Fifty years ago, just after Thanksgiving of 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the landmark law that created special education as it exists today, and guaranteed all children with disabilities the right to a "free appropriate public education."
Yet, "rather than celebrating progress, we face a crisis," warned a recent letter to Congress, signed by hundreds of disability, civil rights and education groups.
That crisis, according to the letter, is "the dismantling of the very infrastructure Congress created to ensure children with disabilities could reach their full potential."
The Trump administration has fired, or tried to fire, many of the federal staff at the U.S. Department of Education who manage and enforce federal disability law, though Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said federal funding for special education is not at risk.
In a November op-ed in USA Today, McMahon wrote that "returning education to the states does not mean the end of federal support for education. It simply means the end of a centralized bureaucracy micromanaging what should be a state-led responsibility."
But, in interviews with 40 parents, educators, disability-rights advocates, subject matter experts and Education Department staffers, NPR heard a growing fear: that the Trump administration's efforts to cut federal staff and oversight of special education could return the U.S. to a time, before 1975, when some schools denied access or services to children with disabilities.
What special education means to one mom and her daughter
Maggie Heilman's 14-year-old daughter, Brooklynn, has never known a world without the 50-year-old law later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
The family lives in a Kansas City suburb. Brooklynn, who has Down syndrome, loves hanging out with her sisters, playing basketball and listening to music "all day, and on the bus," Brooklyn says.
"And she dances all day," her mom adds.
"In circles," Brooklyn says. "Over and over."
The teen is now in eighth grade, has her own special education plan, thanks to IDEA, and
loves her middle school. But sixth grade was difficult.
"I was having a hard time," Brooklynn says.
In October 2023, Heilman says, she got a call from Brooklynn's school that her daughter had become agitated after refusing a request to come to the classroom's reading table. Eventually, Heilman says, Brooklynn was secluded for 20 minutes in a padded room the size of a closet.
"That 20 minutes changed the trajectory of our lives," Heilman recalls. "I had a child who loved to sing and dance and communicate and hug, and, after that moment, she stopped talking."
Seclusion in school, as a practice, is allowed in many states — if students pose an immediate danger to themselves or others. However, the practice can also be traumatic.
Heilman says she told school staff she thought Brooklynn's seclusion was extreme. Through the winter, she said, the school turned to informal seclusion, separating Brooklynn in other physical spaces or school offices.
As a result, Heilman says, Brooklynn repeatedly missed some of her traditional classes. "And we just saw our daughter's health — physically, mentally, emotionally — deteriorate."
Finally, Heilman asked that Brooklynn be transferred to a different middle school, where staff assured her they don't seclude students. Brooklynn's situation improved dramatically, but, worried for the students who came after Brooklynn, Heilman still requested a state-level investigation into her daughter's previous seclusion. The state did not find the district at fault.
Heilman also filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), arguing that Brooklynn had been secluded unnecessarily and that, as a result, she was denied her right to a free, appropriate public education.
That complaint kickstarted a new ordeal for Heilman and her family.
Counting on a federal system as it's being dismantled
OCR is the fail-safe for families who believe their child's civil rights are being violated at school because of their disability. A family can submit a discrimination complaint, and one of OCR's attorneys will review it and, if justified, open an investigation — no need to hire an expensive lawyer or advocate.
OCR has investigated a Texas district for restraining students; a Maryland district for how it handled the bullying of a disabled student; and an Arizona district for forcing students with disabilities to end their school day earlier than general education students.
Department records show OCR began investigating Heilman's complaint in October 2024.
But Heilman says her assigned attorney was removed around the same time the Trump administration began a broad reduction-in-force. According to emails Heilman shared with NPR, her case was then assigned to a different attorney.
Heilman says she has heard nothing about the investigation since June, when this second OCR attorney assured her, in an email, that Brooklynn's case is "currently still in investigation."
Several OCR attorneys spoke with NPR on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by the Trump administration. Two of them said Heilman's second attorney worked in an OCR office that was gutted in October, in a second round of layoffs. Those fired workers have since been reinstated, but Heilman says she has heard nothing about her complaint.
Of the administration's decision to cut many attorneys who protect students' civil rights, Heilman says, "it's telling families with children like Brooklynn that their hurt doesn't matter."
Before special education, children with disabilities were "invisible"
Before 1975, children with disabilities were commonly denied access to public school classrooms.
"They were invisible," says Ed Martin, who helped write the landmark 1975 law. "They had been kept at home. Our goal was to end that."
In 1970, U.S. public schools educated just 1 in 5 children with a disability, according to the Department of Education, and excluded nearly 1.8 million children.
Martin, now 94, says he organized hearings for parents to share their stories with lawmakers.
"There was one mother who told us a story about the school bus stopping at the foot of her driveway," Martin recalls, "and her daughter standing in the window crying, saying, 'Why can't I go with the other kids?'"
When Ford signed the new law, it cemented a bold idea: that students with disabilities have a right to an individualized, public education and that the U.S. government would help pay for it.
Margaret Spellings ran the Education Department under Republican President George W. Bush, and says special education isn't just about doing what the law requires — it's a public good.
"We're talking about a lot of kids who have abilities and disabilities that can be remediated, that can make them productive citizens," Spellings says, "and that is in our interest as a nation to have these students meet their full potential."
In fiscal year 2024, the law provided nearly $15 billion to help school districts pay for specialized classroom instruction and speech and physical therapy, among other services.
Including its early intervention programs for infants and toddlers, IDEA helps more than 8 million children with disabilities in the U.S.
To manage and enforce not just IDEA but a cluster of federal disability laws, Congress placed a pair of offices inside the Department of Education. The Office for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), which includes the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), oversees special education under IDEA, providing guidance to states and directly to families. The other key office is OCR, the Office for Civil Rights. It investigates allegations of disability discrimination, which often overlap with family complaints that allege IDEA violations.
Since these offices were created, support for their mission — to help families, districts and states in their efforts to protect and educate children with disabilities — has transcended politics. Spellings says, "We have long had, for the last 50 years — until this year — huge bipartisan support and fealty to the law."
Until this year.
Devastating special education cuts
According to court records, the Trump administration fired 121 of 135 employees at OSERS during the recent government shutdown.
"We can't, in our wildest imagination, understand how the secretary can fulfill her obligation under the law with so few staff," said Denise Marshall, head of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA).
Since those cuts, the 121 staffers have been reinstated as part of the deal to end the shutdown, though the administration could lay them off again after Jan. 30.
When NPR asked the Education Department if it planned to retain these staff beyond that date, the press office replied with a statement: "The Department has brought back staff that were impacted by the Schumer Shutdown. The Department will follow all applicable laws."
"This is a part of the process of making a smaller federal footprint and turning responsibilities over to states," says Jonathan Butcher, acting director for the Center for Education Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Heritage's Project 2025, created as a policy blueprint for a second Trump administration, calls for IDEA funding to be "converted into a no-strings formula block grant" to be sent directly to districts — that section's author, Lindsey Burke, now works at the Education Department.
In her op-ed, and previously, McMahon has reassured families that funding for students with disabilities "will continue indefinitely." It's the federal oversight she's cutting or moving.
But an OSERS staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, worries that, without federal support staff, "states don't have the systems or the staffing to do this."
Ed Martin, who helped write IDEA 50 years ago, says that, without enough staff, there's also no guarantee the money will be spent on the children who need it most: "The administration has decided that nobody needs to watch [the money]."
"The secretary's words are hollow"
The Trump administration has also made deep cuts to the Office for Civil Rights. In March, it moved to close seven of OCR's 12 regional offices and to fire 299 workers, leaving roughly half the staff the office had in January. This is when Maggie Heilman lost her first attorney.
In October, the administration attempted to fire another 137 staffers, including gutting the office investigating Heilman's complaint. This left 62 employees at OCR who had not received a termination notice — about 10% of the office's January headcount.
"I'm just shocked that they can destroy an entire unit of an organization that's created by statute," said R. Shep Melnick before some cuts were reversed. Melnick is a professor of American politics at Boston College who has been writing about OCR for decades.
As at OSERS, the employees who were fired in October have since been reinstated, but, again, there is no guarantee they will be allowed to stay beyond Jan. 30.
In a statement, the department's press secretary for legal affairs, Julie Hartman, told NPR:
"We are rebuilding and refocusing OCR to enable the office to protect students and enforce the law."
Thousands of languishing civil rights complaints
Even as the administration has tried to cut OCR's enforcement attorneys, it has aggressively used the office to enforce new priorities, going after districts and colleges that support transgender students or embrace diversity, equity and inclusion.
In a statement, Hartman told NPR that OCR had "strayed" under Biden and that Trump "is reorienting OCR to what it's meant to be: a law enforcement agency, not a social-justice advocacy arm of the federal government."
Public data suggests a shift away from disability-related investigations.
Since Trump took office, OCR has reached resolution agreements in 73 cases involving alleged disability discrimination. Compare that to 2024, when OCR resolved 390, or 2017, the year Trump took office during his first term, when OCR reached agreements in more than 1,000 such cases.
In these agreements, school districts often commit to a host of fixes — such as launching a program to monitor the use of restraint and seclusion — that help not just the student at the center of the complaint but other students as well. Still, they require labor-intensive investigations into complaints like Maggie Heilman's, with attorneys conducting interviews and collecting documents.
In her USA Today op-ed, McMahon said, in spite of the cuts to OCR, "protecting students' civil rights is work that will never go away."
To that, Marshall, of COPAA, replied: "Bullcrap. The secretary's words are hollow."
It is possible some of OCR's responsibilities could be shifted to other federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, says Kenneth Marcus, who ran OCR during the first Trump administration and founded the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
That doesn't appear to have happened yet, Marcus says. But if it does, he says, "it is entirely possible that this shift will leave us stronger when it comes to civil rights, but we will need to see the details."
Spellings, the former Republican education secretary, says that if the administration continues to focus its diminished resources on high-profile political fights, it will run the risk of failing the parents of disabled children even as it says it champions parents' rights in general: "I believe it when they say, 'Let's put parents in charge.' … OK, so what about the parents who want their options as described in [federal disability law]?"
What's next?
The endgame for the Trump administration, as the president and his education secretary have said repeatedly, is to close the U.S. Department of Education and move the federal jobs and funding streams it considers essential to other agencies.
On social media, McMahon and her staff have openly mocked the department, which she has said is "mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states."
The problem with that view, says Jacqueline Rodriguez of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, is that states need and often want support when it comes to special education. And that support comes from the hundreds of federal staff the administration has been trying to fire.
Without them, Rodriguez says, "we are concerned special education will cease to exist."
"I'm fearful," says one state director of special education, who spoke with NPR on the condition of anonymity out of concern the government would retaliate against that state. "I think it's good for states to know there's federal oversight and that they'll be held accountable. The concept of leaving special education up to states sounds great, but it's scary. What happens if one state decides to interpret the law one way, but another state disagrees and interprets it differently?"
Fifty years ago, Ed Martin helped write the law that made clear to all states and all public schools: Children with disabilities deserve better. The law, he says, was "an affirmation of the values of the country."
He hopes that's still true.
Edited by: Nicole Cohen
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson
Copyright 2025 NPR
