The recent layoffs within the Department of Education target children and students with special needs, threatening their access to programs and services they need in order to have equal educational opportunities.
More than 460 employees have been laid off since Oct. 10, which is a fifth of the employees that remained after the mass firings that occurred this past spring.
This is in an effort to pressure Democratic lawmakers over the federal shutdown that has lasted almost a month, making it the second-longest shutdown in American history. The longest lasted 35 days during the first Trump administration.
For an administration that strongly advocates pro-life policies, it’s baffling to see how much they don’t seem to care about the life of a child after they are born, especially if they are born into a lower-class family or have a disability.
According to The New York Times, the new layoffs will wipe out offices that deal with sending federal money to states and school districts and enforcing federal special education and civil rights laws.
Students with special needs are often overlooked and are outcasts within the school system. They are shoved into a separate hallway, have lunch away from the neurotypical students and are disciplined more often.
That’s why the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is so important. IDEA is a law that makes a free appropriate public education available to children with disabilities throughout the nation. It ensures special education and related services to those children and supports early intervention services for infants, toddlers and their families.
Before IDEA was first put into effect in 1975, neurodivergent students were often denied public education, institutionalized or received a poor, segregated and underfunded education.
When the people in charge of enforcing these laws are laid off, schools might easily fall back into the practice of pushing students with disabilities to the side, especially if they lack the funding to be able to adequately support students in need.
The Trump administration argues that the role of the federal government in the education system is unnecessary. Linda McMahon, the secretary of education, states that because schools are still running even after the initial layoffs earlier this year, the DOE is useless and should be shut down.
“Millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid and schools are operating as normal,” McMahon posted on social media Oct. 15. “It confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states.”
While it’s true, the federal government plays a small part in the everyday operations of schools, which are run locally and funded mostly with state dollars, the DOE plays a key role in helping student populations that are living in poverty, protecting students against discrimination based on race, gender and disability and enforcing federal law in schools and universities. And all of those protections require federal funding.
By losing mass amounts of workers in the DOE, the department will dwindle and likely be shut down completely.
This makes as much sense as getting rid of federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI because local police can protect the country.
Without a federal department to monitor and hold local school districts accountable for the treatment of students, especially those with special needs, accessibility and outcomes for students will become inconsistent across the nation.
In the worst of cases, in smaller, less funded districts, these changes could roll back the clock 50 years to a time where students with disabilities were denied education entirely.
