NEWS: Senator Blunt Rochester Slams Trump Administration Attempt to Dismantle Department of Education

"This administration's interagency agreements will harm students with disabilities."

Click here to watch Senator Blunt Rochester's remarks.

U.S. Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, today participated in a spotlight hearing on the Trump administration's attempts to dismantle the Department of Education and efforts to move the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) and Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Blunt Rochester questioned witnesses on how these attempts will harm students with disabilities.

In a recent HELP Committee Executive Session, Blunt Rochester offered an amendment to prevent the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the Department of Education from being transferred to another Federal Agency. Republicans blocked consideration of the amendment.

Witnesses:

• Laurie VanderPloeg - Associate Executive Director for Professional Affairs, Council for Exceptional Children
• Katy Neas - Chief Executive Officer, The Arc of the United States
• Valerie C. Williams - Former Director, Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education
• Seth Galanter - Senior Fellow, Edley Center on Law & Democracy
• Elizabeth Tang - Senior Counsel for Education and Workplace Justice, National Women's Law Center
• Stephanie Smith Lee - Co-Director of Policy and Advocacy, National Down Syndrome Congress

Senator Blunt Rochester's questions can be found here, and a key excerpt can be found below:

Senator Blunt Rochester: "Can you compare OCR's model to how the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division processes discrimination cases and say why that difference matters, and specifically why it matters for students with disabilities?"

Mr. Galanter: "Both the roles that DOJ and OCR play are incredibly important, but they are quite distinct. The special role that OCR plays is particularly valuable for parents and students who don't have access to resources, who don't have access to lawyers, or who simply have a complaint and need help, and the OCR complaint process is one of the few places in the federal government that they can go in an education setting and get an individualized response.

"DOJ performs an incredibly valuable function at a systems level. They look and they get lots of complaints, and they sift through them, looking for patterns, looking for you know great great facts or you know novel questions of law that they want to establish a new rule on, and they work aggressively to vindicate the rights of kids.

"But they do it at a macro level. They do it in cases that takes years that lead to settlements that say 90% of kids should get X within you know two years, or you know we want substantial compliance with this by 2030, and that's great for the system. But for an individual parent who's part of the 10% who's not getting the immediate relief, they could always come to OCR.

"There's no plan that they've revealed to explain how they're going to transfer these functions, which requires hundreds of investigators and attorneys experienced in education law, and move it to an agency that, as we know, has already itself been depleted of a lot of its existing expertise, and bringing in a whole new function with a whole different mindset, a different culture that's needed to reach these individual resolutions in so many individual fact-specific cases."