How the Education Department Helps Students with Disabilities Get an Education

Sueli Gwiazdowski, 24, says she switched high schools three times when she was growing up.

She wanted to stay at her first school because she loved being on the speech and debate team – but the campus wasn’t wheelchair accessible. Her second school forced her to learn in a separate room, away from her non-disabled friends.

“I had to fight my way out of that by going to a lot of…meetings and asserting that I was capable and able to participate in the general education setting,” she says.

Gwiazdowski has medical and physical disabilities and was, for many years, a full-time wheelchair user.

A federal law protects against the kind of discrimination Gwiazdowski says she experienced, and she invoked that law – the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) – throughout her schooling to advocate for herself.

“Quite frankly, had it not been for the publicly accessible resources that the Department of Education has provided to students with disabilities like myself, I probably would not have gone to college,” says Gwiazdowski, who is now both a college graduate and an advocate for disability rights.

“And I definitely wouldn’t be waiting for law school to start this fall had it not been for those resources.”

But the U.S. Education Department’s role in helping students with disabilities may be changing soon.

President Trump has said his administration is going to move “special needs” to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), an agency that recently announced its own drastic cuts. His administration hasn’t specified exactly which programs will be moved, and whether IDEA is among them, but the conservative policy playbook Project 2025 does propose moving IDEA to HHS.

Department of Education spokesperson Madi Biedermann said, “The Department is actively reviewing where [Education Department] programs can be responsibly managed to best serve students and families. This will be done in partnership with Congress, other agencies, and national and state education leaders.”

Experts tell NPR any such move would be incredibly complicated. Special education laws are “intertwined” with the Education Department, says Katy Neas, a former deputy assistant secretary in the department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

“To have the separation away from a broader institution of education just seems misguided to me,” says Neas, who now leads The Arc, an advocacy organization for people with disabilities. Neas says moving some of the legally protected programs to another agency would also require an act of Congress.

But some conservatives wonder if the federal government has even been that helpful when it comes to special education.

“I mean, parents make their [education plans] with their local educators, right? With their school and their school district. They don’t make it with Washington,” says Jonathan Butcher, an education researcher at the Heritage Foundation, which helped shape Project 2025.

With so many questions swirling around the future of federal involvement in special education, here’s a look at how the Department of Education traditionally contributes to the schooling of students with disabilities.

Helping schools follow federal laws aimed at students with disabilities

The Department of Education oversees many federal laws that govern how students with and without disabilities experience school.

But IDEA is one of the primary ways the federal government contributes to educating disabled students. The law enshrines the right of every child to “a free and appropriate public education,” and it says students with disabilities have a right to individual education programs (IEPs) that lay out the services each child is entitled to. IDEA is also the vehicle through which the federal government sends money to schools to help pay for those services.

“Not only does the Department of Education provide funding for staffing and resources to the individual school divisions, but IDEA, I mean, that’s your accountability framework,” says Mark Burnette, superintendent of Carroll County Public Schools in rural southwestern Virginia. He says nearly a fifth of his students qualify for services under IDEA.

Nationwide, IDEA serves about 7.5 million students, or 15% of the K-12 student population. In fiscal year 2024, Congress set aside $15.4 billion for IDEA. The Education Department is in charge of distributing that money to states, which then pass those funds on to qualifying school districts.

IDEA funds are used to pay for special education teachers and staff, technology to meet students’ individual needs, instructional materials, transportation and more.

“A child who has a hearing impairment may need a sign language interpreter or captioning to really follow what’s going on in class,” says Neas. “It’s those things that allow a child with a disability to really learn the same material as their non-disabled peers.”

The Department of Education is responsible for monitoring whether states and school districts are following IDEA, and other laws aimed at students with disabilities. That includes Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which says students are entitled to reasonable accommodations, such as scheduled breaks for a child with diabetes to have a snack or check their insulin levels.

The department also provides IDEA guidance to state leaders, and collect data that help determine eligibility for IDEA funds.

Enforcing special education law and the civil rights of students with disabilities

The Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, is the Education Department’s enforcement arm. When students face discrimination at school, they can file a complaint with OCR, which could lead to a federal investigation.

This office is responsible for discrimination complaints on the basis of race, sex, national origin and other categories, but OCR data shows disability discrimination has historically made up the largest share of complaints.

Sueli Gwiazdowski wishes she would have taken advantage of OCR during her schooling.

“The formal complaint process would have allowed me to be a kid,” she says.

It would have let her put the responsibility of enforcement “in the laps of the attorneys and investigators who are paid to do that at the Office for Civil Rights.”

In recent years, the number of OCR complaints has reached record highs, and many have dragged through the system for months on end. But recently, OCR’s capacity to handle all those cases was further strained: When U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon slashed the Education Department’s workforce nearly in half, OCR also lost more than 40% of its staff, along with seven of its 12 regional offices.

The Trump administration promised it would preserve “resources for children with special disabilities.” But the mass layoffs also affected the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services, where Neas used to work. The teams that conduct research on special education, help determine eligibility for IDEA funds and those who provide legal guidance to state and local leaders were also impacted.

“If you don’t have any type of accountability standards or someone to report to, then that leaves room for people to take advantage of programs and not provide the services that they need to provide,” says Burnette, the superintendent.

Michael Gilberg, a special education attorney in New York and Connecticut who also has autism, says one of his disabled clients recently filed a complaint with OCR.

“With no Department of Education functioning in that area, that puts [their case] to a standstill,” he says.

Gilberg notes that without OCR, “The only recourse a family would have would, in theory, be to sue the school district in either federal court or state court…and that takes a lot of time and a lot of money.”

The future role of the federal government in special education

Several of the experts NPR spoke with expressed concern about moving special education programs to HHS, and away from the Education Department, an institution that specializes in helping all students learn.

Alison Barkoff, who led disability programs at HHS until last year, says splintering special education programs into different agencies “is really counterproductive to what IDEA and the goals of special education are about, which is students with disabilities as students first, as part of their schools, part of their classrooms. And that can’t happen if it’s separated from general education.”

Jonathan Butcher of the Heritage Foundation sees the proposed moves as an opportunity to improve the role of the federal government in the lives of students.

“I think that moving it to another agency is an appropriate move because I don’t think that we have evidence that the U.S. Department of Education has effectively served these families,” he says.

“Change is difficult and that’s why it doesn’t happen very often at the federal level, but this is an opportunity to streamline federal processes.”

Disability advocate Sueli Gwiazdowski says history has shown the dangers of separating the rights of disabled students from non-disabled students.

“When educating disabled students has not been considered part of normative general education, that has looked like what? It’s looked like institutionalization.”

She worries if special education were to move to HHS, disability could be categorized as a health concern rather than an integrated part of public life, including in schools.

Reporting contributed by: Dylan Peers McCoy
Digital story edited by: Nicole Cohen
Radio story edited by: Steve Drummond
Visuals by: Mhari Shaw