WASHINGTON — It was obvious to Christine Smith Olsey that her son was not doing well at school, despite educators telling her to leave it to the experts. The second-grade student stumbled over words, and other kids teased him so much he started to call himself “an idiot.”
Though her son had been receiving speech and occupational therapy, Smith Olsey said his Denver charter school resisted her requests for additional academic support. She filed a complaint with the state and then, in September, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
In January, her son’s case came to a halt.
“I have to postpone meetings with you to discuss the case,” a department mediator wrote to her on Jan. 23, three days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. “I am sorry for the inconvenience. I will be in touch as I am able.”
As Trump began to reshape the Education Department, investigations and mediations around disability rights issues came to a standstill.
Standing up for children with disabilities has been a primary role of the department’s civil rights office, which enforces protections guaranteed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Historically, most complaints to the department have involved disability discrimination — parents saying their disabled child is not receiving accommodations they need to learn, which schools must provide under federal law.
It’s not unusual for new presidential administrations to freeze cases while they adjust priorities, but exceptions typically are made for urgent situations, such as a child’s immediate learning situation. The freeze on pending cases and Trump’s calls to dismantle the department altogether left many parents worrying about the federal government’s commitment to disabled students’ rights.
In the first weeks of the Trump administration, the Education Department has launched investigations of complaints involving antisemitism and transgender athletes allowed to compete in women’s sports, delivering on Trump’s vow to use federal funding as leverage to assail perceived “wokeness” in schools.
It’s worrisome the administration has said so little about responding to complaints from families of students with disabilities, said Catherine Lhamon, who led the Office for Civil Rights under former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
“If it is not aggressively engaged in protecting those rights, the office is not doing its job,” Lhamon said in an interview.
An Education Department spokesperson said the Office for Civil Rights ended the pause on its review of disability complaints Thursday, after The Associated Press asked for comment on the findings of reporting for this story. The Trump administration lifted its pause on disability cases sooner than the Biden administration did in its first months in office, spokesperson Julie Hartman said.
The freeze had upended progress for families like Smith Olsey’s, whose children’s special education services may hinge on the outcomes of the department’s dispute resolution process.
“It’s a scary time right now to be a parent of special needs kiddos,” Smith Olsey said.
Her son has been diagnosed with attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder, autism, dyslexia, and dyscalculia, a learning disorder caused by differences in parts of the brain involved with numbers and calculations. Since preschool, he has had an individualized education program for a developmental delay.
This month, the school agreed her son needs extra academic help, but she is seeking compensatory services to make up for time he went without adequate support. She also is seeking reimbursement for money she spent out of pocket on therapy, tutoring and testing.
When families believe their child is not receiving adequate services for their disability, filing a complaint with the Education Department is one way of prompting districts to provide additional help. Parents may also file a complaint with state agencies or pursue litigation.
Between 2021 and 2024, the department’s Office for Civil Rights received 27,620 complaints related to disability rights. The office is required to process all complaints it fields, but politics can play a role in setting priorities and choosing which cases to pursue.
Typically, more than half of the complaints to the department have involved disability discrimination, but last year accusations of sex discrimination surged to account for a majority of them, according to an annual report. Disability discrimination accounted for 37%, while discrimination over race or national origin accounted for 19%.
In recent years, the office has seen a significant decline in its staffing, even as the number of cases it must look into has increased.
Parents and advocates say they are concerned about the future of the department’s oversight role as Trump and his nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon, outline a vision for a dramatically reduced footprint for the agency.
At her confirmation hearing, Democrats pressed McMahon on whether she would support the department’s enforcement role in disability rights. She suggested the Department of Health and Human Services could take over that work.
“There is a reason the Department of Education exists, and it is because educating kids with disabilities can be really hard,” Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., said during the hearing. “It takes national commitment to get it done.”
In the fall, DarNisha Hardaway was relieved when an Education Department mediator found her son’s school needed to reevaluate him and provide tutoring. She had filed a complaint with the department after a series of suspensions that she said stemmed from her son being overwhelmed and not getting enough academic help. The 12-year-old has an intellectual disability, autism and epilepsy.
The Education Department, Hardaway said, “made the school system do what they’re supposed to do.”
If the school district broke the mediation agreement, she was told to contact the Office for Civil Rights again. This month, after her son had an outburst in class, his suburban Detroit school told her he would need to learn online for the rest of the year — a ruling Hardaway saw as a violation of his disability accommodations. On Tuesday, an Office for Civil Rights representative told her they could not respond with any substantive information.
Every day she waits, her son learns in front of a computer. “He can’t learn online, and DarNisha is not a teacher,” said Marcie Lipsitt, who is working with the family. “The OCR is just closed for business, and I’m outraged.”
Complaints about racial discrimination in schools are also pending.
Tylisa Guyton of Taylor, Michigan, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights on Jan. 20 over her 16-year-old son’s repeated suspensions from a suburban Detroit school district, alleging a white administrator has been targeting him and a group of other Black children.
The teen has been out of school since Dec. 4 with the latest suspension, and she has heard nothing about when he might be allowed to return or be placed in an alternative school. Since missing so much school, she doubts he will be able to graduate on time.
“I just feel lost,” she said.
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