Mother Jones

Last Friday, all but two senior staff members in the federal Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) received reduction-in-force notices, according to reporting from  K-12 Drive. It was part of a scourge of layoffs. 460 people across the Department of Education received RIF notices. That is roughly one in five workers in the agency. But OSEP’s evisceration is particularly harmful. One of the major responsibilities of OSEP is to distribute funding connected to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This accounts for the money needed for the roughly 7.5 million disabled students on Individualized Education Plans, also known as IEPs.