On Friday most employees of the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and the Rehabilitative Services Administration (RSA) within the Department of Education were laid off, in an apparent effort to pour salt in the wounds of families already worried about the impact of Medicaid funding cuts on the heath care of their disabled or special needs children. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) experienced “massive layoffs” according to ABC News. At least 466 employees in the Department of Education have been fired during the shutdown, including nearly all of the OSERS staff.
The agency enforces the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the law creating a free and appropriate education for children with disabilities, and funds special education services to the tune of around $15 billion.
The IDEA Act serves children with autism, learning disabilities, ADHD, cognitive impairments, physical or motor disabilities, speech and hearing disabilities, visual disabilities, and other disabilities. It guarantees that children with disabilities receive a free and appropriate education with an Individual Education Plan (IEP) in the “least restrictive environment”, meaning usually that efforts will be made to keep kids integrated with their peers instead of hidden away in some back closet. Since disabilities are equal opportunity and affect families of all political persuasions, the IDEA Act has had bipartisan support, at least up to the present. The Rehabilitative Services Administration has vocational programs and services for older blind individuals, trains interpreters for deaf people, and has information and training for parents.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon, whose mission is to return education power and responsibilities to the state and local level, has attempted to assuage concerns by stating that the department would continue to fully fund and carry out all of Congress' statutorily required programs.
Yet it is unclear how that can happen if there are no staff to administer the programs. According to the website K-12 DIVE:
The National Association of State Directors of Special Education, in a statement on Sunday, said informal reports that NASDSE believes to be true indicate that only the two most senior staff remain in OSEP and just one staff member remains in the Rehabilitation Services Administration. Both offices are part of the Education Department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.
The webpages of OSERS currently have the disclaimer:
Due to a lapse of appropriations, information on this website may not be monitored or maintained. Inquiries may not receive a response until appropriations are enacted.
The IDEA Act was originally passed in 1975 as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA). The name was changed when it was re-authorized in 1990 and it was again reauthorized in 2004 with periodic revision of the regulations to address implementation and interpretation of the law. According to the Department of Education:
Before EHA, many children were denied access to education and opportunities to learn. In 1970, U.S. schools educated only one in five children with disabilities, and many states had laws excluding certain students, including children who were deaf, blind, emotionally disturbed, or had an intellectual disability.
Since the passage of EHA in 1975, significant progress has been made toward meeting major national goals for developing and implementing effective programs and services for early intervention, special education, and related services. The U.S. has progressed from excluding nearly 1.8 million children with disabilities from public schools prior to EHA implementation to providing more than 8 million children with disabilities with special education and related services designed to meet their individual needs in the 2022-23 school year.
One of those individuals sometimes denied access to education prior to 1975 was my sister Karen. Some readers may recall from a previous diary about her that my sister Karen lived with Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome her entire 61 years, a syndrome with a variety of mostly genetic causes characterized by childhood onset of multiple types of intractable seizures, almost always with cognitive impairment, and with a characteristic slow spike-and-wave EEG pattern. Depending on where we lived while growing up, there might have been a special ed class for her or my parents might have had to hire a private tutor for her prior to 1975. She was already 16 when EHA was enacted, but it gave her 5 years of guaranteed schooling before she aged out and became a legal adult at 21. I assume that some of the state and federal services she received as a disabled adult also were administered through OSERS, and she was also a Medicaid recipient. I am glad that I do not have to find out how her care would be affected if she were still alive today.
My daughter is a special ed teacher. She is currently on a workman’s compensation leave of absence after being attacked by one of her students, but I wonder how the OSERS layoffs will affect state funding to hire special ed teachers when she returns to work.
The LGS community is as politically divided as the rest of the country. When I checked the LGS Caregiver Support Facebook Group, I found a fairly neutral, factual statement about the Special Education layoffs, describing them as being “sad”. The group frowns on political postings because of their divisiveness, but denial of the layoffs as “fake news” surfaced within a day, and I was not unprovocative myself by mentioning that these came courtesy of “the guy who mocks the disabled”. One poster said that in addition to her child, some of her speech therapy clients would likely be affected. The thread, which disappeared last night, is back up but doesn’t have a lot of comments yet, which is unfortunate since the information is important to the LGS community.
Support for the disabled was not always a partisan issue, and I am saddened that it has come to this. When EHA was enacted, we lived in conservative Utah, and local members of what was then the Association of Retarded Citizens (now The Arc) worked together on behalf of our disabled loved ones despite most of the Utah members being very conservative. Right-wing Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, about whom I have nothing else good to say, was a champion of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). The ADA was signed by Bush I and the amended version by Bush II with bipartisan support. Support for the disabled was not universal pre-MAGA, but very broad and non-partisan.
With the military assault on our cities, negotiations for peace in the Middle East, assassinations, bombing of boats, ICE kidnappings, political prosecutions, government shutdowns, Epstein files, and a host of other catastrophes, most Americans will likely not notice this undermining of our vulnerable disabled communities. If you can, please take a moment to reach out to the disabled people you know and their caregivers, and check how they are doing over the coming months. It makes a difference to know you that are not forgotten. And contact your Congress reps to add special education to the list of disasters they should be addressing. Thanks.
