Education Department Layoffs Impact Special Education, Civil Rights Functions

It’s unclear when school districts may experience delayed funding due to the lack of federal workers to process entitlements, experts say.

LASOS summer campers hold up an art project at Bel Air High School in Bel Air, Md., on July 24, 2025. AP Photo/KT Kanazawich

The 466 employees recently laid off in the already shrinking Department of Education were responsible for processing grants for special needs students and investigating discrimination and harassment complaints in schools.

The School Superintendents Association, an advocacy group, stated that most staffers in the Office of Special Education and the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education were terminated. Those two offices oversee $44 billion in discretionary funding that schools use for staff, services, and equipment to serve millions of students with disabilities.

“There is reason to be concerned that [the Department of Education] cannot effectively manage this funding without many of these staff, and there could be disruptions to district and state operations, including reimbursement requests,” Sasha Pudelski, the association’s advocacy director, said in an Oct. 13 website post.

The Department of Education, with much of its remaining staff furloughed because of the government shutdown, has not commented on how funding and services to K–12 schools will be maintained with a much smaller staff.

While the vast majority of layoffs are related to special education functions, an unknown number of employees in the department’s Office for Civil Rights were also let go recently.

The American Federation of Government Employees union, in its Oct. 10 lawsuit against the federal government over the firings, tallied the total number of terminated Department of Education employees at 466, but it did not detail the roles of those workers.

In an automated email response, Department of Education media representatives said they are currently on furlough due to the shutdown and could not respond to inquiries.

Meg Keller-Cogan, a former public school superintendent, principal, and special education teacher who now heads the post-graduate school administrator training program at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York, said it’s difficult to gauge when public schools will feel the pinch stemming from the federal layoffs.

Most K–12 districts operate on a July 1 through June 30 budget year and presumably already received some of the special education funding promised to them for this academic year. The grants allocated to schools haven’t been cut, but the personnel responsible for getting the money incrementally to the schools have been.

“It would be unprecedented to cut off funding in the middle of a cycle,” Keller-Cogan told The Epoch Times, noting that districts can move money around during the academic year if federal grants are delayed, but special education is a massive allocation within K–12, so this situation is still quite concerning to most public school leaders.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has publicly affirmed her pledge to dismantle the Department of Education. She previously terminated about 2,000 employees, cutting the size of the agency in half. She has said that the bureaucracy she oversees should be eliminated, with special education functions moved to Health and Human Services and civil rights investigations to the Department of Justice. Funding streams would be maintained in the form of state block grants.

The Afterschool Alliance, a nonprofit that supports and advocates for afterschool programs nationwide, called the terminations “another shocking attack” that followed other recent funding delays affecting summer programs. The terminations affect grant issuance to programs that serve students when school isn’t in session, according to the group.

“Without its staff, we risk having more children and youth unsupervised and at risk, more academic failures, more hungry kids, more chronic absenteeism, higher dropout rates, more parents forced out of their jobs, a less STEM-ready and successful workforce, and a child care crisis that is even worse,” the alliance said in an Oct. 11 statement.

“These firings threaten children, youth, working families, and our future.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A previous version of this article misstated the name of Canisius University. The Epoch Times regrets the error.