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Educators, researchers and employees at the Department of Education say that the Trump administration’s slashing of federal bureaucracies and workforces has significantly weakened special education enforcement and killed programs meant to help students with disabilities.
Last week, Tamara Linkow, the senior director of the American Institutes for Research’s education evaluation studies program, told The Independent that she learned that the federal government canceled funding for Charting my Path for Future Success. The program was meant to help students with disabilities learn about programs to transition to adulthood.
“It consists of two different support programs for students at the end of high school to help them identify to set goals, plan their goals, and take action towards their goals for life after high school,” Linkow told The Independent. Linkow said that the program had just started working with instructors across 13 different school districts across the country that hired about 60 different special educators this semester.
Trump campaigned explicitly on slashing the U.S. Department of Education. He nominated former WWE executive Linda McMahon to serve as his secretary of Education. As late as last week, he said that he wanted the department “shuttered immediately.” Efforts to slash the Department of Education have begun in earnest.
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The study began in 2019. Catherine Fowler – a professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and director at the National Technical Assistance Center on Transition: The Collaborative – said she had been working on the program from the beginning and had worked as a district liaison during the last spring and early summer, identifying districts to participate in the program.
“And so just as everything was really getting started, there would be three semesters of intervention, and that’s where we would really learn what was effective and how to how to do this in schools and do it well, and then be able to track students after high school and see what the long term outcomes are,” she told The Independent.
Students with disabilities have their rights enforced through the Department of Education under laws such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which stipulates that any entity that received federal dollars cannot discriminate against people with disabilities.
Students with disabilities have “504 meetings” to outline the accommodations for students with disabilities, as well as “individualized education plans,” which provide instruction for students with disabilities.
“The instructors had just started working with students,” Linkow said. “They were about a month and a half in depending upon the district, working with their students, and they had to stop overnight.”
The program was funded as part of a $45 million grant entitled “Evaluation of Transition Supports for Youth with Disabilities,” which was meant to evaluate the best programs for students with disabilities based on “strengthening students’ goal setting, planning, and self-advocacy skills and helping them apply these self-determination skills to their transition objectives,” according to the grant’s website.
“This project was so powerful because it was both getting students access to services, getting school districts access to trained instructors to deliver effective services, and we were going to learn a lot about effective services as well so that we could inform the future of what schools and teachers are doing,” Karrie Shogren, a professor of special education at the University of Kansas, said.
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At the Canyon Schools District in Utah, the program served 88 students in 11th grade at five high schools.
“The whole point, right, obviously, is to sort of study what works best in preparing students for life after high school,” Kirsten Stewart, the director of communications for the district, told The Independent.
In response, the district sent an email informing families that students would continue to receive supports they received before starting Charting My Path and it would not affect other services students receive from the district or other agencies.
“What I can say is that we, whenever possible, our practices to absorb staff cuts through resignments, and we have several current job openings in special education,” she said.
Numerous federal bureaucracies such onto the chopping block under the guise of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Ironically, Shogren, the University of Kansas professor, told The Independent, the program would have evaluated the most effective ways to help students with disabilities transition into adulthood.
“This was going to be a chance to figure out what is the most efficient way to support schools, teachers, students, to implement things that are going to lead to the outcomes we want for all students with disabilities, to have jobs, to have careers, to transition effectively into adulthood,” she said.
The Department of Education did not respond immediately for requests for comment.
Linkow said that school districts are hopefully coming close to learning what they will do without the money.
“So districts are having to make a decision, very tough decision, whether they need to let the instructors go, or whether some districts are not,” she said. Some districts will need to find out if there is a way to keep educators on staff despite the money being pulled.
Linkow said she has no idea why this contract was pulled. “This contract, like all others, was terminated for convenience,” she said. “And this program, as I’m sure you saw it, was developed to be effective for students of all types of disabilities, so ADHD, dyslexia, autism, all the way to non-verbal and physically handicapped students.”
Shogren said as a researcher, she is no longer able to conduct her work.
“All of the supports that were going into schools as well were stopped as a part of this, you know,” she said. “So I think the question now is, how do we continue to support students, teachers in schools to provide these transition services?”
Fowler said cutting off the program means much of the work will not see any results.
“So on the bottom line there’s money that won’t be spent, but there’s definitely a lot of money that has already been spent, and there won’t be any outcomes from that,” she said. “That is where it doesn’t seem to match, you know, the goal of efficiency and the goal of saving money. That doesn’t seem like a cost savings to me.”
