The mass dismissals initiated this week in the US Department of Education. Uu. They could the hamstrings of the federal government efforts to help students with disabilities, said former officials and experts in education, citing blows to the divisions of rights and investigation of civil rights of the agency.
On Tuesday, the department began to design around 1,300 employees, reducing almost half of the personnel within their civil rights office and more than 100 of The Institute of Education Sciences, according to the information published by the American Federation of Government Employees, Local 252, the Union for Department personnel.
The cuts in these two divisions mean that there will be much less personnel to finish the 12,000 federal investigations pending on accusations of civil rights violations in schools, approximately half of which involve disability problems, and less employees to review and distribute investigations financed by the Government in effective ways of educating children with autism or severe intellectual disabilities.
The layoffs are the first step to dismantle the department, an objective proposed by President Donald Trump and his Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon. But experts say they raise concerns about how the future will be seen for the application of civil rights as the Trump administration continues to attack federal supervision.
“Those are hundreds of researchers who no longer work for OCR, and whose experience that OCR has benefited during all these years that the nation is now losing,” said Catherine Lhamon, who directed the Office of Civil Rights during the Obama and Biden administrations.
Brittany Coleman, a civil rights office lawyer who was based in Dallas and farewell this week, said that with less personnel, students with disabilities who fight for accommodations for taking exams, for example, now they will have to wait longer in search of help from the department, and could be too late.
“What kind of damage does that mean for your qualifications, for your mental well -being, and how your educational results will affect, which are now not being tracked,” said Coleman, who also served as a store administrator, referring to dismissals at the Institute of Education Sciences of the Department. “What will this mean in general for our students who have disabilities, in regard to grow and achieve the same educational objectives and dreams that we all have?”
Neither the department nor the White House have responded to the requests for comments. In an interview on Tuesday in Fox News, McMahon said the department will still do what the law will require and that financing to schools to support students with special needs will still be provided. Trump defended the dismissals on Wednesday, insisting, without evidence, the journalists that many of the finished staff were not working or doing poor job.
“We are keeping the best people,” Trump said.
The civil rights office lost at least 243 eligible employees of the Union, according to the American Federation of Government employees, and an unknown number of supervisors. Historically, the office had around 600 lawyers who handled complaints that alleged discrimination based on race, gender, disability and sexual orientation, and most already had a 50 or more load. Schools can also call the Office of Civil Rights of Technical Assistance to avoid violating the rights of a student, but that help could also be less easily available.
“The provision of education for students with disabilities is complex,” said Denise Marshall, CEO of the Mothers and Advocates Law Council, Inc., which represents families of children with special needs in schools. “They must have an education with specialized services related to the instruction, all the support they need to learn and grow, and there must be expert personnel to interpret and carry out the requirements of the statute.”
According to the union, more than 300 employees in the Federal Office of Student Aid, according to the union, cut more than a quarter of the division in charge of student loans and subsidies of university enrollment.
“I think it will be a horrible impact for students trying to obtain information about the opportunities to go to the University, to the School of Commerce or simply take classes, and discover that Pell Grant money is for those who are eligible,” said a current employee of the department, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid reprisals.
The conservatives have encouraged the movements of the Trump administration towards the dissolution of the Department of Education, often using the refrain that it is time to send education “back to the United States”, which are already in charge of the curricula of their schools.
“There are another 50 education departments in the United States of America,” said Tiffany Justice, co -founder of Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group in an interview last week. “Each state has an education department. There is absolutely no reason why we need bureaucracy, bureaucracy, cost. ”
But the Democratic governors promised on Wednesday to fight the dismissals, and the broadest plans to close the entire agency, while pointing out that they are struggling to find ways to address the financing and supervision deficits that could result from the cuts.
“States cannot completely fill everything, certainly in education,” said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Democrat, in a phone call with journalists. He later added that the need to accommodate children with disabilities and that they are expected to be more affected by a remodeled agency, eventually cause tax increases.
The governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, a Democrat, said on the same call that his office was already working with the State Attorney General to fight the dismissals with a lawsuit, and that “at some point, we will return to court again.”
As part of the layoffs announced on Tuesday, all employees working in the regional offices of the department in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas and Cleveland will be fired. That was news for senior officials in the offices of governors and education agencies in many of those states.
Until Wednesday afternoon, the Illinois State Education Board had not yet received “formal communication” or leadership orientation in the Department of Education regarding layoffs, said a spokesman. Nor Kentucky’s Education Commissioner.
However, in Montana, Susie Hedalen, a Superintendent of Republican Public Instruction and Montana, said that his office had been receiving offices about the layoffs of the department officials during the whole Tuesday and Wednesday.
The updates, said Hedalen, have helped their department’s goal to “prepare to assume a stronger role” in the execution of some of the programs that McMahon and Trump have said they want to move to the United States.
