Those resources apparently include the more than 250 OCR employees that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been trying to fire since March. 

Three weeks after Richey was sworn in, the department is telling laid-off staff to report by Dec. 15 to temporarily work through a backlog of civil rights complaints, according to an email sent out Friday. 

In a Monday statement, Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents department staff, said she’s “relieved these public servants are finally being allowed to return to work” and that keeping them sidelined has “wasted more than $40 million in taxpayer funds.” She accused McMahon of playing politics. “Department leadership allowed a massive backlog of civil rights complaints to grow, and now expects these same employees to clean up a crisis entirely of the Department’s own making.”

OCR has complaints to work through. In federal court updates as part of over the cuts, officials said that they were dismissing the majority of the complaints filed since the March layoffs. shows that staff have resolved 165 cases this year, but that’s well below previous years. 

The call back to work is the latest twist in a legal saga that has been a rollercoaster both for OCR employees and families waiting for action on their complaints. In October, a allowed the department to move forward with the layoffs as the lawsuit challenging them continues. Now, with the possibility that they could still ultimately lose their jobs, the attorneys, investigators and other OCR staff members must get back to work. 

“The department will continue to appeal the persistent and unceasing litigation disputes concerning the reductions in force,” Julie Hartman, press secretary for legal affairs, said in a statement. “But in the meantime, it will utilize all employees currently being compensated by American taxpayers.”

‘Drastically reduced staffing’ 

The department’s admission that it needs help to carry out its legal obligations is at least the third time officials have recalled staff after eliminating them. In May, a House appropriations subcommittee that she had rehired 74 people. 

“You hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon testified. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.” 

In August, the department brought back employees, placed on leave in late January. Many had on diversity, equity and inclusion during the first Trump administration, an activity that made them a target for the administration’s aggressive anti-DEI agenda. While the union filed for arbitration to challenge the firings, Madison Biederman, a spokeswoman for the department said the staffers were recalled because “the agency determined they are an asset to the workforce.” 

Last week’s development is further evidence that “the federal government cannot fulfill its civil rights mandate to students with such drastically reduced staffing,” said Amanda Walsh, deputy director of external affairs for the Victim Rights Law Center, a legal advocacy group that sued over the cuts to OCR. The organization represents victims of sexual assault. “We have not had any movement on our cases nor have we even heard where they’ve been assigned, demonstrating that the caseloads are too big for the reduced staff to manage.”

In March, the department shuttered seven of the 12 OCR regional offices, and during the government shutdown, tried to lay off another 137 OCR staffers. A the layoffs, and the agreement to reopen the government forced the secretary to bring the employees back to work, at least until the end of January.��

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, opened doors that were once firmly shut for students with disabilities.

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the IDEA, we reflect on how far we’ve come, and the work yet to do, to protect students with disabilities.

— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov)

One advocate for students with disabilities, whose cases make up the bulk of OCR’s work, suggested that Richey has contributed to the sense that “things are moving forward.”

Callie Oettinger, who publishes , a blog, highlighted Richey’s recent marking the 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Along with leading OCR, Richey is serving as acting assistant secretary for the office that oversees special education. Both offices, she said in an accompanying video, are “committed to vigorous enforcement.”

“This is not the language of an agency sunsetting a program,” Oettinger wrote. She told ����Ӱ�� she found Richey’s video “a breath of fresh air, passionate and positive.” 

The department did not say whether recalling the staff was Richey’s idea. But one current OCR staff member, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retribution, said “she seems interested in us doing our work.”

The department said it will reinstate roughly 25 employees Sept. 8, nearly three months after a federal judge told the department to start the process, and will return another 60 every two weeks until early November. 

The plan comes after the Massachusetts district court judge to throw out a June 18 order requiring the department to put the employees back to work. Department officials are now appealing that ruling.

Sean Ouellette, who represents the families and advocates who sued over the firings at OCR, said he was pleased to see “a commitment” from the department.

“I hope they restore staff on the schedule they laid out, or hopefully faster. We’re not really sure it should take that long,” said Ouellette, a senior attorney with Public Justice. “We’re a little skeptical because this only comes after the court called them out on the delay.”

In another personnel development, the department will begin reinstating employees in late January because their positions were linked, sometimes tenuously, to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs. Many of those targeted were told by their supervisors during the first Trump administration to attend a DEI training. The American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents the department staff, filed for arbitration — a dispute resolution process — rather than bringing a lawsuit.

“Because our local refused to stand down, we have learned that a number of our members placed on DEI leave are being returned to duty,” Sheria Smith, president of Local 252, wrote to employees Tuesday. 

But Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, disputed that arbitration played a role in the decision.

“The agency determined they are an asset to the workforce,” she said.

The action could slow down progress toward President Donald Trump’s pledge to dismantle the Education Department and eliminate any DEI-related activity — central pieces of his agenda that the public doesn’t necessarily support, according to recent PDK Poll results.��

McMahon fired roughly half its OCR staff members March 11 along with over 1,000 other employees. The Victims Rights Law Center, which represents victims of sexual assault, argued that their dismissal in combination with the closure of seven out of 12 regional offices, left the office unable to perform duties mandated by law. 

The department tried to link the OCR firings to a in which the Supreme Court allowed McMahon to let staff go from other divisions within the agency. In both cases, the courts have yet to issue a final decision on whether the firings were legal. Judge agreed with Public Justice, saying that the OCR case presented “distinct factual circumstances,” and “cannot be lumped in with” the other lawsuit. 

The department disagrees. “At bottom, plaintiffs’ lawsuit is an improper programmatic attack on how the department runs OCR,” wrote Michael Bruns, an attorney with the Justice Department.��In the appeal to the U.S. Appeals Court for the First Circuit, he called the lawsuit “crafty pleading.”

For now, however, Joun’s opinion leaves the department with no further options but to bring back the staff. 

OCR, not surprisingly, hasn’t been able to move through cases as quickly as it did prior to the layoffs. Since March 11, the office has resolved 413 complaints, compared to about 200 per month previously, Steven Schaefer, deputy assistant secretary for policy at OCR, wrote in a filing to the court.  

Ouellette, the Public Justice attorney, said having more attorneys and investigators back to work should help OCR make progress on the backlog.

“At least that will get things back to the way they were, which was already strained,” he said.

‘Called back’

Union officials haven’t received any communication from the department specifying which employees are returning or when they will start work, said spokesman Andrew Feldman. But the department did tell some to report to the cafeteria on Monday for a “brief orientation,” according to a notice to employees shared with ����Ӱ��.

“We have members who have self-reported to us they have been called back,” Feldman said.

One of those is Kissy Chapman-Thaw, an education program specialist and former teacher. She learned secondhand that she would be among those returning Sept. 8, which she said the department’s IT help desk confirmed Wednesday. 

She oversaw budgeting and higher education grants, including COVID relief funds, but she attended the three-day DEI training in 2019, which she thinks likely contributed to her dismissal.   

“For me, as an African American woman, I felt not just educated, but I understood how to be more sensitive to other people in general,” she said. She refused to quit while her job was in limbo. “After a month, I was like, I’m not going anywhere. They’ve got to fire me. I’m just not going to walk away that easily.”

Advocates say the reduction in staff has contributed to a backlog of untouched complaints, leading students to wonder whether their cases have been abandoned.

“The people who turn to OCR are the students who feel really betrayed by their own institutions or by their own school districts and often feel like they’re at the end of the road,” said Amanda Walsh, deputy director of external affairs for the Victim Rights Law Center, a legal advocacy group that’s part the case. The Boston OCR office, one of seven shuttered in the downsizing, was handling complaints from the victims of sexual assault they represent. Now, Walsh said, they have no information on the status of those cases. “We’ve proactively reached out to OCR for updates and have received no responses.”  

The administration says that because the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the secretary to permanently fire over 1,000 staffers from other divisions in the agency, she should be free to dismiss OCR employees as well. 

The two cases are “functionally identical,” the government’s lawyers wrote in a to the court. They said that the district court should throw out the June 18 order requiring McMahon to reinstate OCR’s attorneys, investigators and other support staff.

Attorneys for the Victim Rights Law Center and the two families who sued say their case is significantly different. Their clients — and those in similar situations nationwide — have pending complaints that have been left in limbo or dismissed because of the staff reduction. 

One Black student in the suit, identified as T.R., from peers in the Falls City, Nebraska, district. They called him a “monkey” and the n-word. A.J. from Birmingham, Michigan, another plaintiff, has a life-threatening dairy allergy. Students poured milk on his lunch and put cheese on his head. Tara Blunt, T.R.’s mother, withdrew him from school in 2023. A.J.’s mother, Karen Josefosky, pulled her son out the following year. 

Firing OCR staff “stalled civil rights investigations across the country and left thousands of students, including plaintiffs, without recourse for discrimination in school,” attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote in last week opposing the administration’s request.��

The delay in putting OCR staff back to work is just one example of the Trump administration’s failure to comply with about a third of the court orders issued against it, according to a recent of 337 lawsuits.

Rachel Oglesby, chief of staff at the Education Department, files weekly updates to Judge , with the Massachusetts district court, about the department’s progress toward reinstating the staff. But her statements list multiple reasons why the department has not acceded to the court’s wishes. Officials, she wrote, are still calculating whether there’s sufficient office space and discussing “the feasibility” of restoring employees’ access to computer systems. In the meantime, the department is paying the staff about $1 million a week while they’re out of work, she said.��

One OCR attorney still on the job said the layoffs have made it nearly impossible to address all of the complaints submitted. 

“One person now has to do the work of three,” said the attorney, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. “There’s just not enough physical time in the day.”

Joun didn’t give the department a hard deadline for staff to return to work. He just said McMahon had to “take all steps necessary to facilitate the return to duty” of those terminated and continue to investigate all complaints. 

That choice of words allows the agency to appear to be meeting the court’s terms, said David Super, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University.

“When you use language like ‘facilitate the return,’ … you certainly invite the administration to drag its feet,” he said. “After a week or two, if nothing meaningful is happening, that’s probably the time to consider whether clearer language is needed.”

The department’s slow progress in getting OCR staff back to work is similar to the strategy it followed in the Supreme Court case brought by blue states and a group of districts and unions. 

On May 22, Joun, the Biden appointee presiding over both cases, temporarily halted the department from firing staff. The U.S. Appeals Court for the First Circuit upheld the ruling two weeks later. The department appealed, asking the Supreme Court to allow the firings to go forward while the case continues in Joun’s court. 

The never returned to work. Aug. 1 was their official last day.

With an administration unafraid to defy the courts, some legal experts question why judges haven’t used stronger measures to force compliance. District courts can hold government officials in contempt and enforce penalties, sanctions and even jail time. In 2019, a former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos $100,000 because she wouldn’t stop collecting loan payments from students defrauded by a for-profit college that went out of business. 

In the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, a held Department of the Interior officials in contempt for not paying Native Americans past royalties on oil, timber and other resources. This year, a District of Columbia circuit court judge to hold Trump in contempt for not returning deportees sent to El Salvador back to the U.S. In July, the men were , their home country.  

But appellate courts rarely uphold lower-court sanctions against administration officials, Nicholas Parrillo, a Yale University law professor, . On Friday, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals against Trump. 

Georgetown’s Super noted that the current Supreme Court, which has backed much of Trump’s agenda, has discouraged district judges from coming down hard on the administration.

The justices have “fired several shots across the lower courts’ bows, suggesting that they should be less forceful in enforcing their orders,” he said. “They haven’t made a single sweeping statement; they’ve just nitpicked the cases that have come to them.”

Despite noncompliance, federal agencies traditionally try to keep the courts happy by demonstrating “some steady progress,” Parrillo wrote. 

In her filed Tuesday, Oglesby said a committee met the day before to discuss “reintegration activities.” Officials mailed 365 boxes to employees to return their old laptops before the department issues them updated equipment.��

On , she said there’s available space for employees in the Dallas regional office. But there’s not enough room in Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco. She’s not sure about Chicago; the New York office is under renovation. 

Oglesby’s rationale doesn’t satisfy Terri Gonzales, a chief attorney who managed the Dallas office. She doesn’t understand why the department didn’t allow the staff to start working from home weeks ago.

“For approximately a full year during the COVID-19 pandemic, almost the entire staff of the OCR Dallas office worked remotely,” she wrote in . “There is no reason why staff members could not do the same now.”

The department, she added, could have taken “common sense” measures to get the ball rolling, like providing staff with contact information for new supervisors and training them on any new procedures enacted while they’ve been on leave. 

The department did not respond to questions about why OCR staff aren’t working remotely. 

‘Cause for grave concern’

OCR is still under the leadership of Craig Trainor, who worked for the America First Policy Institute, the MAGA think tank McMahon chaired, until Trump appointed him acting assistant secretary. He’s awaiting confirmation for a post in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But like Kimberly Richey, Trump’s choice to lead OCR, Trainor’s nomination is stalled while Congress takes an August break.

Trump last week pressured the Senate to advance dozens of his nominees, but a deal with Democrats before the recess. 

Under Trainor, OCR has received nearly 6,500 complaints since the March mass layoffs and dismissed about 4,500 of them, Oglesby wrote. The office resolved 385 complaints and opened 377 investigations. They include one involving the in California requiring officials to clarify that service dogs are allowed at school. Another focuses on ensuring a , student with ADHD receives extra time on tests and other accommodations spelled out in his disability plan. 

In a third example, the Detroit district to fix an elevator at one of its elementary schools and ensure that no students, parents or staff with disabilities miss out on programs or services that require use of the elevator.

An investigation into complaints over services for students with disabilities in the District of Columbia Public Schools is “actively being investigated,” added the current OCR attorney who asked not to be named.

In the past, the staff would have cleared about 200 complaints a month, Gonzales wrote.

“The low reported number of substantive resolutions contrasted with the high number of dismissals is a cause for grave concern,” she told the court. “Based on my experience, it suggests that OCR is not completing investigations promptly and fairly.”

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to move ahead with firing more than 1,300 employees at the U.S. Department of Education as the Trump administration aims to eliminate the federal agency. 

While the states that sued and the government’s lawyers will continue to argue the case in the lower courts, McMahon said the opinion shows that the president “has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization and day-to-day operations of federal agencies.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, dissented with the ruling.

“As Congress mandated, the department plays a vital role in this nation’s education system, safeguarding equal access to learning and channeling billions of dollars to schools and students across the country each year,” Sotomayor wrote. “When the executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.”

When a white teacher at Decatur High School used the , students walked out and marched in protest. But Reyes Le wanted to do more.

Until he graduated from the Atlanta-area school this year, he co-led its equity team. He organized walking tours devoted to Decatur’s history as a thriving community of freed slaves after the Civil War. Stops included a statue of civil rights leader , which replaced a Confederate monument, and a historical marker recognizing the site where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was for driving with an out-of-state license.

But Le feared his efforts would collapse in the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion. An existing state law against “divisive concepts” meant students already had to get parent permission to go on the tour. Then the district threw out two non-discrimination policies April 15. 

“I felt that the work we were doing wouldn’t be approved going into the future,” Le said.

Decatur got snared by the U.S. Department of Education’s to pull millions of dollars in federal funding from states and districts that employed DEI policies. In response, several organizations sued the department, calling its guidance vague and in violation of constitutional provisions that favor local control. Within weeks, three federal judges, including one Trump appointee, Education Secretary Linda McMahon from enforcing the directives, and Decatur promptly .

The reversal offers a glimpse into the courts’ role in thwarting — or at least slowing down — the Trump education juggernaut. States, districts, unions, civil rights groups and parents sued McMahon, and multiple courts the department skirted the law in slashing funding and staff. But some observers say the administration is playing a long game and may view such losses as temporary setbacks.

“The administration’s plan is to push on multiple fronts to test the boundaries of what they can get away with,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “Cut personnel, but if needed, add them back later. What’s gained? Possible intimidation of ‘deep state’ employees and a chance to hire people that will be ‘a better fit.’ ”

A recent example of boundary testing: The administration nearly $7 billion for education the president already approved in March.

But the move is practically lifted from the pages of , the right-wing blueprint for Trump’s second term. In that document, Russ Vought, now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, argues that presidents must “handcuff the bureaucracy” and that the Constitution for the White House to spend everything Congress appropriated.  

The administration blames Democrats for playing the courts. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “radical rogue judges” of getting in the president’s way. 

The end result is often administrative chaos, leaving many districts unable to make routine purchases and displaced staff unsure whether to move on with their lives. 

While the outcome in the lower courts has been mixed, the Supreme Court — which has on much of Trump’s agenda — is expected any day to weigh in on the president’s biggest prize: whether McMahon can permanently cut half the department’s staff. 

In that case, 21 Democratic attorneys general and coalition of districts and unions sued to prevent the administration from taking a giant step toward eliminating the department.

“Everything about defunding and dismantling by the administration is in judicial limbo,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. As a supporter of eliminating the department, he lamented the “If the Supreme Court allows mass layoffs, though, I would expect more energy to return to shrinking the department.”

The odds of that increased last week when the that mass firings at other agencies could remain in effect as the parties argue the case in the lower courts.

While the lawsuits over the Education Department are separate, Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the National Center for Youth Law, said the ruling is “clearly not a good sign.” His case, filed in May, focuses on cuts specifically to the department’s Office for Civil Rights, but the argument is essentially the same: The administration overstepped its authority when it gutted the department without congressional approval.

Solicitor General John Sauer, in to the Supreme Court, said the states had no grounds to sue and called any fears the department couldn’t make do with a smaller staff merely “speculative.”

Even if the Supreme Court rules in McMahon’s favor, its opinion won’t affect previous rulings and other lawsuits in progress against the department.

Here’s where some of those key legal battles stand:

COVID relief funds

McMahon stunned states in late March when she said they would no longer receive more than $2 billion in reimbursements for COVID-related expenses. States would have to make a fresh case for how their costs related to the pandemic, even though the department had already approved extensions for construction projects, summer learning and tutoring. 

On June 3, a federal judge in Maryland from pulling the funds.

Despite the judicial order, not all states have been paid.

The Maryland Department of Education still had more than $400 million to spend. Cherie Duvall-Jones, a spokeswoman, said the agency hasn’t received any reimbursements even though it provided the “necessary documentation and information” federal officials requested. 

The cancellation forced Baltimore City schools to dip into a to avoid disrupting tutoring and summer school programs.

Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, declined to comment on why it had yet to pay Maryland or how much the department has distributed to other states since June.

Mass firings

In the administration’s push to wind down the department, McMahon admits she still needs staff to complete what she calls her “final mission.” On May 21, she told a House appropriations subcommittee that she had rehired 74 people. Biedermann wouldn’t say whether that figure has grown, and referred a reporter to the .

“You hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon testified. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.” 

The next day, a federal district court her to also reinstate the more than 1,300 employees she fired in March, about half of the department’s workforce. Updating the court on progress, Chief of Staff Rachel Oglesby said in a that she’s still reviewing survey responses from laid off staffers and figuring out where they would work if they return.

But some call the department’s to bring back employees lackluster, perhaps because it’s pinning its hopes on a victory before the Supreme Court. 

“This is a court that’s been fairly aggressive in overturning lower court decisions,” said Smith, with the National Center for Youth Law. 

His group’s lawsuit is one of two challenging cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, which lost nearly 250 staffers and seven regional offices. They argue the cuts have left the department unable to thoroughly investigate complaints. Of the 5,164 civil rights complaints since March, OCR has dismissed 3,625, Oglesby .

In a case brought by the Victim Rights Law Center, a Massachusetts-based advocacy organization, a federal district court McMahon to reinstate OCR employees. 

Even if the case is not reversed on appeal, there’s another potential problem: Not all former staffers are eager to return.

“I have applied for other jobs, but I’d prefer to have certainty about my employment with OCR before making a transition,” said Andy Artz, who was a supervising attorney in OCR’s New York City office until the layoffs. “I feel committed to the mission of the agency and I’d like to be part of maintaining it if reinstated.”

DEI

An aspect of that mission, nurtured under the Biden administration, was to discourage discipline policies that result in higher suspension and expulsion rates for minority students. A warned that discrimination in discipline could have “devastating long-term consequences on students and their future opportunities.”

But according to the department’s , efforts to reduce those gaps or raise achievement among Black and Hispanic students could fall under its definition of “impermissible” DEI practices. Officials demanded that states sign a form certifying compliance with their interpretation of the law. On April 24, three federal courts ruled that for now, the department can’t pull funding from states that didn’t sign. The department also had to temporarily shut down a website designed to gather public complaints about DEI practices. 

The cases, which McMahon has asked the courts to dismiss, will continue through the summer. In court records, the administration’s lawyers say the groups’ arguments are weak and that districts like Decatur simply overreacted. In an example cited in a complaint brought by the NAACP, the Waterloo Community School District in Iowa responded to the federal guidance by of a statewide “read-In” for Black History Month. About 3,500 first graders were expected to participate in the virtual event featuring Black authors and illustrators. 

The department said the move reflected a misunderstanding of the guidance. “Withdrawing all its students from the read-In event appears to have been a drastic overreaction by the school district and disconnected from a plain reading of the … documents,” the department said.

Desegregation 

The administration’s DEI crackdown has left many schools confused about how to teach seminal issues of American history such as the Civil Rights era.

It was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that established “desegregation centers” across the country to help districts implement court-ordered integration. 

In 2022, the Biden administration awarded $33 million in grants to what are now called equity assistance centers. But Trump’s department views such work as inseparable from DEI. When it cancelled funding to the centers, it described them as “woke” and “divisive.”

Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a Clinton appointee, disagreed. He blocked McMahon from pulling roughly $4 million from the Southern Education Foundation, which houses Equity Assistance Center-South and helped finance Brown v. Board of Education over 70 years ago. His order referenced President Dwight Eisenhower and southern judges who took the ruling seriously.

“They could hardly have imagined that some future presidential administration would hinder efforts by organizations like SEF — based on some misguided understanding of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ — to fulfill Brown’s constitutional promise to students across the country to eradicate the practice of racial segregation.”

He said the center is likely to win its argument that canceling the grant was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Raymond Pierce, Southern Education Foundation president and CEO, said when he applied for the grant to run one of the centers, he emphasized its historical significance.

“My family is from Mississippi, so I remember seeing a ‘colored’ entrance sign on the back of the building as we pulled into my mother’s hometown for the holidays,” Pierce said. 

Trump’s Justice Department many of the remaining 130 desegregation orders across the South. Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has said the orders force districts to spend money on monitoring and data collection and that it’s time to “let people off the hook” for past discrimination.

But Eshé Collins, director of Equity Assistance Center-South, said the centers are vital because their services are free to districts.

“Some of these cases haven’t had any movement,” she said. “Districts are like ‘Well, we can’t afford to do this work.’ That’s why the equity assistance center is so key.”

Her center, for example, works with the in Tennessee to recruit more Black teachers and ensure minority students get an equal chance to enroll in advanced classes. The system is still under a desegregation order from 1965, but is on track to meet the terms set by the court next year, Collins said. A week after Friedman issued the injunction in the foundation’s case, Ruth Ryder, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs, told Collins she could once again access funds and her work resumed.

Research

As they entered the Department of Education in early February, one of the first moves made by staffers of the Department of Government Efficiency was to terminate nearly $900 million in research contracts awarded through the Institute for Education Sciences. Three lawsuits say the cuts seriously hinder efforts to conduct high-quality research on schools and students.

Kevin Gee from the University of California, Davis, was among those hit. He was in the middle of producing a practice guide for the nation on chronic absenteeism, which continues to exceed pre-pandemic levels in all states. In a , the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus said the pandemic “took this crisis to unprecedented levels” that “warrant urgent and sustained attention.” Last year’s rate stood at nearly 24% nationally — still well above the 15% before the pandemic.

Gee was eager to fully grasp the impact of the pandemic on K-3 students. Even though young children didn’t experience school closures, many missed out on preschool and have in social and academic skills.

Westat, the contractor for the project, employed 350 staffers to collect data from more than 860 schools and conduct interviews with children about their experiences. But DOGE halted the midstream — after the department had already invested about $44 million of a $100 million contract.

“The data would’ve helped us understand, for the first time, the educational well-being of our nation’s earliest learners on a nationwide scale in the aftermath of the pandemic,” he said. 

The department has no plans to resurrect the project, according to a June . But there are other signs it is walking back some of DOGE’s original cuts. For example, it intends to reissue contracts for regional education labs, which work with districts and states on school improvement. 

“It feels like the legal pressure has succeeded, in the sense that the Department of Education is starting up some of this stuff again,” said Cara Jackson, a past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, which filed one of the lawsuits. “I think … there’s somebody at the department who is going through the legislation and saying, ‘Oh, we actually do need to do this.’ ”

Mental health grants 

Amid the legal machinations, even some Republicans are losing patience with McMahon’s moves to freeze spending Congress already appropriated.  

In April, she terminated $1 billion in mental health grants approved as part of a 2022 law that followed the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The department told grantees, without elaboration, that the funding no longer aligns with the administration’s policy of “prioritizing merit, fairness and excellence in education” and undermines “the students these programs are intended to help.”

The secretary told Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in June that she would the grants, but some schools don’t want to wait. Silver Consolidated Schools in New Mexico, which lost $6 million when the grant was discontinued, sued her on June 20th. Sixteen Democrat-led states filed a second later that month.

The funds, according to , allowed it to hire seven mental health professionals and contract with two outside counseling organizations. With the extra resources, the district saw bullying reports decline by 30% and suspensions drop by a third, according to the district’s complaint. Almost 500 students used a mental health app funded by the grant.

A judge has yet to rule in either case, but Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and other members of a bipartisan task force are that she’ll open a new competition for the funds. 

“These funds were never intended to be a theoretical exercise — they were designed to confront an urgent crisis affecting millions of children,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement. “With youth mental health challenges at an all-time high, any disruption or diversion of resources threatens to reverse hard-won progress and leave communities without critical supports.”

Her tenure encompassed President Donald Trump’s first term, a time when staff still addressed the “full range of complaints”  — from racial and gender discrimination to schools denying services to students with disabilities.

But to Simons, the Justice Department’s recent dismissal of a — at a time when continues — is a sign that the current administration has turned its back on students who don’t receive an equal education. It’s why she left the Educational Opportunities Section at the DOJ after 14 years  in April. 

“The administration has been very clear that resources are going to be allocated to certain identified priorities,” she said — primarily keeping trans students out of women’s sports and punishing universities it accuses of tolerating anti-semitism. But that agenda, she said, “is leaving a lot of parents and kids with nowhere to turn.” 

Now she aims to be part of a solution. She’s lending her expertise to a new initiative intended to give families another way to resolve their concerns — the . 

The National Center for Youth Law, a 50-year-old nonprofit, will launch the project on Friday to help families with complaints that the DOJ or the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department either won’t acknowledge or no longer has the capacity to investigate. Simons will co-chair the fund’s advisory council.

Announced in advance of Saturday’s 71st anniversary of the Brown v. Board decision ending segregation, the effort will include a fellowship program for former OCR attorneys who lost their positions when the Trump administration gutted the agency and closed seven regional offices in March. The goal is to capitalize on the “brain drain” caused by the elimination of nearly 250 OCR staffers and connect families with pro bono attorneys who can conduct investigations and bring lawsuits to resolve their concerns.

“I have zero confidence in [the department’s] ability to administer the system effectively,” said Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the center. “I think most parents who are looking at what’s happening probably would reach the same conclusion.” 

As it shifts attention away from discrimination against LGBTQ students and racial minorities, OCR has left thousands of complaints untouched and dismissed many others. Trump’s 2026 calls for an additional 35% cut to the office as the administration pushes to eliminate the department.

The center, along with parents and special education advocates, over the firings, and asked the District of Columbia federal court to . A hearing is set for May 20. 

Andy Artz was a supervising attorney in OCR’s New York City office until March 11, when the department placed him and hundreds of other department staffers on leave and locked them out of their computer systems. He was in the middle of helping a student who had been denied access to a senior trip because of multiple disabilities and close to reaching a resolution for a victim of sexual assault by a classmate. 

“I found the work really meaningful,” said Artz, who hopes to work with the fund. “OCR was able to do a great job helping school districts and universities understand their obligations.”

To the new administration, however, OCR perpetuated discrimination by focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion and harmed women by extending Title IX protections to transgender students.

“Let me be clear: it is a new day in America,” Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said when the department announced into a gender-neutral bathroom in Denver schools. “Under President Trump, OCR will not tolerate discrimination of any kind.”

Even if the court blocks the job cuts, it’s unclear whether attorneys would be allowed to return to cases that don’t align with the administration’s priorities. Smith still sees a need for the new project.

His team will work with local NAACP chapters, bar associations and other community organizations to get the word out about the OCR alternative, Smith said.

In addition to seeking attorneys who will represent students pro bono, the fund hopes to attract some of the talent forced to leave the federal government by offering four- to six-month fellowships. Attorneys will receive a $12,500 stipend and non-attorneys will receive $9,000. Depending on funding, Smith expects up to 10 fellows in the first round.��

‘Top-performing personnel’

When Trump was inaugurated, OCR had over 12,000 open cases, . But the database hasn’t been updated since before the new administration took over. According to Julie Hartman, a department spokeswoman, OCR continues to “evaluate all legitimate complaints” and has initiated over 200 disability-related investigations and dozens related to Title IX and anti-discrimination laws. 

“OCR’s staff is composed of top-performing personnel with years of experience enforcing federal civil rights laws who work vigorously to protect all Americans’ civil rights,” she said. 

She declined to comment on the fund specifically, but said the department “welcomes support from — and has often worked with — outside groups who want to advocate for students and families and help those who believe that their civil rights have been violated.”

Factoring in staff reductions and those who left voluntarily, Artz estimates that only about a third of OCR’s staff remains out of the over 560 attorneys, supervisors and other employees who worked there last fall.

As a former deputy assistant attorney general during the Obama administration, Smith doesn’t solely blame Trump for OCR being “terribly backlogged.” 

“It was a system that often was a black hole for families,” he said. “What does it mean to have an Office for Civil Rights that’s actually responsive to families and to young people?”

For Callie Oettinger, a Fairfax County, Virginia, parent and special education advocate, getting OCR to act has yielded mixed results. She has seen complaints linger for years as well as recent steps by the new administration to act on disability cases. 

OCR still hasn’t completed a probe into her 2019 complaint that the Fairfax district denied transportation to students with disabilities who needed extra time to complete the PSAT. At the same time, she’s noticed an uptick in OCR investigations on more recent issues. Since early April, officials have responded to two complaints she’s involved in, one filed in December and another in March.

“It’s not clear why they’re starting where they’re starting,” she said. “Things are definitely moving forward, but they’re not doing themselves a favor by keeping their website so outdated.” 

Others are looking elsewhere for relief. 

In Delaware’s Cape Henlopen School District, Louise Michaud Ngido, an English language teacher, said she’s heard nothing about that schools have failed to provide English learners with adequate support. Students new to the country, she said, don’t receive specific English development classes and staff members don’t provide translation services or interpreters for parents. The district denied any discrimination.

Under Cardona, OCR opened an investigation last October, but Ngido has heard nothing since. She said she hopes Delaware will be “more proactive” and investigate complaints that OCR won’t.

Department of Justice priorities

At least to eliminate the education department would shift OCR’s workload to the DOJ. But the education staff there has always been a fraction of the size of OCR’s. Simon’s former office once had 40 attorneys. Now, she said, it has six. 

The agency’s priorities have also changed. 

In with the Epoch Times, a conservative media outlet, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said her agenda includes doing “some law enforcement” against hospitals conducting gender-affirming surgeries, elevating parental rights and dismissing school district consent decrees over desegregation. 

The DOJ said in a that it ended its “probing federal oversight” of integration efforts in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish schools because the district was spending “precious local resources” to meet past administration’s demands for data on issues such as hiring and discipline. 

In the interview, Dhillon said the department wants to “let people off the hook” if they corrected past discrimination. Consent decrees, in which a district pays a court-appointed monitor for ongoing oversight, are “a powerful tool” and appropriate when there’s been severe corruption or racism, she said. “What’s not appropriate is to maintain these rent-seeking financial arrangements …  beyond their normal life cycle.”

But Simons, the former DOJ section chief, said Black students are still disciplined at higher rates than their white peers and are more likely to attend “crumbling” schools. that racial and socioeconomic isolation has steadily increased since the 1980s.

“Segregation persists; inequality persists,” she said. 

Working with universities to collect and preserve existing data is another one of the fund’s goals. The administration, Smith said, might point to a declining number of OCR complaints as evidence of fewer problems in schools, when, in fact, it’s a byproduct of fewer investigations. 

“We want to be able to counter that narrative by showing that just because people aren’t going to OCR doesn’t mean that there aren’t real concerns and real issues of discrimination in our schools,” he said. 

‘The aid of legal counsel’

Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked at the department during the Obama and first Trump administrations, said it’s important for nonprofits like the center to “step up,” but cautioned that outside efforts have limitations.

“Without a robust federal civil rights arm, civil rights in this country are not going to be enforced,” she said. 

States don’t have the same expertise and resources, she said, and it’s unclear who would enforce any changes.

But Smith countered that the bulk of what OCR investigators do is negotiate solutions between families and district staff. 

“Having parents and children do that with the aid of legal counsel,” he said, “will yield far better results and outcomes than if they try to navigate those systems on their own.”

He would cry and run off during fire drills. Teachers put his desk in the corner, so he wouldn’t disturb his classmates. They would call her during the day so she could talk him into sitting still. Jones was shocked then that when Kelsey reached first grade, the school said he no longer needed extra support, like a teacher’s aide and a plan to help him control his behavior.

“I’m like, ‘’If there’s not a problem, why were you calling me all these days?’ ” she said. Kelsey, who has autism, went a year without any special education services, and Jones was preparing to sue the District of Columbia’s public school district. The toughest part, she said, was that her experience wasn’t unusual. “If you have 30-plus parents … and they have very similar stories, there is something systemic. They put it on the parents, like this is a one off.”

Ordeals like hers are why the U.S. Department of Education last month launched into the school district. A from an independent civil rights committee showed the district has failed to identify and adequately serve thousands of students with disabilities and has one of the highest rates of special education complaints in the nation. This marks the first investigation the Office for Civil Rights launched that didn’t focus on President Donald Trump’s priorities, such as on university campuses and transgender students competing on . 

The district says it will “fully cooperate” with OCR. But the agency’s review is kicking off in the midst of disruption to the federal government’s enforcement of protecting students with disabilities. Education Secretary Linda McMahon gutted OCR’s staff, and Trump is attempting to move oversight of special education programs to the Department of Health and Human Services. If the investigation results in a plan for improvement, it’s unclear who would hold the district accountable.

“HHS lacks the expertise needed to administer the [Individuals with Disabilities Act],” said Maria Blaeuer, director of programs and outreach with Advocates for Justice and Education, Inc., a District of Columbia advocacy group. Her testimony informed many of the recommendations in the December report. Moving IDEA to HHS, she said “does nothing to improve services for students with disabilities and it deprives state and local education authorities of the expert advice and support they need.” 

Craig Leen, a civil rights attorney who served in the Department of Labor during Trump’s first term, may have played a role in turning the department’s attention to students with disabilities. He is vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ D.C. advisory committee, which issued the report, and he navigated the district’s special education system for his own children.

The report found that the district under-identifies children with disabilities when they are young, which creates delays in students getting the extra help they need. When disagreements arise, the report said, the school district takes a “sue and settle” approach, which favors parents who can afford litigation in order to get services or accommodations for their children.

“That’s not a best practice, obviously,” said Leen, who became involved in disability rights when he was the city attorney for Coral Gables, Florida. “You shouldn’t have to sue to get what you’re entitled to.”

Leen’s daughter Alex, who has autism and an intellectual disability, attended Hardy Middle School in the district, but he didn’t feel she was getting the support she needed to be engaged in class. When he inquired about getting Alex into St. Coletta, a charter school that specializes in serving children with disabilities, an administrator suggested the family file a due process complaint, like a lawsuit.

Transportation — a key focus of the advisory committee’s report — was also a frequent problem.

“Sometimes [the bus] would not arrive at all. Sometimes it would arrive an hour late,” he said. Alex would only wait so long before she got frustrated and wanted to go back to her room. “My daughter needs a very routine schedule. Waiting for an hour for the bus would disrupt the whole day.”

But Leen’s struggles are not uncommon —  as indicated by a class action lawsuit from families over transportation problems last year and a 30 years ago. 

One factor contributing to the transportation headaches is that the district doesn’t actually have its own buses and drivers. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which oversees both the traditional public school district and more than 120 charter schools, provides no transportation for most of the city’s students. It is responsible only for getting children with disabilities to and from school consistently. Many attend schools far outside their neighborhood, or even in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, where their needs can be met.

The superintendent’s office told the committee that it has the fleet necessary to cover all the bus routes and has offered incentives to recruit drivers. But parents say the system is still unreliable. 

They want GPS tracking for buses, nurses and aides, more vehicles that are wheelchair accessible and better communication — like an app. The committee’s report also pointed to teachers who ultimately quit because they were sometimes stuck at school until 7 p.m. waiting for buses to pick up students. 

Santanya Prince-Abdoul, whose 7-year-old son attends school in D.C., started keeping track. She recorded in a notebook over 20 times since fall of 2024 that the bus was late or didn’t arrive.

“I was promised that I would be contacted by a supervisor on various occasions, and no one has ever called me,” she said. “I stopped using the system and started to transport my son to school, which defeated the whole purpose.”  

She also clashed with educators over updating his individualized education program with a goal of counting up to 100. The plan still said her son, who has medical issues and seizures, should practice counting to 20.

“Those are the kinds of things that we are having to sit in meetings to negotiate,” she said. “Even with the attorney involved they’re still resisting, they’re still opposing.”

The committee concluded that “chronic underfunding” contributes to the district’s inability to adequately serve students — an issue not unique to D.C. Congress intended for the federal government to cover 40% of states’ special education costs; instead it’s about 14%. 

In other ways, D.C. schools are atypical. The district has to depend on Congress to approve its budget every year — an often . In most places, a parent dissatisfied with how their district is handling their child’s case can file a state complaint. But D.C.’s state superintendent’s office often refers parents directly to OCR, said Blaeuer, with Advocates for Justice and Education.

“Very often by the time they’re filing with OCR, they’ve given up on solving it for their student this school year,” she said. “They’re hoping to make it better for the following school year and for the other students who come after their child.”

In its statement, the district said it has made “significant investments to strengthen our special education programs, expand inclusive learning opportunities and engage families as partners in their children’s success.”

At a in February, Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee elaborated. 

“We have reduced our number of complaints over the last couple of years.” Last year, he said, parents filed 205 due process complaints, but the number has dropped over 60% over the past decade, he told Council Chairman Phil Mendelson. Ferebee added that the district is trying to “enhance” communication with families as a way to resolve problems before educators and parents reach an impasse. “This is something that we will continue to work on.”

But some families are unwilling to wait. At the end of 2023-24 school year, Jones pulled her son out of Miner and enrolled him in Two Rivers Public Charter School, also in D.C.  She cried at her last parent-teacher conference when she realized how far Kelsey, now in third grade, has come.

“My son can now write a story out of his imagination. At Miner, he was regressing, wasn’t even verbal,” she said. “He’s learning how to advocate for himself, like ‘Hey I need a break. My battery is low.’ He’s going to stay there until eighth grade.” 

Experts consider a released by the department late Friday to be more in line with how the courts have traditionally viewed illegal discrimination.

“This is such a far cry from what they put out two weeks ago,” said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked in both the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It’s downright reasonable.”

Part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to root out diversity, equity and inclusion, the called diversity a “nebulous” goal and warned that districts could be subject to investigations for treating “students differently on the basis of race.” It prompted opposition from , and education . And it left some educators wondering topics like Black History Month.

The Q&A, however, asserts that officials would not automatically consider anything labelled DEI to be illegal and would examine as part of its investigations whether a policy actually resulted in discrimination against students. Cultural and historical observances are fine, the document says, as long as all students are welcome to participate, regardless of race.

“They were trying to see how far they could go, and then they got the pushback,” Wernz said, noting the timing of the department’s guidance. “I love that they say you can celebrate Black history at the end of the month.”

In a on the changes, Wernz noted that the department clarified that it would need evidence that a particular racial group was harmed before it decided to launch an investigation. But she still warned districts to avoid lessons that separate students by race or assignments that ask them to identify their race. 

Neeraja Deshpande, a policy analyst at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, said there was no need to walk back any instructions to districts.

“I don’t think the earlier letter needed to be softened,” she said. “But, of course, school districts were going to have questions and this seemed to answer them.”

‘Vagueness, Confusion and Chaos’

The department is still likely to get wide-ranging reports of what members of the public consider “divisive ideologies and indoctrination.” The portal it unveiled last week doesn’t define what the department considers to be illegal discrimination. 

The additional guidance hasn’t prompted the American Federation of Teachers to drop its federal lawsuit over the original letter. In a statement, AFT President Randi Weingarten said that the Q&A “just made things murkier.”

Last week, the union, along with AFT-Maryland and the American Sociological Association, sued, appeared to ban the teaching of “systemic and structural racism” in American history. The lawsuit says the teachers would be afraid to discuss Jim Crow laws, the internment of Japanese Americans and other examples of historical discrimination.

The Q&A doesn’t discuss how teachers should approach lessons on history and only says, “OCR’s assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”

“If you are a classroom teacher, you still have no idea what you can or can’t teach when it comes to the history of the United States and the world,” Weingarten  said. “It seems like vagueness, confusion and chaos is the point.”

Leaders say they have no plans to hit pause on the project despite a from the U.S. Department of Education that warns against efforts to “preference certain racial groups.” The strongly worded message from Craig Trainor, the top civil rights official at the department, said schools could be investigated for treating “students differently on the basis of race.” 

The Long Beach community asked for “a space that lifts the experience of Black youth,” said Deputy Superintendent Tiffany Brown, adding that the district has a “commitment to listen to those voices.”

Long Beach is not alone. While many school leaders at the letter’s tone, several left-leaning states and districts have since countered Trainor’s threats with tough statements of their own. 

“We’re going to be as inclusive as we’ve always been,” said Gustavo Balderas, superintendent of the Beaverton School District in Oregon. He called the department’s letter “an attempt to bully” districts. “Let’s not be hyper-reactive to things that come out right now.”

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey in a statement that DEI efforts make the state stronger. California state Superintendent assured districts that memos can’t override existing law or “impose new terms on existing agreements.” And Illinois state chief Tony Sanders reminded educators that state law on the history of different racial groups and LGBTQ issues. 

The letter is part of the Trump administration’s larger DEI offensive, which has included and the cancellation of millions of dollars in contracts related to equity goals.

On Thursday, the department unveiled , a website where the public can report schools they think are illegally discriminating against students.

Many districts and advocacy organizations like , the School Superintendents Association, have homed in on a footnote in Trainor’s letter stating that it “does not have the force and effect of law and does not bind the public or create new legal standards.” 

“It is just a letter. It’s not rules or regs. It’s not changing law,” said Sonia Park, executive director of the Diverse Charter Schools Association, a network with member schools nationwide. “We have diverse in our name. It’s not something we’re going to fade away from.” 

The letter referenced , a 2023 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in college admissions. But some experts say the letter is inconsistent with the court’s opinion. 

“The letter goes far beyond what the Supreme Court said in SFFA, and, indeed, even contradicts it,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute. Trainor, for example, said that when making admission decisions, colleges can’t factor essays in which students write about the role of race in their lives. 

But that’s the opposite of what the court ruled, McCluskey said. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said nothing in the ruling “should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” 

According to Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, officials plan to issue additional guidance. Andrew Manna, an Indianapolis-area education lawyer, said it might also take an actual complaint against a district or an OCR investigation to get clarity on what officials consider to be illegal discrimination. 

But some welcome the department’s more muscular approach. 

“I think, and hope, the department will be at least as strict as the Obama administration was,” said Neeraja Deshpande, a policy analyst at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum. She’s referring to a 2014 alerting districts that they risked civil rights investigations if they disproportionately disciplined Black and Hispanic students. A few months later, OCR launched an investigation into the , later finding over 100 instances where Black students were disciplined more harshly than their white peers for similar infractions.

“This is a fundamental question of fairness, as was SFFA,” Deshpande said. “OCR should absolutely go after schools that undermine fairness via unfair DEI preferences.”

Groups or classes or extra academic support aimed at specific are among the practices that Parents Defending Education, a conservative advocacy group, argues are illegal.

The American Federation of Teachers, along with AFT-Maryland and the American Sociological Association, is challenging the letter. They in federal court Tuesday, saying the “vague and clearly unconstitutional memo is a grave attack on students, our profession and knowledge itself.”

‘Target-rich environment’

Leaders in more right-leaning parts of the country said they’re also not worried about Trainor’s letter, largely because lawmakers in their states have already banned DEI.

Last year, Utah, for example, passed that labels diversity, equity and inclusion “prohibited discriminatory practices.” When Utah’s education department gave the legislature a compliance update, there were no violations to report, state Superintendent Sydnee Dickson told ����Ӱ��. 

“We didn’t need to make dramatic changes in our K-12 system,” she said. 

Trainor’s letter followed an from the president that called on the education department to devise a plan for stripping districts of their federal funds if they advance “discriminatory equity ideology.” Officials have until the end of April to devise such policies. 

But the OCR letter accelerates the process, warning districts to “cease all efforts” to accomplish what it calls “nebulous” diversity goals and that it will begin taking “appropriate measures to assess compliance” March 1. The department has yet to specify what those measures might be.

Parents Defending Education has already done a lot of the work for the new administration. The organization keeps a of districts nationwide that have equity-related policies and initiatives. Last year, it forced the Los Angeles district to revise its Black Student Achievement Plan, which provided additional counseling and academic support in schools predominantly serving Black students. All students, not just those who are Black, are now eligible for the extra help. 

 The group’s list has more districts from California than from any other state. 

“California is a target-rich environment for the administration’s causes,” said Laura Preston, director of government affairs for F3Law, which handles education cases throughout the state. 

She suggested that the state might not want to risk the loss of federal education funds at a time when state resources are needed to rebuild parts of Los Angeles ravaged by fire. But she also questioned OCR’s ability to conduct thorough investigations when the department is . The letter, she said, sets up a potential clash between states and the federal government. prohibits the government from mandating or controlling instruction or withholding funds from districts if they don’t comply. 

“Trump keeps saying he wants states’ rights [and] then tries to be the federal school board,” she said. “It doesn’t work in the long haul.”

‘Committed to full compliance’

To show that some education leaders welcome Trainor’s message, the department last week highlighted statements from several state chiefs who agree with the letter. 

“I applaud this directive from the U.S. Department of Education and Florida stands ready to assist other states to end racial preferences in education,” said Manny Diaz, Florida education commissioner. And Ellen Weaver, state superintendent in South Carolina, said her department is “committed to full compliance with the U.S. Department of Education’s directive.”

But Diaz, Weaver and Dickson from Utah were also among the 12 state education leaders who last month told Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary nominee, that they wanted the department to stop issuing “dear colleague” letters intended to push states to “take actions aligned to the current administration’s priorities and opinions.”

McCluskey at Cato said the letter is still consistent with their request, which was to clearly state that dear colleague letters are not legally binding. But he still finds such missives problematic.

“For all intents and purposes they impose new law, while those who issue them simultaneously claim they legally change nothing,” he said. “Of course, they shouldn’t change anything. Changing law is a legislative responsibility.”

Aaron Spence, superintendent of the Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia — which has long been targeted on Parents Defending Education’s — said he’s tried to reassure the community that his district isn’t doing anything illegal, like using racial quotas or hiring staff based on race instead of qualifications.

In January 2022, just after his election, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an demanding that schools avoid “inherently divisive concepts.” But Spence doesn’t view his district’s to be controversial and said under , districts are required to report student progress for different subgroups. 

“People get this pie mentality, which is ‘Oh gosh, if they do more for this group of students, they’re doing less for this group of students,’ ” he said. “The goal for everybody is 100% success. We’re working to ensure all of them get over the bar of achievement that we’ve set for them.”

They include new chief of staff Rachel Oglesby and Jonathan Pidluzny, deputy chief of staff for policy and programs. As the institute’s chief state action officer, Oglesby focused on promoting job opportunities that don’t require college degrees, while Pidluzny directed higher education reform work, including to eliminate university diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. 

Civil rights experts immediately noted the addition of Candice Jackson as deputy general counsel. An architect of the 2020 Title IX rule, in 2017 that most sexual assault accusations “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ” but later apologized. Another addition with experience from Trump’s first term is Tom Wheeler, a former Department of Justice official who was Obama-era guidance that said trans students should be allowed to use bathrooms that match their gender identity. He’s been named principal deputy general counsel. 

Policy experts and former department staff said they expected to see names from America First, which McMahon chaired after leaving her post as head of the Small Business Administration during President Donald Trump’s first term. Little known prior to the election, the institute helped shape the aggressive agenda he began to execute on Monday with a series of executive orders, including that says the U.S. government only recognizes “two sexes, male and female.” Outside of the education department, , who led the think tank, is up for agriculture secretary, and , the organization’s former chief policy officer, is expected to join the White House Domestic Policy Council.��

“Lots of AFPI folks, which is not surprising with Linda McMahon at the helm.” said Jackie Wernz, who runs Education Civil Rights Solutions and served as an attorney in the department while Jackson was there. Wheeler, she said, is also well-known in “education law circles” and has experience working within the “confines of the federal government.” But with Trump already challenging existing laws on issues such as immigration and school safety, she said tradition might not matter.

“It will be interesting to see how he develops now that the rules on how to govern seem to be out the window,” she said.

While he’s not from America First, Steve Warzoha, the new White House liaison, is a longtime McMahon colleague from Connecticut, where he led the Greenwich Republican Town Committee. He’s also spent some time at , Trump’s Florida headquarters, and according to , was arrested for driving under the influence in 2022 after leaving the area.

Asked about the arrest, Madi Biedermann, the department’s new deputy assistant secretary for communications and outreach, said she wouldn’t “confirm or comment on personnel.”

While the team thus far is light on K-12 education experience, those names are likely to emerge once Trump nominates an assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. Biedermann said she expects more announcements next week.

The department unveiled the new appointees, who don’t require Senate confirmation, as McMahon awaits a hearing before the Senate. A date has not yet been set. On Saturday, Trump also nominated former Tennessee education chief Penny Schwinn as deputy secretary. 

Several conservatives said they were impressed by the list. Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, called them “smart, experienced people who know the law, the policies, and the regulatory context,” And David Cleary, a principal with The Group, a lobbying firm, said they are a “much better prepared team than in Trump 45” and show the administration is interested in more than just school choice. 

Experts widely believe he’ll escalate of civil rights protections for Jewish students. While he has not yet named an assistant secretary for the Office for Civil Rights, Craig Trainor, who spent time at America First Policy Institute as senior litigation counsel could help lead those efforts. The newly named deputy assistant secretary for policy in OCR, he led investigations into antisemitism on college campuses as a senior special counsel for the House judiciary committee under Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chair.

But civil rights advocates said the department’s core function is to protect the rights of all students. Many who fought for LGBTQ students’ rights during the Obama administration are alarmed. 

The 2016 guidance on rights for trans students were “developed after years of meeting with stakeholder groups, tracking the case law developments and looking at the research,” said Shiwali Patel, an attorney with the National Women’s Law Center who worked in the Obama administration and left during Trump’s first term. While the Biden administration wrote those protections into Title IX, Trump’s picks, she said, are undoing that regulation “without thoughtfulness and care.”

Liz King, senior director for education equity at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an advocacy organization, said the new faces at the department represent “a very narrow slice of America.”

These are among the numerous allegations of antisemitism The School District of Philadelphia failed to adequately address in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.  

Pennsylvania’s largest district didn’t demonstrate that it fulfilled its legal obligation to evaluate whether a hostile environment existed in schools and, if so, take the necessary steps to eliminate and prevent it, the office found.

As part of an with the department, the 121,202-student district pledged to issue an anti-harassment statement that will be published on its website and printed or linked to in publications aimed at the school community. It will also provide annual staff training on federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics — and improve its documentation of related complaints.   

A district spokesperson said in a Jan. 3 statement that the school system “strives to create welcoming and inclusive environments that allow our students to feel safe and heard,” and that it takes complaints of bullying, harassment, and discrimination seriously. The district has also been embroiled in several recent controversies alleging that it

As part of its agreement, Philadelphia schools will also provide an age-appropriate program for all 6th- through 12th-grade students to address discrimination: They’ll be taught to identify and report harassment — and will be informed about the disciplinary action that will follow a credible complaint. 

The district will also administer an OCR-approved school climate assessment in which students will be asked about the prevalence of harassment, their willingness to report it and how they believe such cases will be handled. Philadelphia schools will provide the office with its findings and take steps to address any concerns. 

The Department of Education has dropped a flurry of agreements regarding K-12 and higher education discrimination complaints in the weeks before President-elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Trump has, on many occasions, pledged to , leaving its fate and that of its civil rights office uncertain. 

Two other higher education cases announced in late December — one focused on the system and the other at — also sprung from the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. 

The ongoing conflict set off student protests throughout the country, including at some of the nation’s top colleges.

In the case involving five UC campuses, the department found the universities failed to respond promptly or effectively to incidents of harassment based on students’ Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Palestinian and Arab ancestry — and some of them subjected students to different treatment regarding access to campus or university programs. 

The Cincinnati case, which included all such students except for Israeli, found the university misapplied laws governing reports of harassment or more commonly ignored discrimination complaints. 

Another case, this one announced in early January, found likely operated a hostile environment harmful to many student groups, including those of Jewish and Palestinian heritage. was also called out in the new year because its records failed to show whether it considered if nearly 100 harassment complaints — many by Jewish and Arab students — amounted to a hostile environment. 

In addition to numerous antisemitic incidents, the Philadelphia case also includes allegations of harassment against Black students. A Jewish teacher noting the hostility she and Jewish students felt, added that some of her Black students were called slaves and told to pick cotton until their hands bled. “The teacher wrote that they were traumatized and felt sick and asked who was going to help the students,” an OCR filing states. 

The Philadelphia school system also failed to maintain a required list of such complaints: a keyword search on a database where these incidents were supposed to be logged did not include several alleged offenses flagged by those who brought the complaint, OCR found. As part of the agreement, staff will be annually trained to better process, investigate and resolve such cases. 

OCR investigators examined documentation provided by an unnamed complainant, a community organization of approximately 250 Jewish families in the district and an advocacy group. The office also spoke at length with the district’s Title IX coordinator, among others.

Michael Balaban, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, filed a complaint with the district in April 2024. He said he did so to represent the concerns of many Jewish families, who told him they feared retribution if they complained directly. 

Balaban said teachers addressing the war should have presented facts about the Middle East in neutral terms, allowing students to come to their own conclusions. He said he is grateful for OCR’s efforts and hopes the district will move forward with making school a safer environment for all. 

“I’m happy with the work that OCR did,” he told ����Ӱ��. “At the end of the day, the school board has to comply. That is really what we will be watching.”

In one case that sparked controversy, several posters, including those that read, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan that critics see as calling for and “This is not war, this is genocide,” were displayed along with the Palestinian flag in close proximity to an Israeli flag in the common area of a school. The principal had the materials removed the morning they were discovered. 

Interviews revealed that a group of students stayed after school in a teacher’s classroom to create the posters. Video footage showed that teacher and two others displayed the materials. A principal later told the educators their actions created a hostile environment and a subsequent report about the incident noted it had a “negative and profound impact on Israeli and non-Israeli staff and students causing feelings of alienation and outrage.”

The teachers were not named by OCR, but and ultimately quit their jobs for trying to make the school a safe space for Palestinian students. 

“The punishment is not because we hung up posters, the punishment is not because we didn’t have parents’ permission after school, they’re going to say that that’s what it is,” one of the teachers told The Intercept. “But the punishment is the fact that these posters are pro-Palestinian, they are anti-genocide, they are anti-violence towards Palestinian people.”

These incidents, along with others, have caused an ongoing furor, one that has played out at raucous school board meetings. One October 2024 session was disrupted when protestors demanded that another pro-Palestinian teacher, . Her supporters said she was being punished for her views; those who complained against her said she made credible threats of violence against Jewish parents. 

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

The allegations of antisemitism detailed in OCR’s report, some supported by district documentation, include the following: 

• A teacher, in grading a geography assignment where students were asked to name various countries on a map, crossed out Israel and hand wrote Palestine on a list of possible answers. The school principal sent a note to families acknowledging the incident, stating that it left “students feeling unsupported.” 

• Students drew swastikas and the Hitler salute on a paper left on a classmate’s desk, and called the child “Big nose,” “Rich kid,” and “Cracker.” The student was put in a headlock and thrown into a trash can. The student reported the incidents to a teacher, but no action was taken until their parents notified the principal. The district transferred the student to a new school. 

• The teacher whose supporters rallied for her reinstatement wrote on social media: “Another Educator Misconduct Complaint to the Pennsylvania Department of Education and Another Dismissal. What’s the end goal here? … I guess I can’t expect anything less from Zionist genocide supporters. Zionism is Racism.” Another teacher, showing support for the post, responded with an expletive-filled rant against “all those who are trying to get those of us who speak out against a literal genocide in trouble.”

• The dismissed teacher i by name on social media: “I asked y’all nicely to keep my name out y’all mouth…Y’all been harassing me for almost a year…You can report me to the Department of Education 10 million times… What you want to happen won’t.” The next day, the teacher posted to her public Instagram account, “Blacked owned [gun emoji] shops in or near Philly? Asking for a friend.”

• Another teacher wrote on social media that, “These Zionists are no different from the swarms of white supremacist spectators cheering on the public lynchings of over 3,000 Black people.”

• Another wrote: “Let’s not be confused about this complaint, this is a group of racist white parents trying to get black teachers and staff fired, for fear that their children will learn the truth. (that their parents are racist.)” 

One teacher’s social media accounts were shared by the district with an external law firm so it could conduct an investigation. According to the district, the firm concluded the educator did not engage in discrimination or harassment based on religion or national origin.

The civil rights office said it requested a copy of the firm’s findings, but the district refused, citing attorney-client privilege. Christina Clark, a district spokesperson, told ����Ӱ�� some information was shared with OCR.

Amid reports of heightened antisemitism and Islamophobia in schools and colleges since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, a senior Education Department official said the agency has received a “huge, huge influx” of civil rights complaints that have led to a surge in federal investigations. 

Since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists on Israel and the subsequent bombing and invasion of Gaza by the Israeli military, the into schools’ and colleges’ responses to complaints of discrimination based on shared ancestry, which includes antisemitism and Islamophobia. 

Of the new investigations, the senior official told ����Ӱ��, 19 are in response to conduct that unfolded in schools in the last two months alone. Of the incidents since Oct. 7 that are now under investigation, 17 took place on college campuses. 

Last fiscal year, by contrast, the office opened 28 shared ancestry investigations over the entire 12-month period. The year before, there were just 15. Such inquiries seek to determine whether schools adequately respond to incidents that create hostile learning environments in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, ethnicity or national origin. 

“We are deeply concerned about the incidents that we’ve seen reported in schools all over the country, and about the safety of students, and the protection of non-discrimination rights for students in P-12 schools as well as in institutions of higher education,” Catherine Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in an interview Wednesday with ����Ӱ��. “We’re very, very concerned about what we’re seeing in schools.”

Though officials declined to comment on the specifics of active federal investigations, a spike in reported antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents in and outside of schools have convulsed the nation and elevated student safety concerns. 

Near Louisiana’s Tulane University, a clash between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel and police are investigating a as a potential hate crime targeting an Arab Muslim student. At Rutgers University, officials chapter following claims the group disrupted classes and vandalized campus. At Harvard University, a rabbi to hide the campus menorah each night of Hanukkah due to vandalism fears. In California, a with involuntary manslaughter and battery after an alleged physical altercation broke out at a demonstration that led to the death of a Jewish protester. 

Outside of schools, police said a 6-year-old Chicago boy was in an alleged anti-Muslim attack, and in Burlington, Vermont, three college while walking down a sidewalk over Thanksgiving weekend. 

The escalating confrontations have embroiled school leaders, who have been criticized for failing to clamp down on hate speech and discrimination. Just days after in Washington about rising antisemitism on college campuses, Elizabeth Magill resigned as University of Pennsylvania president. She and the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were accused of being equivocating and evasive after giving carefully worded replies to repeated questions about whether calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated their schools’ code of conduct. Magill responded that it’s “a context-dependent decision,” underscoring school leaders’ obligations to ensure safe learning environments while protecting people’s free speech rights. 

Harvard University President Tuesday after facing similar scrutiny for her testimony at the congressional hearing and unrelated plagiarism allegations.

Of the 29 active federal Title VI investigations opened since Oct. 7, just eight are focused on incidents in K-12 schools — including at three of the nation’s 10 largest districts. Among them are the New York City Department of Education, the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Hillsborough County Schools in Tampa, Florida, and the Cobb County School District in suburban Atlanta.

Though the circumstances prompting the investigations remain unknown, many of the institutions included on the Education Department’s list of active investigations have experienced high-profile incidents involving discrimination. 

In New York City, a raucous, and prompted a lockdown after a teacher posted a picture of herself at a pro-Israel rally on social media. Also turning to social media, one student said the teacher “is going to be executed in the town square,” and another promoted “a riot” against her. 

In suburban Atlanta, the Cobb County School District sparked controversy following the Hamas attack to the school community that warned of an “international threat,” noting that “while there is no reason to believe this threat has anything to do with our schools, parents can expect both law enforcement and school staff to take every step to keep your children safe.” Because of the message, several Muslim parents said their children had become the targets of Islamophobic bullying. 

In , the civil rights office highlighted hypothetical instances that put school districts at odds with their Title VI obligations. Among them: A Jewish student is targeted by his peers with swastikas and Nazi salutes but his teacher tells him to “just ignore it” without taking steps to address the harassment. Another example involves school officials failing to remedy a Muslim student’s complaints that she was called a “terrorist” and told “you started 9/11.”

Even before the most recent conflict between Hamas and Israel, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have reported an uptick in hate crimes over the last several years, including on campuses. 

Reported hate crimes surged 7% between 2021 and 2022, released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in October, including a 36% increase in anti-Jewish incidents — which accounted for more than half of incidents based on religion. Among all reported hate crimes, 10% occurred at K-12 schools and colleges.

The Education Department last month released its most recent Civil Rights Data Collection, the first since the pandemic. Students reported 42,500 harassment allegations during the 2020-21 school year, including bullying on the basis of sex, race, sexual orientation, disability and religion. Of those, 29% involved harassment or bullying on the basis of race while only a sliver — 3% — involved students saying they were targeted because of their religion. 

The current climate has put Jewish college students on edge, according to , a nonprofit focused on eradicating antisemitism. Since the beginning of the academic year, 73% of Jewish college students said they’ve been witness to antisemitism. Prior to this school year, 70% reported experiencing antisemitism throughout their entire college experience. Yet just 30% of Jewish college students said their college administration has taken sufficient steps to address anti-Jewish prejudice. 

During a televised interview on MSNBC Friday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said he thought conditions would improve on college campuses for Jewish students because the Title VI investigations now being launched by the Education Department would force college administrators to take action. 

Muslim Americans of all ages have similarly . In a two-week period between Oct. 7 and Oct. 24, reports of bias incidents and requests for help at the Council on American-Islamic Relations surged 182% from the average 16-day period in 2022. 

As lawmakers call on school leaders to take a stronger stance against hate speech, they’ve faced pushback from free speech advocates. Earlier this month, New York of “aggressive enforcement action” if they failed to discipline students “calling for the genocide of any group of people.” In a statement, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a right-leaning nonprofit focused on students’ free speech rights, said Hochul’s admonition “cannot be squared with the First Amendment.”  

“Colleges and universities can and should punish ‘calls for genocide’ when such speech falls into one of the narrowly defined categories of unprotected speech, including true threats, incitement and discriminatory harassment,” the group said in the statement. “But broad, vague bans on ‘calls for genocide,’ absent more, would result in the censorship of protected expression.”

The senior Education Department official said that schools must “navigate carefully” their obligations under Title VI and the First Amendment. Even if a student’s speech is protected, the official said, school leaders still have an obligation to uphold all students’ nondiscrimination rights.

“What concerns me is when a school community throws up its hands and says, ‘This speech is protected and so there’s nothing more for us here,’” said Lhamon, the assistant secretary for civil rights. “That may be true, but that’s only true where a hostile environment isn’t created that the school needs to respond to.”

With schools continuing to find themselves caught in emotional debates over students’ access to controversial books, the U.S. Department of Education has hired a new official to oversee its response to content challenges and take action if it finds that removing materials violated students’ civil rights.�� 

Matt Nosanchuk, a former Obama administration official and nonprofit leader whose work has focused on the Jewish and LGBTQ communities, started his job Monday as a deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights. In the coming weeks, he’ll lead training sessions for schools and libraries on the shifting legal landscape related to restricting books available to students. The American Library Association will host the  Sept. 26.

“Across the country, communities are seeing a rise in efforts to ban books — efforts that are often designed to empty libraries and classrooms of literature about LGBTQ people, people of color, people of faith, key historical events and more,” a department official said in an email to reporters Thursday. “These efforts are a threat to student’s rights and freedoms.”

The move comes as conservative groups continue to push for the removal of books they argue are inappropriate for students and GOP leaders take action against districts with books that include sexual content or discuss historical racism. 

“The Department of Education has decided to lawlessly leverage its civil rights enforcement power to coerce school districts into keeping pornography in their libraries,” said Max Eden, a research fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. 

, an advocacy organization, found almost 1,500 instances of book bans affecting 874 unique titles last school year. In many cases, parents complained that the books were too advanced or graphic for younger readers. But civil rights officials say removing a book just because it has LGBTQ characters or discusses racial violence is a form of discrimination.

In a first-of-its-kind resolution in May, the department found that a Georgia district may have created a “hostile environment” when it withdrew several books with LGBTQ and Black characters following parent complaints. The agreement required the Forsyth County Schools to notify students of its library book review process and survey middle and high school students about harassment based on race or sex and whether they feel comfortable reporting it. 

Some parent leaders applauded the appointment. 

“Leadership and energy on this has been a long time coming,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. She hopes “to see real action and resources for children, parents and families who have been caught in the crossfire of this hate-filled political campaign for far too long.”

In Florida, for example, a new states that districts must remove books that contain “sexual conduct” if the material is determined to be inappropriate. Those who disagree with a district’s decision to keep a book on the shelves can ask for a review by a special magistrate.

“That’s one more level of control from the state to overturn what they don’t like,” said Melissa Erickson, executive director of Alliance for Public Schools, a nonprofit. She’s expressed concerns about the ability of conservative-leaning school boards to dictate what’s taught in the classroom.

In 2021, some parents in the Williamson County, Tennessee, district sought to remove the children’s book “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story,” an autobiography about Bridges’s experience as the first Black student to desegregate an all-white school in New Orleans. They objected to the word “injustice” and a reference to “a large crowd of angry white people.”

In Oklahoma, the state that said officials can downgrade a district’s accreditation if it has books with “sexualized content” that an average person might find unfit for students. The rule followed state Superintendent Ryan Walters’s claims that some included books such as “Gender Queer” and “Flamer” that feature graphic illustrations of sex. In several cases, the books had already been removed.

Some advocates say they’ve been unfairly criticized for supporting the rights of parents to restrict their children from access to explicit material.

“When people ask questions they’re crucified,” Nicki Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, testified Tuesday in a . “Pretending that objections to minors accessing explicit sexual content is a threat to liberty and literature is a straw man and a distraction from real concerns about the quality of children’s education and whether students are safe in school.”

Margaret Crespo, superintendent in residence for ILO Group, an organization that supports women leaders in education, said Nosanchuk’s hiring is likely to rankle those who think the federal government should stay out of local school board matters.

She resigned in August as superintendent of the Laramie County School District 1, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where board members pushed for a policy in which books with sexually explicit content would be off limits unless to children without parents’ prior permission. The school board is .  

But Crespo acknowledged the department’s assistance could be helpful to districts.

“Many don’t have policy or state statute to guide the conversation,” she said, “and are struggling to meet the needs of all students.”

In Virginia, state education officials could be partly to blame.

The federal government whether the Virginia Department of Education misled school districts about their responsibility to serve students with disabilities during school closures. The probe focuses on whether the department allowed districts to deliver services that “fell short” of the free and appropriate education required under federal law. 

At the time, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos districts still had to serve students with disabilities despite the shutdown. But Virginia’s  during that period said officials should “acknowledge service delivery limitations” and then make “reasonable efforts” to follow a student’s special education plan — known as an individualized education program —once schools reopened.

Districts across the state released documents saying that some services would be “functionally unavailable” because students were learning remotely and that educators would do their best to serve students online and by phone. 

The state education department “provided cover to the school systems for whatever type of … remote learning or virtual instruction” they provided, alleged Reade Bush, an Arlington, Virginia, father and part of the coalition of parents that asked the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to investigate. “There was no attempt to make it compliant for students who could not engage in virtual learning.”

Virginia is the third state OCR has investigated for its handling of special education services during the pandemic. OCR dropped its investigation in Indiana in June, 2021, saying that it had no evidence the state was denying services to children with disabilities. Another investigation is ongoing.

The Department of Education all states last month of their responsibility to ensure districts follow the law and suggested that some need to tighten supervision. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for at least two years, and six states, including Virginia, didn’t meet expectations this year, according to the department.

Advocates welcomed the department’s guidance. Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a nonprofit focusing on students with disabilities, said monitoring “has been sorely lacking at all levels,” but added that even when states make improvements, federal officials should take “meaningful action” when needed. 

‘The system is just horrible’

The federal inquiry in Virginia is the latest challenge facing the state for its oversight of services for students with disabilities. Fairfax County parents and the state agency last fall, stating that “school-friendly” hearing officers who review parents’ complaints overwhelmingly rule against families. A federal district court last month, but the plaintiffs plan to appeal to the U.S Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The state’s failure to hold districts accountable is a long-standing problem that , according to special education advocates. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who made parent empowerment a centerpiece of his campaign, has special education, but some state board members remain frustrated.

“The system is just horrible in every which way … anti-family, pro-lawyer, pro-litigation,” Board Member Bill Hansen said during .

Virginia has had three education chiefs since the beginning of the pandemic. James Lane, the superintendent when COVID hit, is now an acting assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education. In that role, he recused himself from Virginia education matters and OCR hasn’t discussed the investigation with him, according to the department.

Youngkin appointed Jillian Balow to replace him. She served a little over a year before resigning in March. When she stepped down, she told ����Ӱ�� that special education “is the most complex work that goes on in a state agency,” but declined to make additional comments because of the lawsuit. 

Now Lisa Coons, former chief academic officer in Tennessee, is in charge. She also declined to comment on the OCR investigation, but told the board during the June meeting that she’s making changes, such as opening a parent engagement office and taking more authority over special education.

Michael Adamson, an attorney representing the family in the lawsuit against Fairfax schools and the state, said “lack of oversight … results in a kind of Wild West” and “really bad behavior” at the district level. 

‘Better off in Haiti’

The state told a Fairfax County parent in March, 2021, that it wouldn’t override a district’s decision to only offer remote learning and that district leaders were “best positioned” to determine services. By that point, federal civil rights officials were the district’s failure to provide them. 

Now Fairfax, in an agreement with OCR, must implement an to offer compensatory education — the term for make-up services districts owe students when they fail to provide them in the first place. The district wouldn’t comment on the state’s guidance.

Bush and his wife, who adopted two children from Haiti in 2013, had a similar experience. His 11-year-old son, who is autistic, was among the first students that the Arlington Public Schools allowed to return to school in January of 2021. But he spent his days on an iPad, learning from an aide in another room, despite a doctor’s recommendations that he needed to interact with other children. The Arlington district did not respond to a request for comment.

Bush’s son lost reading skills, made up imaginary friends after months of isolation and, like some children with autism, began incessantly “scripting” — repeating lines from movies or TV shows.��In his son’s case, it was play-by-play commentary from football games. He did hundreds of cartwheels a day and lost motivation for learning and wrestling, a sport in which he had excelled.

“He really nosedived. We’re still trying to get him back,” Bush said. “My son would be better off in Haiti of all places. They kept .”

Bush and other parents continued to face opposition when asking districts for compensatory education.

His son received six and a half hours of reading support in 2021, and another 25 hours in 2022 after he showed Arlington officials test data and samples of his son’s work. Now entering sixth grade, he’s two years behind in reading.

In rural Page County, Jordan Choe’s two children, 9 and 7, have autism, ADHD and dyslexia. 

During the 2021-22 school year, Choe chose to keep the children in the Page district’s optional virtual learning program. The students had access to Edgenuity, an online learning platform, but no special education services. 

He complained to the state, which said in a letter to the family that remote learning “was never designed” to comply with special education law.��

The family eventually hired a private tutor. 

“We lived on mac and cheese and hot dogs to be able to pay for this,” Choe said.��

‘Not unique’

Special education advocates say Virginia waited too long to heed the federal government’s warnings. But families in the state certainly aren’t the only ones still seeking compensatory education

“What is happening in Virginia is not unique,” said Diana Heldfond, founder and CEO of Parallel Learning, a company that provides virtual assessment, therapy and instruction for districts, including some in Virginia. 

She partly attributed the breakdown of special education during the pandemic to underfunding.The law says federal funds should cover 40% of the cost of education for students with disabilities, but in reality it’s . 

Students and teachers pay the price, said Anne Holton, another Virginia state board member.

“I have seen … teachers [with] …essentially no training at all dealing with some of our children with the toughest needs,” she said during the June meeting. “It’s no surprise at all to me that … everybody is frustrated, including the teacher.”

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and a member of ����Ӱ��’s Board of Directors.

During the 2021-22 school year, the School District of Rhinelander, in the central part of the state, altered the student’s schedule so they “could take in-person classes with teachers who were allies,” and attend the rest of their courses online. 

Teachers and students wouldn’t use the student’s preferred pronouns despite multiple complaints, and the student faced both physical and verbal harassment. “Kids whispered and giggled the name” of the student, according to the complaint.

“[The Office for Civil Rights] is concerned that the district response to the persistent harassment limited the student’s participation in school activities,” according to OCR’s statement on the agreement. In addition, the district’s actions don’t reflect “steps to ensure the student’s equal access to education with their peers.”

By the end of October, the district must train all staff on compliance with Title IX, educate students on sex-based harassment, including gender identity, and conduct a school climate survey to better understand the extent of the problem.

The case stands out for a few reasons. Compensatory education is typically a remedy for a student who was denied special education services. Last year, a California district a family up to $5,000 for counseling or therapy services because it failed to promptly address harassment of a transgender student, but experts said they were unaware of other agreements like the one in Rhinelander. 

In addition, students typically subjected to what is known as , such as being placed in virtual or home-based instruction, often have disabilities that contribute to discipline problems. That wasn’t the issue with the Rhinelander student, but advocates said the situation likely isn’t isolated.

“Too often these incidents are unreported and unaddressed,” said Aaron Ridings, chief of staff and deputy executive director for public policy and research at GLSEN, an LGBTQ student advocacy group. “That results in long-term harm in terms of educational outcomes and overall health.” 

While Wisconsin isn’t among them, have considered and passed anti-LGBTQ and transgender legislation this year. Over 400 bills were introduced, and a recent analysis by ����Ӱ�� shows that LGBTQ students face harassment in both red and blue states. 

shows that transgender and nonbinary students are roughly twice as likely as other students to say they’ve missed or changed school because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable. 

But in the Rhinelander case, an assistant principal officially changed the student’s schedule and was “looking to move Student A away from particular students,” according to the complaint. The family, however, expressed that those victimizing the trans student should be removed from the classes.

The student is no longer enrolled in the district and moved out of the state, but Eric Burke, superintendent of the 2,300-student system, said officials planned to discuss compensatory services with the family. If the student returns, the district must offer counseling and identify a staff member that the student can go to if they experience further harassment, according to the resolution.

In a separate statement, the district said it agreed to resolve the complaint “instead of fighting over the merit of the allegations” and that providing “more training was a commitment we have already embraced.”

The investigation found that the district also frequently reported incidents involving the student as “peer mistreatment” instead of sexual harassment, as in the case when a “male student ‘bumped’ Student A in the hallway and used a derogatory term … toward them.” 

As part of the agreement, the district must create an online record-keeping system to document conduct that could amount to sex-based harassment. 

GOP recommends cuts

Title IX complaints made up roughly half of the nearly 19,000 complaints OCR received in fiscal year 2022, according to the agency’s . While thousands were from the same person and most involved athletics, the Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity has likely made LGBTQ students more confident officials will investigate their case, .

“For the first time in history, it is possible to more comprehensively combat pervasive denigration of young people based on their gender identity under federal law,” Ridings said.

The administration, which saw a drastic reduction in OCR staff under President Donald Trump, has been trying to rebuild the office and asked Congress for a 27% increase in funding — $178 million — for fiscal year 2024.

House Republicans, however, have recommended a 25% cut in a that aims to advance “conservative priorities.” The bill would also halt implementation of President Joe Biden’s inauguration day on civil rights protections for LGBTQ individuals across the federal government. 

Democrats have warned that the bill, which is still before the House appropriations committee, would lead to in federal education programs, namely an 80% cut to Title I grants for high-poverty schools. But the debate over funding is still likely to stretch well into the fall. 

“It’s hard to see what the end game of this strategy would be,” Charles Barone, vice president of K-12 policy with Democrats for Education Reform, a think tank, said about the bill. He noted that most Republicans represent districts that would be affected by the proposed cuts. But he added, “They’re going to be fighting over this into Christmas.”

Some parents’ public comments against diversity and inclusion initiatives likely led to “increased fears and possibly harassment” of students, and the district’s efforts to reduce any harm were insufficient, according to from the department’s Office for Civil Rights.

The resolution required the Atlanta-area Forsyth County Schools to notify students of its library book review process, but concluded it did not violate federal discrimination and harassment laws when Superintendent Jeff Bearden directed staff to remove eight books last year for material it deemed sexually explicit.

Some anti-censorship advocates welcomed the department’s involvement.

“This is the most volatile time in history of book censorship,” said Pat Scales, a retired school librarian and former chair of the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee. “I hope that the [Office for Civil Rights] will look into more cases.”

That’s what Democrats in the House requested earlier this year when the department to investigate whether restrictions on books and curriculum violate the law. The Georgia action — which a department spokesperson confirmed was the first time its civil rights division issued findings on book removals — could inform how other districts handle future challenges. But the spokesperson added that “neither the investigation nor the resolution agreement directs, supervises or controls curriculum.”

Democrats recently criticized the GOP-led , which they say will lead to more book bans. Republicans intend the measure to increase transparency into curriculum and reading materials.

The department’s resolution comes as Republicans continue to push restrictions on students’ access to library materials. The Louisiana Senate last week passed a bill that would allow parents to block their children from checking out books they considered inappropriate. And under that takes effect Aug. 1, librarians and educators in Arkansas could face criminal charges if they distribute texts labeled “obscene.”

Last week in Florida, nonprofit PEN America, publisher Random House, five authors whose books have been removed and two parents for withdrawing controversial books even when experts in the district advised against it. 

The district is “depriving students of access to a wide range of viewpoints, and depriving the authors … of the opportunity to engage with readers and disseminate their ideas to their intended audiences,” according to the complaint. 

Beyond its investigation into the 54,000-student Forsyth district, the department began looking into the Granbury Independent School District in Texas last December. The American Civil Liberties Union calling the district’s removal of books with LGBTQ themes sex discrimination under Title IX. That investigation is ongoing.

In Forsyth, parents complained about books that included John Green’s a story of a boy at an Alabama boarding school that has a sex scene, and a memoir about growing up gay and Black by journalist George Johnson, one of the plaintiffs in the Florida lawsuit. The books, which were not required reading for any class, are young adult titles considered suitable for teens 14 and up.

The district removed eight books. In early August last year, the district’s media committee decided to return seven of them after reviewers considered a series of questions such as whether the books had a “high degree of potential user appeal and interest” and “promoted diversity.” was the only one not returned to the shelves.

But leaders did not take “steps to address with students the impact of the book removals,” according to the department’s investigation. As part of the resolution, the district must survey middle and high school students next fall to ask about harassment based on race or sex and whether they feel comfortable reporting it. 

Forsyth spokeswoman Jennifer Caracciolo said the district would implement the resolution and was “committed to providing a safe, connected, and thriving community” for students and families.

One Forsyth County student said a book ban focusing on LGBTQ and non-white characters “contradicts the idea of democracy.”

“Despite the claims that these bans are not based [on] discrimination, they have a ripple effect,” said Isabella Rappaccioli, who will be a sophomore at Forsyth’s Alliance Academy for Innovation this fall. She’s also a member of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, which campaigned against restricting classroom discussions of divisive concepts. s.

“Challenges like these … vicariously send a message to our young people that they are different from their peers,” she said. “No child deserves to feel that way.”

But Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, called the resolution “federal overreach.”

“The agency’s analysis seems to have come down to this: Some students reported feeling that the school climate was hostile to their group, therefore it was,” he said. “But issues like this are much more complicated, including whether others felt keeping the books in libraries was hostile to them.” 

The department’s investigation is not the first time the district became embroiled in controversy over a decision to remove books some parents find inappropriate. Under  in January with parents who complained about several books, the district must allow the reading of explicit excerpts at school board meetings.

Mama Bears, a conservative parents group that advocates for book restrictions, last year when the board refused to allow parents to recite passages with profanity or sexually explicit language during public comments. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Story sided with the parents. In a settlement, the district paid $107,500 in legal fees and agreed not to prohibit parents from quoting from any book in the district’s school libraries or classrooms. 

“It’s their First Amendment right to be able to give their opinions like anybody else,” said David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, which defended the parents. 

The nonprofit didn’t take a position on whether the books removed were unsuitable for students, and he said he would defend liberal parents if they were silenced for arguing in favor of such books. But he added that if districts are removing books because of political pressure, “that raises First Amendment red flags all over the place.”

Legal precedent on the issue dates back to 1982. The U.S Supreme Court ruled in that the Island Trees Union Free School District in New York violated the Constitution when it removed books that some parents deemed to be “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.”

‘True education’

In Granbury, Superintendent Jeremy Glenn’s comments — such as there being “no place” for books with transgender characters in school libraries and that “there are two genders” — sparked the district’s review of books. Ultimately two of the three titles removed contained LGBTQ topics, including “This Book is Gay,” a nonfiction for youth coming out as gay, lesbian or transgender.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas arguing that removing books with LGBTQ themes amounts to sex discrimination under Title IX.

Scales, the retired librarian, said schools discriminate against students when they remove such books.

“Books help readers develop empathy,” she said. “Let’s give them the books and hope that this younger generation will see things differently than the folks who are trying to shut down true education.”

But in a moment of déjà vu, 7,339 of those Title IX complaints were filed by a single person — the same one who directed 6,157 similar claims to OCR in 2016, according to the civil rights office, which declined to name the filer, citing privacy rules. That person would have had to file an average of 20 complaints a day — or nearly one an hour — in 2022.

“This individual has been filing complaints for a very long time with OCR and they are sometimes founded,” Catherine Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, told ����Ӱ��. 

She noted anyone can file a complaint for any perceived violation.  

“It doesn’t have to be about their own experience,” Lhamon said. “There’s not a lot I can tell you about the person.”

In , the office received 18,804 complaints, the highest number in its history and a figure that exceeds by 12% its previous record of 16,720 set in . Lhamon has talked on multiple occasions about how is straining its limited resources, with 2022’s being particularly challenging. 

“We investigate every complaint over which we have jurisdiction,” the assistant secretary told ����Ӱ��. “So the 7,339 complaints from that single individual last year took a very substantial amount of time for my staff.”

And while Lhamon did note her office has found in the complainant’s favor in the past, she didn’t immediately know how often or if this happened in 2022. 

In 2016, the more than 6,000 complaints filed by that same individual alleged discrimination in school athletic programs, according to the civil rights office. Fiscal year 2022 followed much the same pattern when the office logged 4,387 allegations of Title IX discrimination involving athletics. 

One complaint could include more than one type of alleged Title IX violation, encompassing, for instance, both athletics and gender harassment. 

The 2022 athletics-related claims far outpaced the 1,030 related to sexual or gender harassment or sexual violence. The figure also swamps similar claims from when just 2,093 complaints included Title IX-related claims — with just 101 focused on athletics. More than 500 cases concerned sexual or gender harassment or sexual violence that year. 

Some wonder about the type and validity of complaints filed by one person. 

“When you see that almost 80% of Title IX complaints filed with the Education Department were filed by a single person — and this person filed nearly 8,000 complaints in a year — it raises questions about whether at least some were filed in bad faith,” said Elizabeth Tang, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. 

It’s possible too, Tang said, that the uptick can be a response to increased awareness about student’s rights. It might also reflect a perception that the Biden administration is more receptive to these complaints than the prior one which, under the leadership of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, looked to roll back more stringent investigations of campus sex assault and discriminatory discipline claims.

Liz King, senior program director of education at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said she hopes greater awareness is at work, but is concerned about ongoing and possibly increased civil rights violations against students. 

“Any single instance of discrimination is one instance too many,” she said, adding that the civil rights office does not have the staff to meet the task it’s been given. 

The surge in complaints comes at a time when the agency faces significant challenges: It shrank from nearly 1,100 full-time equivalent staff in FY 1981 to 546 last year and is dealing with a host of issues that reflect by the pandemic.

Biden, in his March budget address, sought — to $178 million — for the civil rights office to meet its goals. Lhamon, whose 2021 confirmation Senate Republicans tried to block, said she’s grateful for the president’s support and hopes Congress approves the increase. 

Race, color, or national origin discrimination claims made up 3,329 of all complaints received in FY 2022, according to the civil rights office’s annual report, which was released last week. That’s up from 2,399 the year prior. Disability-related complaints comprised 6,467 of the total compared to 4,870 in FY 2021.  

At the same time, age discrimination claims, which made up 666 complaints in the most recent report, were down from 1,149 the prior year. The office notes the majority of these claims were also filed by a single person in both years.

The civil rights office fielded 8,934 complaints in FY 2021 and more than 9,700 the year before that, according to its annual reports. 

Lhamon said a number of cases this year involved the LGBTQ and transgender community, a student population that has become the focus of hostile legislation in multiple conservative states. The complaints can cover a wide swath of issues, she said, from the prohibition of same-sex prom kings and queens to a school’s refusal to allow an LGBTQ student group to form on campus. 

“It could be that students are not allowed to use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity or are not allowed to play on a particular sports team,” she added. 

The first resolution agreement crafted by her office on behalf of a transgender student was in 2013: It developed fewer than 20 such agreements for these children in FY 2022, Lhamon said. 

Among the allegations made against schools, the civil rights office found in April 2022 that Chino Valley Unified in California violated Title IX by failing to properly respond to a complaint of sexual harassment of students on a high school athletic team. 

This included the “videotaped assaults of teammates, students forcibly physically overpowering other students and sharing photos of their genitals among the team and on social media, and students placing their genitals on and near other students’ faces and bodies.”

The response from district administrators and coaches failed to end the behavior. According to the office, Chino Valley agreed to reach out to all former athletes from the offending school’s fall 2017 team and offer counseling services or reimbursement for such services.

It also was made to conduct a climate survey of the school’s athletics teams and train district leaders, school administrators and coaches about their responsibilities for responding to such claims. 

In another case, this one involving the San Juan Bautista School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, OCR found the school failed, over the course of several years, to investigate a student’s report that another student sexually assaulted her. 

The office concluded that the school’s procedures for resolving sexual harassment complaints did not comply with Title IX. As a result, it agreed to conduct the investigation, reimburse the complainant for some coursework, train employees and align its grievance procedures with the law. 

In a third case, Tamalpais Union High School District in California was faulted by OCR for failing to investigate allegations that a transgender student was harassed about her appearance, voice, body, name and pronouns. 

The office found in June the district’s inadequate response allowed for a hostile environment for the student. The district agreed to reimburse the student and her family for counseling costs and review its policies and procedures among other measures.

Tardiness, absenteeism or “subjective” offenses like defiance or disrespect, should not result in a suspension, the guidance said. And children with disabilities removed from regular classrooms for more serious offenses, or because they could harm themselves or others, must continue to receive special education services. Officials touted the materials, including a Q&A and examples of how to provide behavior support, as the most detailed guidance on students with disabilities the department has released.

“This work is especially urgent now as our schools and our students and families continue to heal from the pandemic,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. “The disruptions of the last two years have led to a sharp increase in students experiencing mental health challenges.”

Recent that despite the drop in suspensions during remote learning — and recent trends toward restorative practices — students with disabilities have been disciplined more during the pandemic than their peers without disabilities. At the same time, educators said this past school year was marked by an increase in student misconduct. According to , roughly half of schools surveyed blamed the “pandemic and its lingering effects” for increases in classroom disruptions, rowdiness and disrespectful behavior. Many students with disabilities, however, also missed out on services required by their individualized education program, or IEP, during the pandemic — services that could have mitigated behavior problems, . 

The guidance also follows a May announcement that the Office for Civil Rights will update Section 504 — a 45-year-old civil rights law meant to protect students with disabilities from discrimination. 

Students with a 504 plan don’t always qualify for special education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. But in their comments, Cardona and Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights, stressed that both are subject to laws preventing discrimination.

“The department is making a statement that school districts need to provide these protections even if they have not identified students with disabilities,” said Dan Stewart, an attorney with the National Disability Rights Network. 

The documents represent the first of two parts focused on discipline. Later this summer, the department is expected to release guidance focusing on racial disparities in discipline. Some expect it to echo Obama-era guidance that many thought overreached because it threatened schools that ran afoul of the policy with a civil rights investigation. 

Tuesday’s release notes that states, under the law, must measure whether there is significant disproportionality in discipline, based on race and ethnicity, of students with disabilities, and  raises the possibility that districts could be subject to a civil rights investigation “if there is question regarding whether school districts are imposing discipline in discriminatory ways.”

Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a vocal critic of the earlier guidance, said there are students who are identified as having an “emotional disturbance” because of their behavior.

“We shouldn’t be surprised if they continue to misbehave, and get suspended or expelled at higher rates,” he said, adding that any civil rights investigation of a district is a “form of punishment” and that districts might “under-discipline their students with disabilities — especially those with emotional disturbance — in order to make their statistics look better.”

But he acknowledged the new document takes a more balanced approach. “[The Office for Civil Rights] is trying to be clear that it doesn’t want schools to be hamstrung in terms of dealing with safety issues, or kids that are disrupting the learning of others.”

Selene Almazan, legal director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, agreed, noting that the guidance doesn’t “undercut” schools’ ability to remove a student with disabilities for disciplinary reasons. 

“Schools have always had at their disposal the ability to discipline students who present an immediate danger,” she said. “I don’t think this ties their hands.”

Daniel Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California Los Angeles, argued that the earlier guidance, which former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded, was not an overreach. Critics, he said, “complained that any disparity would be regarded as discriminatory.”

‘Didn’t have a full understanding’

Katy Neas, deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, noted that over the past year of and holding listening sessions with educators and parents that staff turnover was resulting in an increase in discipline that removed students from school.

“There are so many new people in new roles that didn’t have a full understanding of what the law required,” she said, adding that the guidance should help families and schools work toward appropriate services. “Behavior is often a sign of communication when something’s not right.”

The guidance, for the first time, addresses what are known as “,” such as shortening a student’s school day, even when parents haven’t agreed to a change in the student’s special education services. A normal school day for a student with disabilities shouldn’t be any longer or shorter than it is for those without disabilities, the guidance said.

“Informal removals have been lurking in the shadows for quite some time,” Stewart said, adding that the department’s attention to the issue is a monumental step forward” and “puts districts on notice that the department is going to take these things more seriously.”

The guidance also notes that students who have been removed from school while awaiting a threat or risk assessment — a practice that schools are increasingly using to prevent violence — are still protected under IDEA. 

“Sometimes districts say, ‘You can’t come back until you get a letter from a doctor or a psychologist that says you’re OK to return,’ ” Stewart said. “That places the burden on the parent. That’s a removal. That’s an expulsion.”

Advocates also praised the guidance for making a strong statement against restraint and seclusion of students, saying that the department is “not aware of any evidence-based support for the view that the use of restraint or seclusion is an effective strategy in modifying a child’s behaviors that are related to their disability.”

And while the controversy surrounding the issue hasn’t changed, the pandemic offers up a troubling new context: Districts are reporting spikes in , violent attacks on school employees and blatant disregard for school rules.

“There is certainly a much higher level of dysregulation in our kids,” said Rico Munn, superintendent of the Aurora Public Schools in Colorado. He added that educators usually expect students to fall into a routine and follow rules by September. “We weren’t hitting that until spring break.”

The education department is expected to update its policy in two parts. One will focus on students with disabilities, who are significantly to be suspended and expelled than non-disabled students. The other will address racial gaps in discipline — a reality that persists in many districts despite over the past decade to keep students from being removed from school and often referred to police.

Advocates for students’ educational rights are eager for the department to make a strong statement against discipline that keeps students out of the classroom.

“Discipline is inherently an authoritative tool used to punish students for being what an adult has decided is disobedient,” said Denise Stile Marshall, president of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, which focuses on the rights of students with disabilities. “There is a lot of research on this, but simply put, punitive school discipline does not improve student behavior or academic achievement.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s not accidental. The person leading the department’s effort is Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary at the Office for Civil Rights, the same position she held under President Barack Obama. Seth Galanter, who worked with Lhamon during the Obama years, has also returned to the civil rights office after four years at the National Center for Youth Law.

In 2014, the Obama administration issued a saying that schools where Black and Hispanic students were disproportionately removed for disciplinary reasons could be in violation of federal civil rights laws — even if those students misbehaved at higher rates. 

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded that guidance in 2018, siding with those who called the move and said it misinterpreted meant to prevent discrimination.

The Biden administration comes to the issue not only more sympathetic to the idea of restorative justice, but in the midst of a pandemic that has seen an increase in student misbehavior. One said student behavior was so “abysmal” that educators were afraid for their safety.

‘A year of disrupted schooling’ 

That’s one reason why Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, that the department should hold off on new guidance, arguing that districts shouldn’t have to fear a federal investigation for removing disruptive students from the classroom. 

The pandemic, he noted, was worse for low-income Black and Hispanic students, who were more likely to attend schools that had been closed longer. 

“The very same students that have more catching up to do after a year of disrupted schooling are also facing the prospect of a more challenging learning environment if schools are hesitant to remove problem students,” he wrote. 

Others say the pandemic shouldn’t interrupt the administration’s efforts to revisit the issue of bias in school discipline.

“It is always a good time to say that racial discrimination is wrong [and] that children with disabilities have the right to be alongside their non-disabled peers,” said Liz King, the senior program director for education at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. 

She thinks the guidance should reflect showing police in schools don’t reduce gun violence but do increase suspensions, expulsion and arrests of students — especially for Black students. She wants the department to take a stand against seclusion and restraint of students and “lean in” to the rights of Black and Hispanic girls and LGBTQ students.

Black girls are five times more likely than white girls to be suspended from school at least once and four times more likely to be arrested at school. A 2016 from advocacy group GLSEN found that LGBTQ students are suspended at higher rates than non-LGBTQ students. 

‘Absolutely a dance’

The Obama-era guidance embraced so-called restorative justice practices that aim to give students a chance to build stronger relationships, work out their grievances and make amends for their actions in lieu of suspension. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have passed laws supporting the model, according to the at Georgetown Law School. 

on such programs was mixed, but a more from California showed restorative practices can shrink Black-white discipline disparities and are associated with higher grade point averages in high school.

But “good discipline is very expensive” and hard to implement with the “regular teacher allocation in the school,” said Elliott Duchon, former superintendent of the Jurupa Unified School District, near Los Angeles. 

His district launched a multi-year effort to reduce suspensions and expulsions after federal officials found that Hispanic students were more likely to be suspended than white students.

Los Angeles Unified’s restorative justice program costs $13 million a year, according to the district, and funding for the Oakland district’s program — considered — was almost cut until the city and private funders stepped in to pick up the cost. 

Critics of alternative discipline practices argue the Obama-era guidance created tension between teachers who make discipline referrals and administrators who send students back to class without any consequences.

“It’s absolutely a dance,” said Jacqueline Shirey, at-risk coordinator for the Beaumont Independent School District in Texas. “If we are going to say that students can’t leave, what are we doing to help the teachers?”

With that in mind, Shirey began training teachers last fall to set up “de-escalation” spaces in their classrooms — a desk with a box that includes stress balls, 500-piece puzzles and writing materials. 

“I saw a way for students to learn how to manage their own emotions before it became disruptive, and I didn’t want students to leave my classroom to do that,” she said, but added that ground rules are necessary. “If you don’t implement it with a purpose, then it really does become supplies in a corner that students can play with.”

When students returned last fall, some administrators decided it was important to take a business-as-usual approach to discipline. 

In Nashville, Hunters Lane High School Principal Susan Kessler said her teachers “enforce dress code this year and every year” and that it helps in “maintaining school culture, enforcing building security and reducing distractions in the classroom.”

Other school leaders factored in the impact of school closures on students’ behavior.

Aaron Eyler, principal at Matawan Regional High School in Aberdeen, New Jersey, brought his staff together in September for a frank conversation about what to expect when students returned. 

He told them not to worry about trying to “win the battle” against students wearing hoodies and hats. And he wasn’t surprised to see more of what he referred to as insubordination, like students wearing Airpods and being late to class. The point, he said, was to keep students from missing even more instruction.

“With … what happened last year and the lack of consistent structure,” he said, “there was no way we weren’t going to have greater instances of discipline than what we’re accustomed to in school.”

Ronn Nozoe, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said any guidance from the department is likely to “ruffle feathers,” but he added, “You never want to tie the hands of folks who are actually doing the work.”

Special education experts say there’s wide variation in how school districts accommodate students’ needs in the classroom and that parents are often in the dark about their children’s rights under 504.

“It’s time to … make the regulations current and responsive to the experiences of students and families in schools,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon said Friday, after the update was announced. “We have, over these 45 years of experience, seen ways that sometimes schools don’t understand or don’t follow the law.”

The announcement follows the department’s with the Los Angeles Unified School District to make up for services that roughly 66,000 students with disabilities missed during remote learning. The district has to determine which students were denied services and make sure parents know their children are eligible for additional support. The update, according to the department, is also part of the Biden administration’s strategy to address among young people. 

Experts in the special education field said updating the law is long overdue.

“It’s about darned time,” said Julie Weatherly, a special education attorney in Alabama who advises districts and works to resolve disputes with families over special education services. At a minimum, she said, she hopes some language in the regulation will be updated.

“The best thing that could happen would be that the word ‘handicapped’ would be removed,” she said. 

It wasn’t until 2010, when President Barack Obama signed “,” that the terms “mental retardation” and “mentally retarded individual” were replaced with “intellectual disability” and “individual with an intellectual disability” in federal law. 

Typical accommodations under 504 include letting students sit in the front of the classroom, break up assignments into shorter sections and gain exemption from physical activities. The department, Weatherly said, could update the regulations to provide more specific examples of how a disability interferes with learning or “major life activities,” as the law states.

But she said she doesn’t want to see the department add extensive documentation requirements. For students who require an individualized education program under IDEA, she said, the process is already “parent unfriendly.”

But families and advocates want to see a more standardized process for ensuring that students receive services. 

Denise Stile Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, said Section 504 is “incredibly important in terms of protecting equity and student access,” but districts sometimes “treat it like a consolation prize” if a student doesn’t qualify for special education — and might not even let the parent know accommodations are available. 

Lisa Mosko Barros, a Los Angeles parent and advocate, added that currently, districts aren’t required to involve parents in designing accommodations and that schools don’t receive additional funding for a child served under the program, as they do for special education.��

“There does not seem to be as robust a framework for accountability” as with special ed, she said, “nor does there seem to be adequate mandates around family partnership in the process.”

Advocates for students with dyslexia said they welcome the opportunity to provide comments. 

“Far too often, individuals with dyslexia are denied access to the accommodations and educational services they are entitled to,” said Megan Potente, co-state director of Decoding Dyslexia California. “Strengthening rights is absolutely critical to addressing barriers and accessing opportunities for those with dyslexia.”

Lhamon said the length of the comment period has not yet been determined, but it could be 2023 before new regulations are released.

“They wanted more evidence that she had gone,” said the trans student’s father, Jeff Walker. “I said, ‘I’ll send you media, pictures, an invitation from the White House.’ They still did not excuse the absence.”

The episode would certainly be in keeping with the spirit of laws signed by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, that restrict trans students’ lives in and out of school. , similar to legislation in Texas and Arkansas, targets doctors who provide trans health services, like the prescription of puberty blockers, to minors. keeps trans students out of bathrooms and locker room facilities that match their gender identity. Like Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” legislation, it also prohibits discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in the elementary grades.

Such legislation might soon be on a collision course with federal law, as the U.S. Department of Education puts the finishing touches on a long-awaited rewrite of Title IX. That update is widely expected to codify the rights of trans students for the first time. Department officials have already said that Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination and harassment in programs receiving federal funds, will echo the in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which extended protections against sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace to LGBTQ employees.

A department spokesperson said Tuesday that it expects to release the new rule in May. 

Alabama is among 15 Republican-led states it. In the last year, a dozen states have passed bills prohibiting trans females from competing in girls’ and women’s sports. But the wave of legislation targeting LGBTQ students has since spread to encompass “just about every moment of their daily lives,” Sam Ames, director of advocacy and government affairs for the nonprofit Trevor Project, said earlier this month during a .

Experts expect the rule to put school districts in the center of what will likely be a long legal battle.

Max Eden, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called it “a very unenviable place.”

“It sets up a big showdown between states and the federal government,” he said during a , “and schools will be caught in between the two forces.” 

Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit leading the campaign against what it calls districts’ “indoctrination” of students on issues of race and gender, organized the event to inform parents about the upcoming rule. Eden also warned of an unpleasant tug-of-war between schools that teach gender as a “fluid construct” and parents who oppose references to gender identity in the classroom.

“It gets to a fundamental question of what is a human being,” he said. “If a school says one thing and Mommy and Daddy say another thing, a kid has to pick, and that’s not a fun place to put an 8-year-old.” 

The public is clearly divided over such policies. A from the University of Chicago and the AP-NORC Center showed that allowing trans students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity receives the most support from Democrats (52%) Hispanic adults (35%) and those with a college degree (45%). Nine percent of Republicans supported such policies. Forty-seven percent of those who voted in a recent school board election and follow news about their local board were opposed, compared to 35% who don’t follow such issues.

The tension is already on display in Oklahoma, where Attorney General John O’Connor told the that it’s illegal to let a trans girl use the girls’ restroom, while state education officials say it’s a matter for the district to decide. 

For districts that could face similar directives in the future, “federal law always wins,” said W. Scott Lewis, co-founder of the Association of Title IX Administrators. “The writing is on the wall. This is a protected class.” 

That might change if federal courts weigh in against the department. Two current federal cases involving trans athletes — one in and another in — could work their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite Republicans’ questioning, newly confirmed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declined to comment on the issue during recent confirmation hearings.

While the education department’s interpretation of the Bostock ruling doesn’t mention sports, the Biden administration made its position known in filed last year in a West Virginia case. The plaintiff, a transgender girl who wants to compete with girls on her middle school cross country team, is challenging the state’s 2021 law banning students born as male from participating in girls’ sports. 

“Although the regulations allow recipients to operate or sponsor separate teams based on sex, the regulations do not define ‘sex’ or address how students who are transgender should be assigned to such teams,” the brief said. “When assigning students to single-sex sports teams, a recipient must still comply with the statutory prohibition against discrimination based on sex in Title IX itself.”

In a year marking Title IX’s 50th anniversary, some experts say the administration’s position could undermine years of work toward achieving equity in women’s sports. 

“Imagine you go to a meet to watch an event called ‘the Girls’ 100,’ which includes both males and females — some of whom identify as girls, some as boys, some as nonbinary. Specifically, what is it that makes the assembled individuals all ‘girls’ so that having them compete in a separate event from the ‘boys’ is defensible?” asked Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a Duke University law professor and co-director of the Center for Sports Law and Policy.

Some of the males could be on testosterone suppression, while some of the females are taking testosterone, she explained, adding that “such a field would only rarely allow a female who is not taking testosterone to win in a category that was originally designed for her, to secure her equal access to the social goods that flow from competitive sport.”

Lewis, with the Title IX administrators organization, predicted the issue will reach the court during its next term.

“They can’t let it sit any longer,” he said. 

The issue could also play out in Congress if Republicans regain control during upcoming midterm elections. But any legislation aimed at Title IX “will be entirely symbolic,” because it would need 60 votes in the Senate to pass initially and President Joe Biden would veto it, said R. Shep Melnick, a political science professor at Boston College.

“Congress has rarely amended Title IX, and never on a major substantive issue,” he said. “The conflict will play out in the administrative and judicial arenas.”  

‘Breaking a confidentiality’

Even before Biden took office, he pledged to revise the Trump administration’s Title IX rule, which increased protections for those unfairly accused of sexual misconduct. Once in office, he ordered the department to begin the lengthy process of rescinding the rule and restoring elements of Obama-era guidance that directed schools and colleges to address sexual assault.​

Those changes, already controversial, were quickly overshadowed by the administration’s efforts to incorporate the rights of LGBTQ students into Title IX. During a weeklong public hearing last year, the department invited comment from those experiencing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, further signaling that the rule — which will be put out for public comment upon its release — would address those issues.

It’s unclear whether the regulation will include detailed guidance about issues like preferred names and pronouns or sex-specific school uniforms, but advocates for trans students hope the department will supplement the rule with examples of how districts can address those issues. 

Schools should “make it clear what nondiscrimination looks like” said Asaf Orr, senior staff attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “Dictating that teachers can’t discuss anything related to gender identity is fostering a school environment that is not welcoming to LGBTQ students.”

Walker, who described his daughter Harleigh as “100% girl,” is a plaintiff in challenging Alabama’s new Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which criminalizes transgender health services for children. He’s also concerned that requiring Harleigh to use the boys’ restroom will “open her up to assault.”

“My fear is some administrator at her school will try to make an example out of her,” he said. “They say this is going to protect my child. It’s not going to protect anyone.”

While the Alabama provision, which only applies to K-5, doesn’t affect Magic City Acceptance Academy, a Birmingham-area charter school that serves many LGBTQ students, Principal Michael Wilson said he’s concerned about a requirement for school officials to inform parents if students question their gender identity.��

“You’re breaking a confidentiality, a relationship that you have formed with kids,” he said, noting recent data showing increases in LGBTQ students seriously considering or attempting suicide.

The education department’s webinar highlighted what some schools are already doing to support trans students.

Sam Long, a trans biology teacher at Denver South High School in Colorado, talked about working with two other LGBTQ educators to “clean up” teaching materials on reproduction. 

“We can be more accurate and be more inclusive,” he said. “It’s ovaries that produce eggs. We’re acknowledging that not all women produce eggs, and also not all egg producers are women.”

Rebekah Bruesehoff, a trans student and activist from New Jersey, said she’s always “looking for clues” throughout her school — like preferred pronouns on a teacher’s ID badge — to see which educators are more accepting.

“I don’t just walk into class at the beginning of the year and announce that I’m transgender,” said the ninth grader, who described herself as a “total nerd” who loves school, plays field hockey and participates in musical theater. “It’s one tiny part of who I am, but there’s so much more to me.”

It isn’t true. 

In fact, county juvenile court data tell a completely different story — one in which police actually carried out nearly 500 arrests in Pittsburgh schools that year, disproportionately against Black students and children with disabilities, often for minor offenses. That’s by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which found that school districts in Allegheny County had dramatically underreported interactions between kids and cops to the U.S. Department of Education. Student arrest rates in the county exceeded the state average, the ACLU analysis found, and among the county’s 43 districts, Pittsburgh Public Schools played an outsized role in shuffling children from campuses into the criminal justice system. 

The underreporting combined with the high student arrest rates, the report argues, raise serious questions about whether Black students and those with disabilities, who are disproportionately subjected to school-based arrests in Pennsylvania and nationally, receive “the protections from discrimination guaranteed by law.” 

School leaders “have to realize that connecting young people to the justice system is harmful” and understand that “how educators choose to deal with students is a responsibility that they have,” said report co-author Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. 

“The conversation is really about the harms to Black children” Jordan said, and while the Pittsburgh district “does not want to be seen as anti-Black or insensitive to the concerns of Black parents,” leaders have failed to adopt sufficient student interventions that don’t involve the criminal justice system, he said. 

The Pittsburgh district attributed the underreporting of its data to the federal government to an error. After taking heat for racial disparities in arrests, school leaders in 2020 to study arrest data and created a task force focused on improving school safety. 

The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Outside southwest Pennsylvania, federal education data suggest the issue of underreporting student arrests is widespread nationally. The Education Department’s is key to enforcing federal civil rights laws, but advocacy groups say inconsistencies and underreporting by local districts could weaken its utility.

School policing has become increasingly fraught in recent years, and dozens of districts cut ties with local law enforcement after a Minneapolis cop murdered George Floyd in 2020. Yet in the wake of destabilizing pandemic-induced campus closures, schools across the country have in student misbehavior, including fights and weapons possession, and some districts have beefed up campus police to combat the mayhem.

By underreporting campus arrests, however, districts could give parents an inaccurate picture of campus safety and the effects of school-based police on the young people who interact with them. 

“The harms of having police in schools are much more widespread than districts report,” said Jordan, who called Allegheny County a “hot spot” nationally for youth arrests. During the 2018-19 school year, Pittsburgh students were arrested at nearly eight times the state rate, the ACLU found. 

Black and disabled youth face the brunt of arrests

Attorney Kara Dempsey, who represents children in education and juvenile delinquency matters, knows firsthand the long-lasting effects of school-based police on Allegheny County youth — especially Black girls. 

In one instance, a middle school girl who said she took her teacher’s credit card as a joke ended up getting arrested, Dempsey said. Due to probation violations, she wound up in a secure detention facility. Youth often struggle to comply with probation guidelines, Dempsey said, and school-based arrests can then grow into a yearslong cycle of juvenile justice involvement.

“Because she has trauma, she runs from these facilities,” said Dempsey, a supervising attorney at the . “That just continues this cycle. It’s just really insane.”

Local activists have been sounding the alarm for several years. In a 2020 report, the local Black Girls Equity Alliance found Pittsburgh school district police were the for Black girls, accounting for a third of all referrals countywide. Black girls in Allegheny County were referred to the juvenile justice system at a rate 10 times higher than white girls, researchers found. 

In response, a consultant group, RMC Research Corporation, to study the drivers of school-based arrests. Black students accounted for about 80 percent of district arrests, RMC found in its report, but just 53 percent of the student population. 

Part of the problem can be explained by in which adults view them “as more culpable, less innocent and less in need of help and support” than their white classmates, said Sara Goodkind, an associate professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who helps lead the equity alliance’s juvenile justice work. 

“These really high rates of referrals of Black youth are not because there’s a problem with young people. It’s that there’s a problem with the adults who are responding to them and with the systems we have in place,” she said. 

The number of police officers stationed inside public schools has grown exponentially in the last few decades, and research suggests their presence precedes an increase in student arrests. More than two-thirds of public middle and high schools had at least one school-based officer during the 2017-18 school year, according to the most recent federal data, and while suspensions and expulsions have declined in recent years, arrests have grown. 

Police presence has long been bolstered by high-profile yet statistically rare mass school shootings, yet research is mixed on their ability to improve campus safety and civil rights groups have often warned their presence could do more harm than good. 

To better understand student arrests in Pittsburgh, ACLU researchers analyzed data reported to the federal and state government, as well as internal district figures obtained through public records requests and those produced by the RMC Research Corporation. The results were perplexing, Jordan said, because each source produced different numbers. 

During the 2017-18 school year, the Pittsburgh district reported 86 arrests and 395 law enforcement referrals to the state education department. That same school year, the district reported zero arrests to the U.S. Department of Education while the county juvenile court tallied 499 school-related arrests. 

“For a district in which the arrest rates have been high for a very long time, why should they be so inaccurate,” Jordan asked. “I can’t speak to intentionality, but they are in the position to know that what they have put out to the public is inaccurate. They are well aware of that.”

During the 2017-18 school year, Black children made up 15 percent of the country’s students but 31.6 percent of those reportedly arrested at school, according to the most recent federal data. Black students with disabilities accounted for just 2.3 percent of the total student population but 9.1 percent of those subjected to arrests. 

In Allegheny County, the racial disparities were far starker: During the 2018-19 school year, Black students were arrested nearly nine times more often than their white classmates, according to juvenile court records. That year, 1 in 51 Black boys and 1 in 69 Black girls were arrested at school compared to 1 in 316 white boys and 1 in 894 white girls. Black girls were the only demographic group where more than half of juvenile arrests stemmed from school incidents. 

“The numbers speak from themselves,” Dempsey said. “There’s obviously bias in decision-making from people in power who have the ability to decide whether to either charge these individuals or not.”

Racial disparities were most severe in the 1,500-student South Allegheny School District, where a quarter of Black middle and high school students were arrested during the 2017-18 school year. 

ACLU researchers found about half of arrests countywide were for simple assault or for drug charges, primarily involving small amounts of marijuana. 

The drivers of racial disparities in student arrests and other forms of discipline, including suspensions and expulsions, have long been the subject of research and passionate debate. One study, , attributed nearly half of the discipline gap between Black and white students to actions by teachers, suggesting that the “differences in punishment may be due to racial bias.” Just 9 percent of the disparities could be explained by differences in behaviors between Black and white children, researchers found. 

Ted Dwyer, the Pittsburgh district’s chief accountability officer, said in a statement the arrest data it reported to the Education Department was inaccurate “due to an employee illness” that hindered fact-checking but didn’t learn about the problem until it was too late to submit a correction. He said the district has worked to improve data reporting processes, including those related to student arrests.

Dwyer said school police “have demonstrated their commitment to working with the school staff to curtail arresting students,” and noted that arrest rates have dropped in the last several years. However, he said arrest rates have decreased more quickly for white students than their Black classmates, therefore making the disparities even larger.

“The district has convened a task force to conduct deep listening sessions, review of the School Safety Manual and evaluate the effectiveness of current school safety and well-being,” he said in the statement. “The group continues its work.” 

Questionable zeros reported nationally 

By matching education data to juvenile court records, Jordan and his co-author Ghadah Makoshi, a community advocate at the civil rights group, took an unconventional and labor-intensive approach to expose the extent of school-based arrests across Allegheny County. School districts don’t generally compare their data against the figures collected by juvenile courts, Jordan said. 

On a few occasions, journalists have done similar investigations. In , The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, found that the local school district failed to report hundreds of arrests to the state. In 2020, Illinois Public Media reporters found that had underreported student arrests to the U.S. Department of Education for years. 

The issue plagues districts across the country. reported zero school-related arrests during the 2015-16 year, according to a report released in 2020 by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, a figure that suggested “a widespread failure by districts to report data on school policing despite the requirements of federal law.”

Three of the country’s 10 largest school districts — including those in New York City and Chicago, , according to a recent analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit news outlet. Yet in New York City, for example, police department records that year.

For years, the federal Civil Rights Data Collection has faced scrutiny for offering incomplete data on highly sensitive topics other than school-based police, including on instances of sexual misconduct and educators’ use of physical restraints. In , the Government Accountability Office found that 70 percent of school districts reported zero seclusion and restraint incidents during the 2015-16 school year but the U.S. Department of Education lacked tools to fact-check the data’s accuracy. The department’s quality control processes, the government watchdog found, were “largely ineffective or do not exist.”

Advocates combating sex-based discrimiation have long accused districts of underreporting campus misconduct. In an analysis of federal civil rights data from the 2015-16 school year, the nonprofit American Association of University Women found that serving students in grades 7 to 12 reported zero incidents of sex-based harassment or bullying. 

Given the data’s role in enforcing civil rights laws, Jordan said the U.S. Department of Education should be more aggressive in ensuring the numbers are reliable. With better data, he said, researchers can better understand the impact of police in schools. 

“The data doesn’t answer the whole question,” he said, “but it gives you the opportunity to drill down, to see what can be changed to improve the overall school environment without involving police and the criminal justice system.”

Lhamon, who faced steep opposition from Republicans, will lead the Education Department office in charge of enforcing federal civil rights laws in schools, including rules that prohibit discrimination based on race and sex. She secured the post after a combative confirmation hearing in July, followed by a partisan 11-11 vote a month later in which members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee deadlocked on her nomination. Lawmakers voted earlier this month to discharge her nomination from committee and bring it before the full Senate.��

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Harris’s vote, which broke a 50-50 tie, followed an effort by Republican lawmakers to block her return to a position she held from 2013 to 2017. She was unanimously confirmed in 2013, but became a lightning rod in several key education debates, including one that looked to hold K-12 schools and universities more accountable for sexual misconduct on campus.��

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that Lhamon’s confirmation will help ensure that schools are “fairer and more just.”

“She will lead the Department’s vital efforts to ensure our schools and college campuses are free from discrimination on the basis of race, sex and disability and to protect all students’ rights in education,” Cardona said in a media release. “Catherine is one of the strongest civil rights leaders in America and has a robust record of fighting for communities that are historically and presently underserved.” 

In 2011, before Lhamon became assistant secretary, the Obama administration released a that instructed educators to investigate sexual misconduct allegations “regardless of where the conduct occurred,” and to use a less-strict “preponderance of the evidence” standard when determining guilt. Eight months into her tenure under former President Trump, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose confirmation was secured by a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence, rescinded the guidance and replaced it with new Title IX regulations in 2020. The Biden administration the Obama-era guidance.

Civil rights groups have praised Lhamon as a champion for student equity, but her conservative critics have accused her of being an overzealous bureaucrat who went beyond her legal authority during her previous stint on the job.��

In 2014, the civil rights office to warn school districts that discipline policies could constitute “unlawful discrimination” if they didn’t mention race but had a “disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.” In June, the to revisit how the Education Department can ensure racial equity in school discipline.��

While Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, Lhamon will be taking up her job at a time when battles over race and gender in schools have become even more divisive, as seen in several states recently moving to bar transgender students from playing sports.��

Catherine Lhamon is one step closer to being confirmed for the second time as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights. In a 50-49 vote along party lines, the Senate voted Oct. 7 to discharge her nomination from the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The move gives the full Senate an opportunity to weigh her nomination after the HELP committee deadlocked with an 11-11 vote along party lines in August. A date for the full Senate vote on Lhamon’s nomination has not been set.��

From racial discrimination to transgender students in sports, some of the country’s most politically fraught education debates coalesced in a single Senate hearing Tuesday as lawmakers weighed Catherine Lhamon’s nomination to become the Education Department’s top civil rights boss.

Democratic lawmakers portrayed Lhamon, who previously served as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights during the Obama administration, as a staunch champion of students. Republicans, meanwhile, grilled her with tough questions and accused her of being an overzealous bureaucrat with a habit of exceeding her legal authority. An ongoing debate over how schools should respond to campus sexual misconduct complaints became the leading point of conflict during Lhamon’s hearing.

The Senate education committee hearing, held to consider Lhamon’s likely return to her old job, was divisive from the onset. In his opening remarks, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the committee’s ranking Republican, said he’s not convinced that Lhamon “understands, or at least appreciates, the limits of her authority” and lamented that she would unravel a Trump-era regulation that bolstered the due-process rights of students accused of sexual misconduct.

Though Lhamon maintained a measured posture that leaned heavily on existing law, Burr pressed her on the due process question, including whether students should have the right to see the evidence used against them in misconduct allegations and whether she believes in the “presumption of innocence.” Ultimately, Barr argued that Lhamon’s record on holding schools accountable for students’ sexual misconduct “is deeply troubling if not outright disqualifying.”

In response to question from Sen. Burr, Lhamon again won’t say that she endorses the presumption of innocence; will only say that in “civil rights investigations,” TIX adjudicators “should be open to the possibility” that acc’d students aren’t guilty.

— KC Johnson (@kcjohnson9)

After accusing former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of rolling back civil rights enforcement for years, Lhamon said on Tuesday that it’s critical for the Office for Civil Rights to return “to even-handed enforcement that is consistent with the law.” In 2011, before Lhamon became assistant secretary, the Obama administration released a that instructed educators to investigate sexual misconduct allegations “regardless of where the conduct occurred,” and to use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard when determining guilt. Eight months into her tenure, DeVos rescinded the guidance and replaced it with new Title IX regulations in 2020. The Biden administration the Obama-era guidance.

Lhamon avoided a direct response to Burr’s questioning, arguing instead that she ultimately “won’t be in control of what change does or does not happen with respect to the Title IX regulation,” as the Biden administration’s work on that issue has already begun. But she did hold that Title IX has long failed to protect students from campus sexual misconduct, and that the Trump-era regulations weakened enforcement.

That acknowledgement came after Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, in which she argued the Trump-era regulations would move the country “back to the bad old days,” when it was “permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity.” In defending the tweet, Lhamon noted that the Trump-era regulations narrowed which school officials are required to respond to sexual misconduct allegations. That group includes Title IX coordinators, school officials with “authority to institute corrective measures,” and K-12 teachers in cases of student-on-student misconduct.

“Among the resolutions that I oversaw when I led the Office for Civil Rights included resolutions where, for example, at Michigan State, a student reported that she’d been sexually harassed by a counselor in the counseling office when she went for counseling about sexual harassment,” Lhamon said. “She reported it to the counseling office. Under the current regulation, there would be no responsibility for the school to investigate.”

Lhamon’s nomination hearing also highlighted another Title IX issue that’s been central to recent partisan feuds: The rights of transgender students to participate in school athletics. Under Lhamon’s lead in 2016, the Education Department released a “Dear Colleague” letter notifying schools that transgender students must be permitted to use restroom facilities that align with their gender identities. The Trump administration in 2017.

In a series of questions, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, asked Lhamon whether transgender girls should be permitted to compete in women’s athletics or if such a policy discriminates against cisgender females. Tuberville, who was the head football coach at Auburn University before joining the Senate, suggested that transgender students could instead be relegated to their own athletic teams.

In response, Lhamon said that Title IX aims to ensure that nobody faces sex-based discrimination in public schools, including any student who wishes to participate in school athletics.

As Republicans probed Lhamon on her policy record, Democrats consistently rallied to support her. In defending the Obama-era guidance on transgender student rights, Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, accused Republicans of waging a “public relations campaign” that isn’t about protecting female athletes but is rather “unfortunately about trying to marginalize these kids and make people fear them and make people see them as a threat.”

“Nothing could be, frankly, further from the truth,” he said. “These are kids who, just like all of our kids, want to participate in athletics, an experience that is central to coming of age for millions of kids all across this country. An idea that we would deny that to anyone in this nation simply because of their [gender identity], I think, is deeply unAmerican.”

Along with the guidance on transgender students’ rights, Lhamon’s tenure with the Obama administration included a “Dear Colleague” letter from 2014 which warned schools that racial disparities in school discipline could violate federal civil rights laws. The Trump administration did away with that guidance, too, but Lhamon said on Tuesday that it’s “crucial” for the Biden administration to reinstate it. In fact, she noted that when the civil rights office was created in 1979 partly to enforce federal school desegregation orders, racially disparate school discipline rates were among the first issues that investigators confronted.

That racial disparities in school discipline persist to this day “means that we have not gotten our arms around it as a country and we are not doing enough right by our kids,” she said, adding that racial disparities are not always a form of discrimination. “I think it’s crucial to reinstate guidance on the topic and I think it’s crucial to be clear with school communities about what the civil rights obligations are and how best to do the work in their classrooms.”

Though Tuesday’s hearing centered primarily on Lhamon, lawmakers also considered the nominations of Lisa Brown as the Education Department’s general counsel and Roberto Rodriguez as its assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development. Brown is currently the general counsel of Georgetown University and Rodriguez is the president and CEO of the nonprofit Teach Plus. On average, takes 68 days between their nomination and a final Senate vote, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

The U.S. Department of Education will hold a virtual summit on June 22 — the first in a series of events focused on addressing the inequitable impact of the pandemic on students of color and other high-need groups.

Setting the stage for the conversation, the department’s Office for Civil Rights released a report Wednesday, summarizing what it calls a “developing story” of how the shift to remote learning and the public health crisis widened disparities in students’ access to a quality education.

Drawing on existing surveys, research and assessment data, the report recapped how vulnerable groups, including English learners, students with disabilities and LGBTQ students, faced significant barriers to learning before the pandemic, only to be further cut off from the support they needed during school closures. The report comes the same week as a public hearing on Title IX and follows last week’s that the Office for Civil Rights will accept public comments on discrimination in school discipline, offering further evidence that an arm of the department that was downsized during the previous administration is leading much of the agenda so far under Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.

The department also released for how states and districts can implement the “maintenance of equity” provision of the American Rescue Plan, which is intended to prevent budget and staffing cuts at high-poverty schools.

The upcoming summit, guidance and report comply with an President Joe Biden issued when he took office, directing federal agencies to examine the challenges facing underserved communities.

Offering 11 observations of the pandemic’s impact on students, the report noted “worrisome signs” that academic performance has fallen below per-pandemic levels, that nearly all students have experienced mental health challenges and that gay, lesbian and transgender students have been at increased risk of isolation, harassment or abuse.

“Those who went into the pandemic with the fewest opportunities are at risk of leaving with even less,” the report said.

The event later this month will focus on how students can influence the schools they attend, continuing Cardona’s emphasis on student voice. He’s met with students during school visits, featured students during his school reopening summit in March and held a roundtable discussion with homeless youth in April.

Other speakers at the summit will include Deputy Secretary Cindy Marten, Pedro Noguera, dean of education at the University of Southern California, and Olivia Carter, the 2021 School Counselor of the Year.

The report out Wednesday stressed the role of civil rights protections for students as they recover from the pandemic. Schools, for example, must enroll homeless students without requiring proof of residency documents and ensure English learners receive language instruction and support.

The report noted that prior to the pandemic, students of color and students with disabilities were more likely to face suspension, expulsion and other harsh discipline practices. Now, the hardship, grief and loss some students have experienced may contribute to behavior challenges once they return to school full time. Schools, as a result, will have a greater need for educators and other specialists who understand how to work with students who have experienced trauma, according to the report.

The pandemic revealed “deep cracks in the foundation” of the nation’s schools, the report said. “We have an extraordinary opportunity to move forward with full awareness of these cracks and recognition of the essential need to address and repair them.”