How the Education Department Helps Students with Disabilities

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. Today, the education department has measures in place for these situations.

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.

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

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.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services