Month: October 2025

Efforts to Dismantle the U.S. Department of Education Threaten Students with Disabilities

For Immediate Release: October 15, 2025
For More Information: Lindsay Wagner, (215) 701-4264, [email protected]

Widespread layoffs in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) have effectively eviscerated federal enforcement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires that the U.S. Department of Education bear the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that local school districts and charter schools comply with special education laws.

OSERS, which includes the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), provides essential guidance, reviews and monitors state compliance with federal special education laws, and issues corrective action to states. The impact of its dismantling cannot be overstated: without staff to oversee legal compliance and equitably distribute federal funds, children with disabilities will lack critical federal protections, and become more likely to be excluded and left behind. The Department currently administers more than $15 billion in IDEA funds for special education programs nationwide; OSERS provided essential guidance to ensure effective and equitable use of those funds.

The deep slashing of OSERS’ staff is part of a broad effort by this administration to dismantle the Department of Education (“ED”) and unlawfully flout Congress’ authority; in this case, by abandoning enforcement required under IDEA, a law enacted 50 years ago next month. The IDEA guarantees all children with disabilities access to a free and appropriate education and importantly, this landmark legislation remains the law of the land, requiring continued compliance by states, school districts, and charter schools.

Schools remain legally mandated to follow both federal and state special education laws.  This includes identifying and serving children with disabilities, protecting them from discrimination, and ensuring that they are educated in the least restrictive environment alongside their non-disabled peers. Importantly, Pennsylvania’s Department of Education must continue to ensure schools’ compliance with federal and state special education laws, which may now require increased oversight.  

ELC-PA urges federal legislators to push back against this unlawful dismantling of OSERS and ED. Federal enforcement and oversight is needed to sustain key civil rights protections for children with disabilities. Under our Constitution, only Congress has the authority to create or eliminate federal agencies. These unlawful mass layoffs and dismantling of the Department undertaken by the executive branch will substantially diminish federal enforcement of disability laws and is a devasting setback for students with disabilities who thrive in supportive, inclusive classrooms. Without ED’s enforcement authority, state agencies that fail to meet their legal obligations could face fewer consequences and be less likely to undertake systemic reforms. However, parents will continue to bring administrative complaints and federal court actions against schools and the state to uphold the rights of their children.

We look to Congress and the courts to reject the administration’s efforts to undermine the rights of students with disabilities, restore robust federal oversight, and reaffirm the nation’s commitment to educational equity and to all students with disabilities. The time to push back is now. 

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The Education Law Center-PA (ELC-PA) is a nonprofit, legal advocacy organization with offices in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, dedicated to ensuring that all children in Pennsylvania have access to a quality public education. Through legal representation, impact litigation, community engagement, and policy advocacy, ELC advances the rights of underserved children, including children living in poverty, children of color, children in the foster care and juvenile justice systems, children with disabilities, English learners, LGBTQ+ students, and children experiencing homelessness. For more information, visit elc-pa.org.

Hendricks v. Gilhool: A 1989 Victory for Equal Education

Inaccessible and inferior classrooms. Arduous, lengthy bus rides. Children forced into separate, restrictive schools.  

Frustrated parents complained, and the Education Law Center-PA took up their cause in Hendricks v. Gilhool, a 1989 federal class-action lawsuit that convincingly demonstrated a pattern of discrimination against students with disabilities in multiple school districts.  

Parents, including Cheryl Hendricks, mother of Nicholas, then 11, said their students were being treated unfairly and denied equal access to education guaranteed by federal laws.

Hendricks noted that her son, who was on the autism spectrum, had to change schools “almost every year” and that classrooms were “just not comparable” to regular-education classrooms. “We are not asking for any more for our children. All we ask is that our children be treated equally,” Hendricks said at the time.

Evidence showed that school districts in Pennsylvania refused to open their classrooms to students with disabilities. As a result, students were assigned to inferior mobile classrooms, storage rooms with exposed pipes, or excessively crowded spaces. Some of their classes were located in classrooms not comparable to those serving the larger student population in terms of size, sanitation, noise levels, lighting, and ventilation. And some children were transported to schools that were as much as 1¾ hours from their homes or were moved to new school districts, making it challenging for their families to settle into the school community.  

In March 1989, U.S. District Court Judge Daniel H. Huyett III issued summary judgment for the plaintiffs and ordered the state to prepare a remedial plan to ensure equal access to education in comparable classrooms for students with disabilities.

Former Executive Director Leonard Rieser, ELC-PA’s lead counsel in the lawsuit, described the issue at the time as “a systemic problem, one that only the districts collectively can solve, and the districts have not worked out a system for solving it.” The state Department of Education, he told the Allentown Morning Call, had “the legal duty to go to the districts, to pull them together, or push them together, to get something worked out.”

Recalling the case recently, Rieser noted that the problem “was most severe, at least as I recall, for kids with more complex, ‘low-incidence’ disabilities. It felt, at least to me, like [their placement] reflected an assumption that the quality of their space was less important than that made available to other students.”

In a matter of months, in January of 1990, the state Board of Education unanimously adopted new special-education regulations, including “the Fair Share Plan,” which required districts and Intermediate Units statewide to “provide for sufficient appropriate classroom space for all exceptional students educated within the … Intermediate Unit/school district.”

The Fair Share criteria mandated that space for special education students “be comparable in quality to that provided to non-handicapped students” in location, instructional appropriateness, accessibility, size, lighting, and ventilation. The plan also laid out standards related to relocating classes for students.

Said Rieser: “This situation really reflected a governance problem, in that Intermediate Units didn’t have the power to compel any district to provide any particular amount or quality of space, even when the IUs were serving kids from that district, among others.”

“That’s why we needed PDE — a higher authority — to be involved, which was itself a change, because PDE was not in the habit of seeing itself that way, in my opinion.”

While much progress has been made as a result of this case and others that ELC-PA and our partners have brought over the years, we continue to advocate today on behalf of students with disabilities to ensure their inclusion in appropriate classrooms.