Education Week

In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Lindsey Williams, a Democrat from the Pittsburgh area, said her office has heard from families with complaints pending before the Education Department, and school districts in the middle of OCR investigations, that haven’t been able to get answers from the agency since the downsizing. Parents and advocates have said largely the same thing in court filings: that investigations in response to complaints they filed have simply stopped. 

Williams is drafting legislation that would create a state Pennsylvania office of civil rights in the state’s education department. It would give the state new authorities, and strengthen existing ones, to investigate and enforce federal and state civil rights laws “in the absence of a federal government willing to do so,” Williams wrote in a memo about the bill that’s still in the works.