speaking at the informal hearing were those who had already tried, and were still trying, to seek recourse through communication with district or state officials. 

Grace Thompson spoke in front of the judge Wednesday morning about her son’s experience at Audubon Gentilly. According to Thompson, her son was supposed to receive speech therapy and a one-on-one aide to help in class, but never received them. Thompson said she’s tried to seek help through the district’s accountability office, which, she said, has offered little guidance and has been “slow” and “inconsistent” in its communications. 

“I’ve literally been calling them for the last year and a half,” Thompson told the judge. “They know who I am.”

Steve Corbett, CEO of Audubon Schools, said Audubon Gentilly has provided students with all necessary services and has been found fully compliant with federal special education law. The most recent state special education found “no unresolved areas of noncompliance” at the school. 

Other parents also spoke of slow communication with the district and the schools their children attend. They said their children weren’t receiving the services outlined in their individualized education plans, that their learning has regressed, that schools were slow in performing evaluations and reevaluations, and that oversight was only afforded to children with parents that could be there to actively fight for them.

District Superintendent Fateama Fulmore and state representatives were present at the hearing. In response to hearing parent concerns, Fulmore said she appreciated the opportunity to hear from them directly and that her team will follow up. 

“We have an obligation to every child in this system to get this right,” Fulmore said. “We are doing better.”

Lyric Lee, a former student at Morris Jeff Community School who had an IEP and graduated last year, said she learned at a young age how to advocate for herself, her brother and other students who have special needs. She said the consent decree should continue. 

“I’ve learned when people are not kept on a watch, they feel like they don’t have to do it, and they’ll do everything possible to make sure they don’t have to,” Lee said. 

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Death row inmate Tremane Wood’s sixth-grade English teacher was standing outside the gates of his Oklahoma prison praying for his soul — and thinking he had already been executed — when she got word that .

It was 10:01 a.m. Thursday — a minute after Wood, 46, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection — that Cindy Birdwell and other supporters in the crowd learned that Gov. Kevin Stitt had decided to accept the state Pardon and Parole Board’s recommendation and commute Wood’s sentence to life imprisonment.

There was “whooping,” tears of joy and jumping up and down, she said. Birdwell said she was humbled and grateful to have played a part in it, saying she represented educators when she spoke before the parole board last week on Wood’s behalf. She wanted the outside world to know the “little Tremane” that she knew back in Stillwater Middle School in the early 1990s, she said, and for other teachers to recognize “they have little Tremanes” in their class, too.

“Someone who is quiet sometimes, who’s ornery sometimes, who doesn’t do their work quite up to their potential, who stays back because they want more of your attention, who wants to tell you something but can’t,” she said. “We just have to slow down a little and say, ‘I see you. I hear you.’”

Stitt said he came to his 11th-hour decision not to execute Wood for his role in the 2002 robbery and murder of a young farmworker after It marked only the second time in the Republican governor’s seven-year term that he granted clemency to a death row inmate.

The from his family, religious leaders and many others were mounting as his scheduled execution drew closer. Among those closely watching were Dan Losen, an attorney and senior director at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law, who dug deep into Wood’s childhood records and interviewed his former teachers and administrators to argue that Wood was a victim of the school-to-prison pipeline.

In a 23-page report shared with The 74 and a letter sent to the parole board, Losen concluded that school officials ignored overwhelming evidence that Wood was being beaten and neglected at home and that he suffered from learning and behavioral issues, such as ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result. Instead of reporting that abuse or having Wood evaluated for special education services, as the law requires, they severely punished him. In middle school, Wood was suspended for six months — the end of sixth grade and the entire first half of seventh — for acting out and chronic absenteeism.

“I am so deeply grateful to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board for recommending clemency and to Governor Stitt for granting clemency to Tremane Wood,” Losen said. “I hope Tremane’s clemency, and the voices of similarly situated adults, will contribute to diminishing the unjust and disparate harm experienced by children due to inadequate training, supports and resources for schools. There are many schools that are doing a great deal to support traumatized youth, but far too many school districts, and far too many educators that still dismiss struggling students as ‘bad kids.’”

Working with Losen were Birdwell and Alton Carter, the former assistant to Wood’s middle school vice principal, who was directly involved in disciplining Wood. He told Losen school officials knew the boy was “traumatized, neglected and beaten” and just wanted him out of school.

Carter has since gone on to be a child advocate and now he, Losen and Wood are planning to work together to better inform educators and school districts on how to support abused students.

“Hopefully, Tremane Wood’s story has already helped raise awareness of the importance of trauma-informed responses,” Losen said.

Death row inmate Tremane Wood is set to be executed Thursday for a fatal stabbing he was . Now, in a last-ditch effort to save his life, the Oklahoma man’s sixth-grade teacher and a leading expert on student disability and the ties between school discipline and incarceration are calling on Gov. Kevin Stitt to spare him.

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommended in a 3-2 vote last week that Stitt commute Wood’s sentence to life imprisonment. The 46-year-old is in a matter of days for the murder of a young farmworker that took place during a botched 2002 robbery, one that his older brother confessed to committing and was sentenced to life in prison for. 

While Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond maintains Wood is a callous killer, who carried out the fatal stabbing and whose life as a violent gangster continues today behind bars, his former English teacher Cindy Birdwell said Wood’s case is the result of an education system that failed him. 

In her testimony, Birdwell described how Wood was the victim of severe emotional, physical and sexual abuse as a child and expressed regret that she and other teachers at Stillwater Public Schools had missed the signs. The first time Birdwell visited Wood in prison, she said, she offered an apology. 

“The first thing I said to him was, ‘I am so sorry, Tremane. I am so sorry that I didn’t see your pain and tried to get you relief from that pain,’” she said. “He just looked at me with his kind eyes, he smiled and said, “That’s all right.” He said that school had been his happy place, the place where he felt safe and happy.” 

The argument that Wood’s public school and the adults there could have changed his life trajectory is the basis for a 23-page report by Dan Losen, an attorney and senior director at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law. Losen, who sent a letter to the clemency board and shared his report with The 74, had access to Wood’s education, medical, juvenile court and state Department of Health and Human Services records, and conducted interviews with numerous educators and administrators from a pivotal time when Wood was a student at Stillwater Middle School in the early 1990s. 

Losen concludes that school officials ignored overwhelming evidence that Wood was being beaten and neglected at home and that he suffered from learning and behavioral issues, such as ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result. Instead of reporting that abuse or having Wood evaluated for special education services when the boy acted out in school or was chronically absent, they severely punished him. 

“These failures all entailed choices by adults not to evaluate, not to investigate, not to communicate, and not to intervene, despite legal requirements to do so,” Losen wrote. “These inactions by public school staff and administrators subjected Tremane to inadequate care and protection during his childhood, and had immeasurable negative consequences for his life.”

It was during this period that the school decided to suspend Wood for an extraordinary amount of time, the last several months of sixth grade and the entire first half of his seventh-grade year. Losen points out that if Wood had been evaluated and classified as a student with a disability, there would have been legal safeguards in place against excluding him from school for that long and required provisions for educating him while he was suspended, such as placement in an alternative program. 

“But when Tremane was only 12, rather than protect Tremane and find therapeutic ways to engage him in school, Stillwater school officials’ punitive response to his minor misconduct and chronic absenteeism caused Tremane to spend even more time in what school staff knew was a violent, dangerous, and neglectful home environment,” he argued. 

The reasoning for all this, Losen said, came out in what he described as “perhaps [his] most revealing interview” with Alton Carter, the assistant to the Stillwater Middle School vice principal three decades ago. “Without question [Wood] was traumatized, neglected and beaten,” Carter told Losen, and school officials “just wanted Tremane out.”

Losen pointed to academic research findings that school suspensions are . The research has led to an effort by schools across the country to like suspensions and expulsions. 

A spokesperson for Stillwater Public Schools said Wood’s case is “a deeply sad situation for everyone involved,” but that federal student privacy laws prevent the district from divulging student records. Because Wood hasn’t been a student at the district for nearly 30 years, the spokesperson said, “I could not locate any personnel who can speak to the events or circumstances of that era.” 

‘I’m not a monster’

During Wood’s clemency hearing, which hinged primarily on whether he received adequate legal defense, Birdwell was one of only two outside witnesses who spoke on his behalf. 

The former teacher said she got involved in the defense of Wood, who is Black, years ago after prosecutors portrayed him with “words like sociopath, psychopath, blah blah blah,” while an incompetent, appointed by the court failed to defend him before a nearly all-white jury. 

“I knew Tremane and I knew that he was not some soulless killer,” Birdwell said in an interview with The 74. “I’m a Christian and I believe that I felt a calling.” 

Wood was convicted of felony murder and in 2004 sentenced to death for the slaying of Ronnie Wipf, a 19-year-old migrant farmworker who was lured into a hotel room near Oklahoma City on New Year’s Eve in 2001 and robbed. While Wood acknowledges he participated in the robbery, it was his brother, Jake Wood, who fatally stabbed Wipf. Both were convicted at separate trials of killing the young man. Jake Wood died by suicide in prison in 2019.

Tremane Wood was found guilty under Oklahoma’s felony murder law, which holds someone criminally responsible for murder if they take part in a violent felony that leads to someone’s death. 

At the clemency hearing, members of the parole board appeared swayed by Wood’s lawyer, who noted that the court-appointed attorney defending him at the time had devoted just two hours to the case and, before his death, wrote an apology to Wood on the back of a business card: “It’s not your fault. It’s mine.” 

The factors that led Wood down a path of violent crime include “the institutional failures of schools and juvenile services agencies to provide a sustained, therapeutic response to Tremane’s needs as a neglected and abused child,” Amanda Bass Castro Alves, the assistant federal public defender, wrote in an email to The 74. Prosecutors surfaced his experiences as a misguided teenager to support their case for the death penalty. 

“Institutions often responded to Tremane’s acting out behaviors as a juvenile by punishing rather than helping him,” she said. “He was subjected to extended long term suspensions in middle school that left him vulnerable to the harmful influences that ultimately paved his pathway to prison.” 

After the parole board vote, Drummond, the state attorney general, reemphasized Wood’s alleged misconduct since his incarceration. 

“After this dangerous criminal took a young man’s life, he stayed fully active in the criminal world from behind bars,” Drummond said in a statement. Prosecutors presented evidence during the clemency hearing that Wood was a gang leader who allowed drugs and violence to proliferate inside the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.

“My office will continue to pursue justice for Ronnie Wipf. We intend to make our case to the governor on why clemency should not be granted and why the death sentence, as determined by a jury, should be carried out.” 

Assistant Attorney General Christina Burns testified during the hearing that Wood’s murder conviction was based on a “series of direct personal choices,” and that early warning signs from his youth showed that he could be “impulsive, aggressive, and acted out in an antisocial manner, which can ultimately lead to antisocial personality disorder as an adult.”

“Persistent adult antisocial behavior generally begins in adolescence and it can be flagged in children with symptoms that include poor anger controls, early developmental issues, early behavioral problems, manipulation of others and a failure to accept responsibility,” Burns said, pointing to evidence that incarcerated teens experience a .

“As this case and Tremane’s most current prison activities show, these concerning personality traits are unfortunately validated by his adult behavior,” she said.

Speaking from video feed via prison, Wood said he was “a man who has deep flaws,” who has made poor decisions — including behind bars. But he doesn’t deserve to die. 

“With the pressures of your life hanging in the balance, it gets tough trying to balance it all,” he said. “But I’m not a monster. I’m not a killer.” 

Stitt, a Republican, to a death row inmate only once during his seven years in office while rejecting clemency recommendations for four others. A “does not take the process lightly” and will meet with attorneys for all parties before making a decision this week.

Bright spots turn dark again

Wood’s very upbringing was rooted in violence and trauma. As a teenager, watching his father — a police officer — tie his mother to a chair, pour alcohol on her and threaten to light her on fire before beating his two sons. 

Twice during Wood’s young life he was removed from his violent home — and twice he did well, Losen documents. In 1994, Wood was placed in a therapeutic foster home in Cromwell, Oklahoma, where he attended Butner High School for his freshman year and had “nearly perfect attendance, earned all As and Bs, and was a standout cornerback” on the football team.

“His lengthy period of success provides a clear and positive picture of what Tremane might have experienced the rest of his childhood had his disabilities been identified, had support been provided, and had the pattern of abuse and neglect that he endured been ended permanently,” Losen wrote.

Later, Wood was sent to a Department of Juvenile Justice residential program in Tecumseh and received “glowing reports of his cooperative good nature.” Each time Wood was returned home from these more structured settings, Losen said, his problems resurfaced.

Losen cites documents in Wood’s record indicating that school officials suspected him of having a disability and being in need of services but they never evaluated him. Under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, any suspicion of a disability in a student should trigger a referral for evaluation. 

Oklahoma has “a long history of non-compliance with the provisions of the IDEA pertaining to [identifying students with disabilities]  as well as a history of unjust discipline,” Losen writes, citing a to the Oklahoma Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

It’s not alone. Losen refers to that notes an estimated 85% of young people housed in the juvenile justice system in 2007 had a disability, yet only 37% had been receiving any supports or services at school.

This is the population of public school kids that Wood now wants to help, Losen said. The researcher said he has already started working with the death row inmate to use his story to raise awareness among educators about the needs of traumatized children. It’s outreach that Alton Carter, the former vice principal’s assistant at Wood’s middle school, has already been doing and is now interested in teaming up with Wood as well, Losen said. 

The question now is whether Wood will still be here.

Yet these cuts are only the latest symptom of a deeper problem: The special education system is failing. Fifty years ago, the (IDEA) was a revolutionary step forward that mandated a free, appropriate public education for students with disabilities, tailored to their individual needs. It has since hardened into a compliance-driven exercise that leaves most of the students it serves without the educational support they need to succeed in school or life.

We understand these failures better than most, having watched our own children’s struggles compound due to their schools’ failures to provide the “basics,” such as a high-quality curriculum, evidence-based instruction, orderly classrooms and a little extra academic support. These are the same things millions of students without identified disabilities also need — but that neither the general nor special education system reliably delivers.

The result is a crisis that long predates the current funding fight, because special education was never designed to help students achieve grade-level expectations. It is a system that prioritizes sorting children into diagnostic categories over improving student learning. Every year, more students are labeled, more money is invested, and yet the results remain the same: Millions of children unable to read, write or calculate proficiently. The problem isn’t too little special education, it’s that special education as we know it does not work.

That’s why the Center on Reinventing Public Education has launched a new project, , that aims to generate conversation and solutions around meeting the needs of students who struggle in school — one grounded in evidence, transparency and a willingness to question the faulty assumptions that have shaped special education for a half-century.

Part of this initiative is the , the first-ever 50-state digital record of rates of students identified as needing services since 1976. The data document America’s increased reliance on special education to address learning and behavioral differences that are more common than those that originally inspired Congress to pass IDEA. But giving more students access hasn’t solved the core problem: Eligibility is based on subjective determinations of disability (something that can’t be measured) rather than demonstration of student need (something that can). As a result, students’ access to special education depends on the local policies and practices used in their schools, creating a huge disparity in services depending on where they happen to live.

While these findings illuminate longstanding inequities, they also open up new opportunities to act. To encourage deeper exploration, CRPE is inviting educators, researchers and advocates to , uncover new patterns and propose ideas for a better system. Selected participants will receive financial support to develop deeper analyses that can help policymakers and practitioners design a new generation of interventions.

Those new insights and fresh approaches could help reimagine the current system from the ground up. Instead of sorting students into rigid categories, schools could respond flexibly to their needs. Instead of disconnected experiences across general and special education, there could be a continuum of evidence-based supports. Instead of investing in gatekeeping, legislators could use analyses of this new dataset to justify allocating resources directly to the instruction and tools students need to succeed.

None of this can happen so long as advocates hunker down in defense of a program that is failing the students it was designed to serve. Instead, is an attempt to give advocates, families and educators the tools to see the system as it truly is and imagine what it could become. Invention can offer hope in the face of despair, abundance in place of scarcity and power to the powerless. Those are the resources disability advocates brought to Congress 50 years ago. They can be tapped again to advance the interests of children with disabilities in today’s challenging political climate.

Judge Susan Illston from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said she believes the who sued will be able to prove the government’s actions are unlawful “as shown by the haphazard way in which the [reductions in force] have rolled out” and that they “are intended for the purpose of political retribution.” 

Illston, who temporarily blocked the layoffs on Oct. 15, said she was moved by some of the written statements from laid-off employees. 

“Although we are here talking about statutes and administrative procedure,” she said, “we are also talking about human lives, and these human lives are being dramatically affected by the activities that we’re discussing.”

Her injunction means the staff must return to work once the government shutdown ends. 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon cut 465 positions, including 132 in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, 137 in the Office for Civil Rights and 121 in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, had no comment on the judge’s ruling and referred The 74 to McMahon’s earlier calling the department “unnecessary.” 

At Tuesday’s hearing, Michael Velchik, a Department of Justice attorney, argued that the government had the right to lay off employees because Congress hasn’t approved a budget for the current fiscal year.

​​”If you don’t have money coming in, you should be looking for ways to cut costs,” he said.  

But attorney Danielle Leonard, representing the employee unions, disagreed.

“What counsel is arguing is that if Congress lets government funding lapse for one day, the president can fire the entire federal government,” she said. “That is absurd.”

The cuts were the Trump administration’s latest move toward eliminating an agency that it argues should never have existed in the first place. McMahon acknowledges that Congress has the final word on whether the department shuts down, but so far, members have taken no action on a proposal that is likely to fail in the Senate. Two weeks into the government shutdown, the cuts, saying that money was still flowing to the states, and some conservatives argue advocates have overreacted to the layoffs. In a commentary, the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess said the department for a smooth launch of this year’s financial aid form. But even he questioned the latest cuts, calling them “opaque, severe and lacking in any kind of clear justification.” 

In their complaint, the unions said staff faced “political discrimination,” and even President Donald Trump has called the layoffs an effort to eliminate “Democrat programs.” 

But in filed Friday, Jacqueline Clay, chief human capital officer at the department, said officials didn’t “target employees based on their political viewpoints,” but considered other factors including a shortage of funds.

‘Risks of harm’

Last week, over 60 organizations asked the Senate education committee to hold an oversight hearing into the administration’s actions, which they said have caused “unnecessary chaos” and “create immediate risks of harm to every qualifying individual with a disability and their family.” 

On Monday, also called on Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, to reverse the layoffs.

Some worry that gutting the elementary and secondary office could mean a lack of sufficient oversight of Title I, the largest federal education program. The $18 billion fund is intended to support schools serving low-income students, with the level of funding schools receive based on a set of complicated formulas. 

Without federal staff, there’s a greater risk that states might distribute the funds incorrectly, said Victoria Rosenboom, one of the four staff members who handles those Title I calculations each year. McMahon placed all four on administrative leave. 

“Without us to monitor, the states might monitor less themselves,” Rosenboom said. Her team also gathers data from the Census Bureau every year to determine poverty levels. While there’s still someone in the budget office who can allocate the funds, she said, “they don’t do any of the data collection work. The data quality is all done by us.” 

Others warn of a return to the days when states improperly used Title I funds for construction projects or replaced state dollars with federal funds. 

“There were no limits on the imagination of schools in terms of how they would spend their money, and there were some pretty egregious expenditures,” said Dianne Piche, a former civil rights attorney at the department who is now retired.  

In the early days after the law passed, a from advocates pointed to districts “wasting millions of dollars” on purchases such as a Baptist church building in Detroit, 18 portable swimming pools in Memphis and equipment, including a deep fryer, adding machines and a piano, in one Mississippi county. 

Vought wrote the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a vision for the Trump administration that argued for turning Title I into a block grant. While McMahon’s budget proposal didn’t go that far, she’s currently considering a waiver request from Iowa to roll Title I and other federal funds into a block grant. Indiana submitted a similar proposal, but it excludes Title I. 

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed during the first Trump administration, but the plan then was to “keep the department functioning,” said Rosenboom, who joined the department in 2019. “At that time, there was still some unease about our future, but definitely not to the same degree as with this administration.”

CHINA, Maine – When Saige Bird moved to Maine, her first order of business was to get support for her then 3-year-old son, who is autistic and has a speech impediment that renders him unintelligible to most people.

Over the past year and a half, she has struggled to get him the speech or other support he needs and is legally entitled to.

While Child Development Services — a quasi-state agency responsible for providing disability services to Maine children under the age of 5 — to a new model for serving 3- and 4-year-olds, a significant number of preschoolers who remain in the existing system are being left behind.

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Over the 2024-2025 fiscal year, 875 3- and 4-year-olds, or 15% of preschool-aged children served by Child Development Services, were on waitlists for 1,690 services including speech, occupational and physical therapy, according to data provided by the Maine Department of Education. Historically, Child Development Services has not kept track of waitlist data, but this is an increase from 2019, when a report requested by the Maine Legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee found that 10% of children requiring services were on waitlists.

When Bird’s son, whose name she asked be omitted for privacy reasons, was first referred to Child Development Services for evaluation, Bird was thrilled.

“I thought I was gonna get the help I need for my son,” she said.

But that excitement soon turned to disappointment.

Four months after her initial appointment, she received an email from a speech therapist, only to discover she was based in Texas and the sessions would be remote, which she didn’t think was a good fit for her son, then 4 years old, who is hyperactive and has a low attention span.

Another four months later, Child Development Services offered a preschool placement for her son at Augusta Children’s Center. She ultimately declined it due to, among other reasons, trouble scheduling around her son’s outside occupational and speech therapy.

“I know some people love the Children’s Center,” she said. “But it wasn’t right for my son and our family.”

Under federal law, children are supposed to receive all services they’re found eligible for within 30 days of being evaluated.

But that deadline is not always met.

“We are frequently hearing about waitlists and hearing that these waitlists are persisting,” said Jeanette Plourde, an attorney for Disability Rights Maine. “We continue to see parents being told in (Individualized Education Plan, known as IEP) meetings that (Child Development Services) doesn’t have the staffing, that there are no placements, that it’s just not possible to fulfill their child’s IEP.”

This, says Plourde, is simply not okay.

“Our state has an obligation to provide these services under federal and state law,” she said. “Full stop.”

Bird is one of many parents who gave up completely and opted to find her child the services he needs in a different way. Three to five days a week, Bird drives an hour and a half round-trip to and from Belfast for in-person speech, which Child Development Services determined her son needed, and occupational therapy, which she sought separately. Since January, she has spent at least $550 on co-payments for both services.

The Maine Department of Education, which oversees Child Development Services, is well aware of the agency’s challenges, , and is working to turn the tide by of providing preschool special education from Child Development Services to the state’s public schools, a mammoth task it says will better serve preschoolers by utilizing the state’s resources more efficiently.

But while Child Development Services works to implement this systemic change, there’s not much that can be done for the children who aren’t getting their needs met, said Child Development Services State Director Dan Hemdal.

“It’s an unfortunate reality of early childhood special education in the state,” said Hemdal of children ending up on waitlists.

Hemdal and others say that a lack of preschool placements and providers — including speech, occupational and physical therapists — can make it difficult, if not impossible, to match preschoolers with the resources they need.

But while the state works to create a system that better serves preschoolers with disabilities, children across the state lose valuable time.

The first five years of life are crucial for development and can shape the trajectory of a child’s life.

“You only have a certain amount of time while the brain is this plastic,” said Nancy Cronin, the executive director of the Maine Developmental Disabilities Council. “This is a magic time for development that no child can afford to lose.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Education Department is looking to move the $15 billion Individuals with Disabilities Education Act program outside of the agency, the Washington Post ���ճܱ���岹��.

In a statement to States Newsroom, department spokesperson Madi Biedermann did not explicitly confirm the report, but said the department is generally looking for ways to move its operations to other agencies. President Donald Trump has pledged to eliminate the Education Department.

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The agency “is exploring additional partnerships with federal agencies to support special education programs without any interruption or impact on students with disabilities, but no agreement has been signed,” Biedermann wrote.

Biedermann said Education Secretary Linda McMahon “has been very clear that her goal is to put herself out of a job by shutting down the Department of Education and returning education to the states” and that McMahon is “fully committed to protecting the federal funding streams that support our nation’s students with disabilities.”

Trump’s administration moved to lay off 465 department employees, including 121 at the , earlier this month amid the ongoing government shutdown.

A federal judge has  from carrying out the layoffs, but the ruling provides only short-term relief as legal proceedings unfold.

The department’s many responsibilities include guaranteeing a free public education for students with disabilities through IDEA.

Trump has already suggested rehousing special education services under the Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  in March that the agency is “fully prepared” to take on that responsibility.

Fully transferring responsibility for IDEA would require an act of Congress — a significant undertaking given that at least 60 votes are needed to break a Senate filibuster and Republicans hold just 53 seats.

An estimated 15% of Americans live with a disability. Yet fewer than 10% of such students pursue careers in STEM, even though their interest in science, technology, engineering and math matches that of their peers. That’s a missed opportunity — not just for them, but for American businesses facing a growing talent shortage.

People with disabilities often bring unique skills to STEM, such as advanced digital literacy gained by using assistive technologies and innovative problem-solving abilities resulting from neurodiversity. Virgin founder Richard Branson, for example, credits dyslexia for influencing his out-of-the-box thinking on business issues. The founders of many successful American companies, such as Elon Musk and Charles Schwab, are neurodiverse. LinkedIn now includes “” as a professional competency, recognizing that workers who approach information in a unique way often create innovative solutions.

The question isn’t whether neurodivergent perspectives and disability can drive innovation — they do. The real question is whether America is investing enough to unlock that potential. Currently, disability innovations remain chronically underfunded. Unlike Big Tech, which draws billions of dollars in investment, accessibility and assistive technology rarely receive the funding they need to grow. Without that support, promising tools stall in research labs or small pilot programs, never reaching the students who need them most.

This funding gap creates a vicious cycle. Without adequate investment, assistive technologies can’t achieve the scale needed to drive down costs or demonstrate market viability. Private investors remain on the sidelines. Meanwhile, the disability community continues to face barriers that innovative solutions could remove.

Strategic investment by the federal government has played a significant role in providing seed money for disability innovations. , a teletherapy company that received seed funding from the Institute of Education Sciences’ Small Business Innovation Research program, embodies this potential — growing to a team of more than 2,000 clinicians delivering more than 5 million sessions of therapy across 7,700 schools in 45 states.

For too many children, months-long waits for speech-language therapy can delay critical progress at a pivotal stage of learning. , a national initiative led by the University at Buffalo with support from the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences, is developing AI-powered tools that deliver near-real-time, interactive and personalized support. The project aims to help schools reach more students sooner, easing the strain of therapist shortages and long wait times.

uses federal funding from the Department of Education’s to innovate and expand educational access for students with disabilities. Through — the world’s most extensive digital library for people with dyslexia, low vision or blindness — readers can access more than a million titles in audio, large print and Braille. Today, Benetech is using artificial intelligence to make STEM and teacher-created materials more accessible, transforming complex content, including math equations, chemistry formulas and structural diagrams, into formats that can be read aloud.

From the to the department’s ed tech and innovation grants and various other initiatives, has sparked innovation in the disability sector, which struggles to secure sufficient financial investment. Many of these programs also fund research and pilot projects that explore how AI can improve educational outcomes — a key administration priority.

The president’s proposed budget presents a mixed picture: While it preserves the SBIR program, it redirects funding from the Office of Special Education Programs to states, reduces the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research’s budget and slashes the Institute of Education Sciences to roughly one-third of its prior funding level.

In addition, on Oct. 10, during the federal government shutdown, the administration laid off nearly the entire staff of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, including the Office of Special Education Programs that administers some of these grants. Many of these cuts appear inconsistent with the stated goal of leveraging AI for educational innovation, given that much early-stage research and development depends on these funds.

Federal programs help identify key challenges in special education and have encouraged innovators to focus on them, connecting them with researchers and providing opportunities to build and test product concepts that are effective. However, federal funding alone cannot do this; private and philanthropic capital are also needed to diversify and broaden the pipeline. 

There are some nascent signs of progress here. Organizations such as are directing funds toward specific challenges — for example, its initiative, which supports projects using artificial intelligence to advance mathematical discovery. Some corporations and venture capitalists are investing in early-stage disability innovation funds, like , which aim to unlock the economic potential of individuals with disabilities. In the process, they also support innovations that have broader applications. By validating promising solutions and reducing investment risk, these early funders create pathways for later-stage investment, which in turn enables organizations to scale their work, reach a broader audience and achieve greater impact.

The payoff is clear: Millions of students with disabilities gain access to tools that unlock their learning potential, while the nation builds a stronger pipeline of STEM talent critical to economic growth and competitiveness.

These are among key findings of a new into ways to address the continuing turnover and shortage of special education and ESL teachers that has existed for more than three decades. 

The analysis showed that mentorship, teacher and principal preparation standards, tests of reading instruction knowledge, pay and professional development are key to retaining and recruiting these educators.

Students with disabilities and English learners face some of the most persistent academic challenges, partly because of a lack of access to high-quality teachers, said NCTQ President Heather Peske.

“Despite their potential, many of these students are not meeting even really basic thresholds in reading and math, and this is not for any fault of the students themselves,” she said. “It’s really because they don’t have access to the kinds of qualified and effective teachers that they need.”

The report recommends improved state policies to address attrition in these areas:

Teacher mentorship

The analysis found that half of states don’t require prospective educators to complete their student teaching under the supervision of an educator who is certified in the same subject area they are training to work in. Most are in the western United States, including states like Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Idaho and Nevada. 

Having a mentor certified in the same field allows the college students to see what teaching special ed will actually be like and increases their chances of staying in the subject area once they finish their degree, according to the report. The analysis highlighted a study of more than 250 people who completed special education teacher preparation in Massachusetts, which found that those with a supervisor licensed in special education were 12% less likely to leave the workforce.

Teacher preparation standards

Clear state standards for teacher preparation programs ensure that aspiring educators get the skills needed to serve students with disabilities, the report said. Ten states don’t have explicit special education standards for teacher colleges, while 16 lack defined English learner standards.

The analysis highlights Texas, which created for ESL and bilingual education in 2019. These include understanding the foundations of language acquisition and adapting instruction to meet student needs.

Principal preparation standards

Less than half of states require principal preparation programs to address special education in coursework, while only 13 do the same for English learners. Without an understanding of effective ways to serve students with disabilities or English learners, principals are less prepared to improve outcomes for them and retain the teachers who serve them, the report said. 

Research has that principals are a key factor in creating an inclusive environment for special education students. One said that many new school administrators “find themselves suddenly thrust into situations in which they must be the final arbiter on matters related to strange-sounding issues such as IEPs [individual education programs], 504 [disability discrimination] decisions, due-process hearings and IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] compliance.”

In Iowa, teacher colleges are to provide evidence that candidates are equipped to address the needs of English learners or students with disabilities, the report said. 

Reading instruction

The analysis found that 17 states require special education teacher candidates to demonstrate their knowledge of literacy instruction using a test the NCTQ deems effective. In 2023, the nonprofit reported that 29 states and the District of Columbia use weak reading instruction tests that aspiring elementary educators must pass to obtain a license. NCTQ studied 25 tests that states use and identified 15 as weak — with only four considered acceptable and six considered strong.

Just five states — California, Idaho, New Mexico, Louisiana and Maryland — require English learner teacher candidates to pass acceptable tests, the report said.

“Wisconsin, for example, uses a strong or acceptable reading licensure test, but they don’t presently require special education teachers to take that test and pass it,” Peske said. “We would say that this is an example of low-hanging fruit when it comes to policymaking.”

The NCTQ reported that 70% of fourth graders with disabilities and 67% who are English learners scored below the basic level in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

English learners are also at an increased risk of being identified for special education because of literacy-related struggles, the report said.

“With so many states right now focused on reading and implementing relatively new reading laws, it was surprising to us to find that states are also not requiring their teachers, especially of students with disabilities, and their English learner teachers to take and pass an acceptable reading licensure test,” Peske said.

Teacher pay

The report said that paying teachers in critical shortage areas more than those in general education can improve retention and recruitment in hard-to-staff areas. But has found that the additional compensation must be at least 7.5% of a teacher’s base salary — about $5,000 — to make a difference.

Only 18 states offer higher salaries or bonuses for special education educators, while eight states do so for English learner teachers.

An annual state-funded $10,000 incentive in Hawaii improved special education teacher shortages. The bonuses, which , reduced by 35% the number of teaching positions that were vacant or filled by an unlicensed teacher.

“Interestingly, it did little to improve retention among current special educators,” the report said. “Instead, the reduction in vacancies was driven almost entirely by general-education teachers — who were presumably dual-certified — transitioning into special education roles.”

The nonprofit said the policy was also successful because of its simplicity. All Hawaii special education teachers were automatically eligible, and there was no application process. 

Professional development

High-quality professional learning can improve retention for special education and English learner teachers, the report said. Currently, 40 states provide professional development for both fields. Oregon, Hawaii, Iowa, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia are the only states that don’t offer professional learning for either position.

The report highlights Rhode Island, which recently adopted guidelines that require professional learning specifically for teachers of multilingual learners.

Peske said each of the above policy areas is equally important for lawmakers to consider. “If a state really wants to build a strong teacher workforce for students with disabilities and English learners, we would advise them to use these fixed [policy] levers together,” she said.