As the U.S. Department of Education continues to transfer responsibilities to other agencies, disability advocates are concerned that special education could be up next.
The Education Department said last week that it reached an agreement with the Department of Treasury to take on management of student loans. The so-called interagency agreement, or IAA, is the 10th that the Education Department has struck in the last year to send programs to other agencies.
Now, rumors are swirling in the nation’s capital about the future of the Education Department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.
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“Additional IAAs are expected very soon and may include transferring the programs of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), which includes the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and the Rehabilitative Services Administration (RSA) that oversees vocational rehabilitation, out of the Department of Education to another federal agency,” reads a recent action alert from the National Down Syndrome Congress urging people to contact members of Congress.
The Down syndrome group cited “urgent information” suggesting that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke with Education Secretary Linda McMahon about moving OSERS to his department, reportedly based on the idea that special education is “medical.”
President Donald Trump said last year that he planned to move oversight of “special needs” programs to HHS. But, McMahon has indicated that OSERS could move to HHS or the Department of Labor, the National Down Syndrome Congress said. The group noted that “reliable sources” indicate the White House Office of Management and Budget will soon decide which agency to route the programs to.
“While these reports have not been officially confirmed, this is a critical moment for advocacy,” the Down syndrome group said in the email. “These programs should not be moved anywhere. These actions bypass Congress and violate clear congressional intent and conflict with federal law.”
Stephanie Smith Lee, co-director of policy and advocacy at the National Down Syndrome Congress, declined to comment, but in a letter to the White House budget office, she and her colleague, Heather Sachs, indicated that moving special education programs to HHS would be especially troubling.
“Moving IDEA oversight from an education agency to a health agency risks reviving an outdated medical model of disability, which treats students as patients needing to be ‘cured,’” they wrote. In addition, they warned that such a move would weaken coordination between special education and general education, fracture the connection between education and workforce preparation and place special education within a broad health bureaucracy.
Chad Rummel, executive director of the Council for Exceptional Children, said families should be wary.
“The administration should be focusing on how to improve the lives of kids with disabilities, and any changes needed to do that would be welcomed. However, no one can show us how the time, energy and resources needed to move OSERS will benefit kids, so we must continue to be guarded,” Rummel said. “Bringing down a system built over 50 years is not going to be easy to fix; parents and educators should be concerned about where we are headed and what education experts are leading and supporting this change.”
Savannah Newhouse, a spokesperson for the Education Department, said the agency is still considering its options.
“We are continuing to evaluate potential partnerships for special education programs,” she said. “As we have said again and again: statutorily-mandated federal functions — such as civil rights enforcement and special education services — will continue.”
