A big change for kids with disabilities is underway, Trump says. Critics say it’s against the law.
By Kalyn BelshaandErica Meltzer for Chalkbeat
President Donald Trump made a brief announcement Friday morning of a policy that could upend how the nation serves its 7.5 million students with disabilities.
Offering virtually no details, Trump said he’d decided that the Department of Health and Human Services would handle students’ “special needs” instead of the Education Department.
“Rather complex,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “I think that will work out very well.”
But many legal experts and advocates for children with disabilities say the president does not have the authority to move funding or oversight of special education to another agency. That would require an act of Congress, they say.
Many educators, parents, and disability rights advocates worry that the president will try to move forward anyway, and that this plan could end up stripping children with disabilities of legally required educational support and services — and sideline them in an agency that doesn’t have the expertise, staff, or training to properly serve them.
“There was a recognition that the education of students with disabilities should occur alongside non-disabled students,” when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, was signed into law in 1975, said Robyn Linscott, the director of education and family policy at The Arc, which advocates for children with disabilities.
“To be able to say that students with disabilities are this monolith and we can just pluck them out of the general population of students and plop them into a different agency,” Linscott said, “is just bonkers.”
What the law says about Education Department’s role
IDEA predates the creation of the federal Education Department by four years, and was enacted when education fell under what was then known as the Health, Education, and Welfare Department.
IDEA would remain on the books even if the Education Department ceased to exist. But advocates said enforcement of the law is bound up in the infrastructure of the Education Department, as the two evolved together. Students with disabilities are part of nearly every other education law, from school accountability to higher education access.
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