A Cowardly Attack on Disabled Students
When Republicans like the squatter currently occupying the White House try to cut popular public support and civil rights programs, they do so in cowardly fashion, like a bully who shoots you a quick elbow to the ribs when he thinks nobody’s watching.
Take, for example, all that’s been going on lately with Donald Trump’s attacks on the U.S. Department of Education. The department is currently responsible for enforcing the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act of 1975 (IDEA), which establishes the right of every child with a disability in the United States to a “free and appropriate” public education.
Before IDEA was enacted, disabled students were routinely rejected by our school districts. The public schools that my non-disabled neighbors attended weren’t wheelchair accessible. There was no law obligating school districts to do anything to accommodate disabled children at that time, so they often did nothing, and we had no legal recourse. I was instead bussed miles away to one of Chicago’s few accessible public schools.
IDEA gives the parents and guardians of disabled kids a means of fighting back against their school district if they feel that the disabled child is being shortchanged on their education due to lack of accommodation. They can file a complaint with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which assigns an investigator to look into and help resolve the dispute.
But shortly after the squatter took office on January 20, a freeze was placed on OCR investigations of disability complaints. That freeze was lifted on February 20, but the Associated Press reports that OCR investigators have been told to shift their priorities to better reflect the political agenda of the squatter, which includes such matters as keeping transgender people from participating in school athletics, stopping pro-Palestinian student protests, and eradicating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Earlier this month, the squatter’s regime closed seven of the twelve regional OCR offices, including the one here in Chicago and in other major cities such as New York and Philadelphia. This was done via a mass email to about 1,300 of the DoE’s 4,000 employees sharing the “difficult news” that their jobs were being eliminated. The OCR division was among the most heavily affected.
This is how political cowards go about doing their dirty work. They profess their undying love for and eternal devotion to laws like IDEA. But they know that a quick and easy way to make a law ineffective is to deprive those who enforce civil rights laws and administer public programs of the resources they need to properly do their jobs.
The squatter never would have dared to promise on the campaign trail that, if elected, he would gut the right of disabled kids to receive a free and appropriate public education. But he has spoken often about his simple-minded quest to abolish the Education Department, which, he says, has become infested with “radicals, zealots, and Marxists.”
That’s just another cowardly way of doing things.