Latest / DiveIn: Diving into Special Education's Most Complex and Pressing Debates / MOVERS NEEDED! 📦 What Is Happening to the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services?

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MOVERS NEEDED! 📦 What Is Happening to the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services? · DiveIn: Diving into Special Education's Most Complex and Pressing Debates

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From the Division of Research of the Council for Exceptional Children,
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this is Dive in, the podcast where we ask
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difficult questions about the education of students with disabilities. And occasionally
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we pretend we have the answers. I'm your host,
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Federico Vitolo, professor at the University of Illinois,
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Chicago. So, are you ready? Let's dive in.
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Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of Dive In.
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This week we're taking a short break from our inclusive
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education series because there is a lot happening in Washington
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and when the federal government starts moving special education offices
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around town, we probably need to pay attention. But first,
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if you have been following our inclusive education series, first of all,
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where have you been so far? We have talked with David
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Connor, Doug Fuchs Anscott, and Valentina Miglarini,
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who have given us very different perspectives on what inclusive education means,
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where students should learn what counts as evidence and what needs
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to change in our schools. And we are not done.
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In our upcoming episodes, we will turn to instructional
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design for inclusive education and we will also hear perspectives that
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are sometimes missing from academic debates like parents and students.
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But this week we need to make a quick trip to
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Washington D.C. because apparently special education
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is moving. No, I mean literally, it's moving.
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My guest today is Kuna Tavalin.
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If you've been a long time Dive in listener, you may remember Kuna from prior
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episodes. She's a regular in our show. Kuna works on federal policy
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and advocacy for the Council for Exceptional Children, and I invited
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her because a lot has happened since we last spoke in October.
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Perhaps the biggest development is the movement of staff and functions from
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the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services at the
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U.S. department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services.
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I asked whether people were literally walking through the streets of
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Washington carrying boxes of special education files from one
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federal agency to another one. It was a joke.
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Or at least I thought it was a joke. Gunna informed me
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that Usher's employees had in fact been given
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boxes and were packing their offices as we spoke.
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So apparently we reach a point where it is becoming
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very difficult for me to write satire about federal education
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policy. Reality keeps stealing my material.
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And while the boxes make for a good visual,
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what is happening behind those boxes is much more important because
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describing this simply as special education move to HHS doesn't
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quite capture what is happening. Some staff are moving.
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Some authority remains at the Department of Education. For example,
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political appointees funding may be travel
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one system while employees work in another agency. States may have
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to interact with multiple federal departments. But beneath the bureaucratic
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confusion are some very serious questions. What happens
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when the federal office responsible for special education is separated from
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the federal offices responsible for general K12
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education? Does moving special education to
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a health agency risk reinforcing segregation or a medical model
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of disability? What role could HHS Secretary
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Play, particularly regarding his comments about autism?
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What happens to IDA funding and federal oversight?
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Could IDA dollars eventually become part of the push towards vouchers?
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And perhaps most importantly, what could all this mean for
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the actual services students with disabilities receive in school?
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There is even, I hate to say this, some good
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news. Not a lot, let's not carry away. In fact, at one
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point Kuna tells me that I'm basically speaking her nightmares out of
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loud, which may be the best description yet of my interview style.
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Fortunately, we recorded the interview in the morning, so Kuna had the rest of the
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day to go for a long grind, seek therapy, or reconsider ever accepting another invitation
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to this podcast. So if you're trying to understand what exactly is happening
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with OSers, the Department of Special Education, HHS,
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IDA and federal special Education Policy and you have seen the headlines,
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but you're still thinking, what? Wait, who moved where?
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This episode is for you. Well, unpack it will ask
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what we know, we'll distinguish that from what we
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don't know, and we'll try to figure out where all those boxes are going.
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Are you ready? Let's dive in.
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Una so good to have you back on the show, though not always.
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You bring us the best news ever. But I'm
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so happy to see your face, hear your voice and hear what's going on.
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I appre. I appreciate being invited back. I'm grateful that
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you decided to have me back after our last conversation.
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Hopefully not everything is doom and gloom today, but we'll see how the
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conversation goes. Yeah, so yeah, we should start giving
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like antidepressant pills with the show. It should be like a promotion.
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It would be part of the sponsor. Anyway,
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last time I was checking last time we talked was last October and
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Since then it's October 2025. Of course. And since the great deal
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have happened in Washington, it seems like special education has moved around Washington
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so much that may qualify as a mobile student for schools.
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Maybe we receive some special services around that I don't know. But can
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you give us the big picture? What has in this in the has changed
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in the landscape? What is going on? Are they people moving things
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around? Is the special in my move? Did you see people carrying full locates
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of OCR complaints on the streets moving to another Office. What's going on?
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I love that you said that in that way because right now,
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literally, the staff at the Office of Special Education and
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Rehabilitative Services have been given boxes.
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They all have boxes at their desks and they are expected to
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move out of their office spaces by,
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I believe, the 8th of September, with a scheduled
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move in date for two days later at HHS.
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So my joke was not so much a joke there, actually wasn't
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very funny. No, sorry, sorry, we edited that down.
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She's. Yeah, it's. The thing is these days something that you think something extraordinary,
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almost funny, it's not funny because it's really happening.
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So it's incredible. Anyway, so let's. So they're
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moving. They're moving to the hhs, The Department of Human Health Services.
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Yes. And I'll just say they could have saved a lot of time and
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money by just painting HHS on the Department of Education building and calling
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it a victory. But instead, people are being moved to different agencies
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in little pieces. And not everybody's going. But just
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to go back to your question, kind of the big picture,
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if I could summarize, what has changed and what hasn't,
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the functions of IDEA have not changed.
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The funding remains the same.
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It's insufficient, but it remains the same.
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Most of the grant programs that
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were there a couple of years, that were established a couple of years ago,
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are continuing. And the big
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change is that the folks at the Department of Education are
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now what's called detailed or assigned to
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other agencies on what is technically a temporary basis,
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but what is being articulated as a permanent
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basis. Permanent basis is the goal for the administration,
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and that's just for the Office of Special Education Services. Is that
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for other offices? No, most of the offices have been reassigned
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at this point. The folks who are not going to be moving are the political
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appointees.
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The way that our federal education laws are written,
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there are certain functions that the Secretary of Education and
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certain positions under her that are political must carry
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out within the Department of Education. I think the way that these agreements
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have been reflected, written, the calculation, is that they are moving absolutely everyone
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who they can to other agencies and absolutely every function
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they can to other agencies while remaining within the bounds of the law.
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So there will be people left over. So like, for example,
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the decision making power when it comes to policies
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and priorities will remain with the political appointees at the Department of
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Education when they have to answer inquiries from Congress that
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will come from the Department of Education when they make a proposed rule that will
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technically come from the Department of Education will be the lead agency,
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but all the people will. The rest of the people are gone. So what
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are they going to be reporting? Well, it seems
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like they. It's not fully fleshed out
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and transparent, but it looks like they will be working within
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the office of. Formerly known as acl,
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the Administration for Community Living.
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And that's so. So with all that for our office,
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what it used to be OERs. Right. Office of Special Education Services.
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Yeah. That completely has all that personnel.
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It's as we speak, packing their boxes,
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moving to the Department of Human Health and Services.
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That's, that's happening as, as we're doing this interview.
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Last time we talked also there was a lot of people
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that had been fired. Right. Had been like notice of the termination
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of their job. Has that people been reinstated or.
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The amount of people is really a reduced amount of employees.
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So almost everyone at OSERS was fired
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last October during the government shutdown when Congress reopened
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the government in their law to reopen
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the government, they also required all of that personnel to be restored to
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their positions through the duration of that law,
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which ended at the end of January. So we were worried they would all be
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fired again wholesale at the end of January, but they were not.
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And so the kind of regular cadence of folks
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finding other jobs has happened, but they're, but folks are not being terminated.
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So for our audience to stand in, all these employees that
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are moving to the hhs, what were their roles? What are
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the responsibilities and how this move can impact the job they do?
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We're talking about people who support political appointees
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in creating new priorities for grant
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programs, new rules, new guidance. But there aren't very
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many of those folks really anymore. After the
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reduction in force that's now a year and a half old, then we're
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talking about project officers who work with grantees on specific
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grants. We're talking about people who work
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on state compliance with idea. Really,
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it's the people who are running the federal role in
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supporting and overseeing special education.
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Where do you see the implications of this? I know it hasn't happened, so I
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know exactly how it's going to play out. But what are the fears here?
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What are the implications of moving this personnel to a different
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office that has nothing to do with the location? Yeah,
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well, I think, I mean, there are many that we can speculate about and some
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are kind of nitty gritty and really happening and challenging
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and others I think are more big picture or fears
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that we will find out whether they are justified down the road.
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So the, the main constituents if
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you will, for OSers is either
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grantees or states. The, the big money goes to states and
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the oversight, the connection from the federal government is to states
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primarily, and the funding goes to states.
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So this notion of returning education to
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the states by relocating OSers from
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the Department of Education to HHS,
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nothing is actually being returned. They need to learn a
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new bureaucratic system. So we're
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reinventing a wheel that was already turning. This is
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not easy to do. So the Department of Education has actually
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decided to distribute the October 1st funding
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for special education that goes to states through their
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current payment management system within the Department of Education. Because actually
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transitioning that to a new system is challenging. It doesn't go
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smoothly. We saw that when the adult education and
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career and technical education funding was transitioned from the Department of Education to
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the Department of Labor. It was called
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a resounding success by the Secretary of Education at a time
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when half of states still had not been able to draw down their money.
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You have to do different reporting. You have a totally different system.
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You have to learn. And now what's happening is that states are, are currently
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working from Department of Labor and the Department of Education
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and they will, if this transition continues down
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the road that it's going in, also have to work with hhs.
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So we're actually creating more bureaucracy, not less.
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More work for states, not less. So that's just
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funding coming from one office. The employees are in other ones and
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the political employees are in another office. Like, it seems
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almost like when my students form groups to make an assignment that nobody knows what
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they're doing and they're just looking at their faces like, what are we doing now?
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Yeah, yeah,
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yeah. I mean, states are learning states.
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They have more jobs to do because they have more places they have to go
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to draw down funds and more reporting, different reporting. None of that is aligned anymore.
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And so that's a challenge there.
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There are other challenges that we'll see how they play off, play out.
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Right. Special education is, you know,
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north of $15 billion a year. That whole
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office that's not even including the Rehabilitative Services Administration.
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Right. Together they're moving under an office
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with a two and a half billion dollar budget. So that
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is already under capacity. So there's messaging that disability
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specialists at HHS have knowledge that OSERS is going
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to be able to leverage to improve the way that they do business.
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I'd love to see what that really looks like. I'm not aware of any kind
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of like secret weapons within HHS that are going to make special Education
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run better. Right. And I know that office
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is on a skeleton staff. I know a lot
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of the people who got riffed, who got reduced at hhs.
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Right. You have to remember that it wasn't just the Department of Education that saw
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a significant cut in staff that happened across agencies.
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So HHS is well under capacity compared to
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how they were, you know, on January 19th of
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2025. So we're, you know,
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we'll see how it goes. But certainly concerns about capacity,
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concerns about the way that grants are administered, kind of in the
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logistical. On the logistical side. And then there's another side.
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Right. The Department of Education was deliberately created
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to make it. To make it easier for the federal government to
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support states in educating children. Right.
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Fracturing those programs makes it. Makes it all much more
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difficult for kind of the exact inverse reasoning.
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Right. Moving special education to the health
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agency and the rest of K12 education to
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labor creates a real disjointment.
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Right. And we will see again how
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it plays out. But this notion of a medical model for
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serving kids with disabilities is a major, major concern under
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the Biden administration. One of the goals was to improve the
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way that Medicaid funds kids with disabilities in school.
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Right. And within the same administration,
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across the agencies of center for Medicare,
17:29
Medicaid Services and osers, folks worked
17:34
for years to try and better align, but they
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kept on running into the same challenge, which was the Department of Education
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is looking at what kinds of services kids need in order
17:45
to access the general education curriculum. Right.
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And CMS is thinking
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about what kind of treatment needs to
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be provided. Right. So we are talking about two very fundamentally different things.
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And they couldn't get on the same page because they speak different languages.
18:05
So when we say, even under a directive from politicals
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to say, make this work better. Right. They're looking at different laws. So when we
18:13
say we're concerned about treating a disability and not educating
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a child, there's a different mindset in the health agency.
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Right. That we have to be realistic about.
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Yeah, I was thinking of that, too. And I'm thinking also about who is leading
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DHS these days and the implications of that.
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You know, some people are afraid that with Robert F.
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Kennedy, Jr. Playing a role on this, I mean, how much power will he
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have to shape the teaching and learning of students with disabilities?
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Yeah, it's an open question. Will he?
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I mean, it's an open question. There's a scenario in
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which, because HHS is such a large agency, that special education
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is just lost in one of those many sub agencies that nobody is
19:00
really paying attention to. Or he could lean in
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really hard, especially on the autism question.
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And we don't really know what the
19:11
intention is there. But I will say that our colleagues at
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CEC who work with kids with autism and
19:19
advocates who are self advocates and families of
19:23
kids with autism are really, really, really scared because
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I think they feel like he misunderstands autism and
19:32
continuing to perpetuate the debunked
19:36
myth that vaccines cause autism. And even
19:40
just last month, with the rollout of a new of an executive order
19:44
that changes the vaccine schedule and making
19:48
references again to autism during that press
19:53
event, it continues to really,
19:57
really rattle our autism colleagues.
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Yeah. And also, like, pathologize students with autisms
20:05
and treat them from a deficit perspective. That it's
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not very conductive when it comes to teaching and learning. Not either to develop
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healthy identities either. Yeah, yeah. I also
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want to say, like, there is an argument that getting
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all of the federal disability programs into one place makes sense.
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Sense. But when we think about who is on an
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iep, like most of those kids are going to
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go on to live independent lives and will
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not be relying on those other federal programs and everybody
20:42
is being segregated from the mainstream in this move to
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put all disability programs under one roof. At hhs,
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we always. We always run into this challenge in the federal
20:55
government, and I think way beyond the federal government with
20:59
how to silo and how to break down silos and what grouping makes more sense.
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And I mean, we're humans, so everything is nuanced and complicated.
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But certainly as a field and as self
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advocates, we have always fought for integration and not segregation.
21:16
Yeah. I think it would be amazing if every agency had a disability
21:19
office, you know. Yeah.
21:22
Yeah. But the fear here is that this could
21:26
contribute to a further silos for delivering
21:32
instruction for students with disabilities because we'd be in a very different department,
21:37
segregated for the rest of the education community. Is that a fair assessment?
21:41
Yeah, I think so. I think so. It's like
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the federal government held an IEP meeting and decided that
21:49
all stars needed a new placement and put in a more restrictive environment, and we
21:53
ended up in dhhs. I think that hinders the possibilities
21:58
to look for to strive for further inclusion
22:02
of students with disabilities in schools. There are a lot of parallels, I think.
22:06
I mean, our CEO Chad Brummel has said,
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and I think he's right on the
22:16
Department of Education and all of their sub offices really do resemble
22:19
the way that a school operates. Right. You wouldn't take
22:23
the special ed department out of a school and go put it in a medical
22:27
office. Right. It just doesn't make sense.
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Yeah, no, that's right. It's like putting like a special ed department of a school
22:34
into a hospital and tell them to coordinate the schools to
22:38
teach students with disabilities. Probably it's more
22:42
complicated than that, but it definitely increases the kind of silos and expertise
22:47
bubbles that we have that doesn't allow us to make
22:51
it break those boundaries.
22:55
Is there any good news? I know some
22:59
I see you people don't see your face, but you're looking somewhere else now,
23:03
which it doesn't give me much hope.
23:05
Kuna. Anyway, the funding increased a little bit,
23:09
maybe from 14 billion to 15 billion, but then
23:13
some other money came away. What's going on funding wise?
23:18
What's going on funding wise is a great question right now.
23:22
Nothing until after the elections, actually.
23:25
Yeah. Quite literally. Last night Congress passed
23:29
a spending bill that's really a stopgap spending bill to make
23:32
sure that, that federal agencies are funded at current levels
23:36
through mid December. In other words, they decided not to make those funding
23:41
decisions until after the election. And they, and they've avoided
23:46
a government shutdown scenario during the election season
23:50
as well, which I think is, I mean, it's good when the government shuts down.
23:53
That's bad. So. But they haven't made decisions.
23:57
But I'll just say kind of in broad strokes, the House has
24:02
released their spending proposal. They cut a lot of programs.
24:06
They do not cut special education. They do trim down special
24:11
education research, but the idea programs
24:15
are not cut. The Senate has
24:19
not released the details of their bill and they will be negotiating
24:23
their bill until the very last minute because it
24:27
is anticipated to have some. The Senate will be pushing
24:31
for some controversial measures related to the Department of
24:35
Education that the House majority will not like and that the president
24:39
will not. And maybe that's where the good news is. I think the good news
24:44
really what keeps me going because we are really facing
24:48
some very strong headwinds right now. What keeps me going
24:52
is that our field, the advocacy community,
24:57
has really risen to the occasion. And because
25:01
of that, I think things could have been much worse.
25:06
And also we are seeing a little bit of a
25:10
few glimmers of hope. So, for example,
25:14
CEC and other organizations worked with the
25:18
Senate help Committee to support a bill that
25:22
actually passed in July that would,
25:26
or maybe it was August, I don't remember, but I think it was July anyway.
25:31
But it would prevent the secretary from Moving
25:35
Special Education, K12 Education, Indian education
25:39
and post secondary education offices out
25:43
of the Department of Education. There was a long negotiation
25:46
about the contents of that bill. It was spearheaded by
25:51
Senator Tim Kaine, who's a Democrat from Virginia,
25:55
and it was co authored by Senators Murkowski
26:00
of Alaska and Collins of Maine, who are both Republicans.
26:03
So it's a negotiated deal. It doesn't include the Office of Civil Rights, which is
26:07
certainly a priority for us, but it's.
26:10
And it's not a bill that's going to be signed into law. We know that.
26:14
But it's much, much stronger than just
26:18
a symbol or a message because one of the
26:22
co sponsors is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
26:25
And last year, during those final spending debates,
26:29
what kind of language to insert around the Department
26:33
of Education was the final thing that they negotiated.
26:37
It was the last kind of holdout. And what Congress did
26:41
last go round was express their
26:44
concerns. They expressed the same concerns we have with just a
26:49
number of things, from the legality of these moves to the
26:53
difficulty in administering the programs and so
26:57
on and so forth. But they didn't explicitly prevent any
27:03
of this from happening. And then they required that the
27:07
Department of Education brief the Appropriations Committee every
27:11
other week. Right. So it was kind of softer language. Well,
27:14
this year the chair, the Republican chair of the Senate Spending
27:18
Committee has co authored a bill to prevent these things from
27:23
moving. We always work with what we call four corners. So in
27:27
this case, our four corners are the chair and ranking members of the House
27:31
and Senate Appropriations Committees. It's always one
27:36
Republican and one Democrat on each side.
27:39
And the Democrats are in support of,
27:43
of this move to stop the department.
27:46
And now so is the chair of the Senate Committee.
27:51
So we have three of our four corners going into negotiations on the same
27:55
page, which is a really strong negotiating position.
27:59
I don't think that this bill will end up in the Appropriations Bill,
28:04
but I think that the language will be stronger than last time.
28:07
So there's some hope there. And this was really pushed
28:11
through advocacy and through two
28:17
Republicans in the Senate saying this is wrong
28:20
and having the strength to speak out about it. Well, I think
28:24
those two Republicans in the Senate are up for reelection in November too. So one
28:30
of them. Right, the one from Maine. Correct. Correct. Okay,
28:34
so we'll see also what happened with that. Well, I mean, and that's
28:38
a, that's a really good point because if she wins her reelection,
28:42
she has a lot of leverage come December when they're negotiating.
28:46
If she loses the election, then she's a lame duck.
28:50
It's going to be a very interesting post election season
28:54
this year. We don't really know how the elections are going to turn out.
28:58
They could, they could be minimally impactful on the makeup of the Congress
29:03
or they could be seismic and it could be, there could be anything in between.
29:06
We really don't have a good read this year. Yeah. Can you say again briefly,
29:10
where are the offices that these bill kept
29:14
from moving from the Department of Education Administration on Disabilities.
29:19
Which offices? Sorry, I don't know if I understand.
29:23
You mentioned a list of offices that were,
29:28
that appeals say that they could not move from the Department of Education and you
29:31
mentioned 405, which were of those. Can you remind us? Yeah.
29:35
So it is the osers, the Office of Special
29:39
Education and Rehabilitative Services. It's oese,
29:43
the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. Ope,
29:46
the Office of Post Secondary Education and Indian Education.
29:51
And why Indian Education? Because the move of
29:55
programs that support native children in public schools
30:00
to the Bureau of Indian Education, which does not otherwise interface
30:04
with public schools, is incredibly problematic for Senator Murkowski
30:09
of Alaska, who has a lot of Alaska Natives in her state.
30:14
Yeah, that makes sense. All right. It seems like we have a complicated
30:18
landscape. Some hope that at some point,
30:22
I mean, are you hopeful that authors will go back to the Parliament of Education
30:24
in a year or two? I mean, that could happen too.
30:28
I don't know if I would call myself
30:32
hopeful, but I will say I definitely can see
30:36
a scenario in which they all return to the Department of Education.
30:41
And yeah,
30:44
it's, it's, it's hard to know how everything will play
30:48
out at the end of this project. It's really hard to
30:52
predict and it's changing constantly.
30:56
And again, the, the elections could
31:00
have a significant impact on how things go forward over the second half
31:04
of this presidential term or not.
31:08
And you never know what's going to kind of catalyze
31:12
the next step. You know, like if states really have a hard time drawing
31:17
down their special ed Money or their K12 Title 1 money,
31:21
folks will notice those dollars fund teachers.
31:26
There's a real palpable impact. And so
31:31
if this project fails catastrophically, it's possible that
31:35
we'll get red States to speak up, which is really
31:38
what I think we need, or maybe
31:42
some members of Congress that are of the same party
31:46
as the administration. Right now, we're not, we're not hearing a
31:50
lot of pushback. Although I'll tell you just anecdotally at a staff level,
31:54
I can't tell you how many Republicans I've met with over the last few
31:58
months who think that this is a Fool's errand. But we're not seeing that reflected
32:03
in speeches or votes. You know, one last question.
32:07
I know there's a big push to shift the responsibility to
32:11
states. You know, I'm funnel all the money directly to states and makes them
32:14
more responsible and more flexibility to use those
32:18
funds. Are they any barriers or ways
32:23
to ensure that maybe that money doesn't go, for example, to vouchers? I mean,
32:28
because a lot of states are moving to vouchers. And if we do the responsibility
32:32
to states and is that kind of the way that they're going about
32:36
education, are they any. I'm losing the word here, but it's like breaks
32:41
or, you know, ways that can prevent that. States use,
32:45
for example, IDA money for vouchers.
32:49
Well, you can't do that currently under the law, so that's
32:53
helpful. But I do think you're just speaking my nightmares out loud over
32:57
and over again. There is certainly a group of people. I have your
33:01
worst nightmare. Kud. Yes.
33:05
Will I sleep tonight? Who knows? I don't know. I don't know. Good that
33:09
we did this in the morning. So you have a whole day just to go
33:12
to therapy and deal with all this stuff. Oh my goodness. Oh, my goodness.
33:15
I'm gonna have to go for a long run after this. But there, there's actually
33:18
a group of people who are pushing to voucherize the idea. Money.
33:22
Yeah. And it's definitely,
33:25
it's driven by proponents of schools
33:30
that serve single disabilities. So school schools for
33:33
kids with autism or schools for kids with dyslexia.
33:37
And it's definitely, in my opinion, the antithesis
33:41
of an, of integration and least restrictive environment and whatnot.
33:46
It's also not a lot of money. You're. We're talking back
33:50
of the envelope and just from memory, so don't write this number down, but we're
33:54
talking like $1700 per student. You give a parent $1700,
34:00
they're not going to be able to get the services that a school provides.
34:03
It's just not the, the, the economics doesn't,
34:07
doesn't work there. But there's certainly a small
34:11
push for that. And it,
34:14
the backstop is the federal law. Changing the federal law,
34:18
it will be very hard. It'll be hard because it needs
34:22
to be done in a bipartisan way. You can't just do it with
34:26
a simple majority rule. So that's one of our backstops.
34:30
What's what, What I'm really worried about, though is just that the quality of services.
34:34
Dec. Teacher shortages get
34:38
worse. School Budgets are blown up because,
34:42
because there is, there's less of an infrastructure to,
34:46
to resolve challenges and parents are forced
34:50
to sue in greater numbers, which will ultimately
34:54
hurt school budgets and school systems. That's kind of, that's what I'm really
34:58
worried about. And we're talking about kids.
35:03
They don't wait for you to fix things. They grow so fast. Right?
35:07
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you miss a week of school, you're in trouble, you don't
35:10
get services for a year, forget about it. So that,
35:14
that's my, that's my real fear. No, that law won't
35:18
be changed. Quality, yeah, that's a big concern. But also
35:22
quality. The problem with that is when we, you know, de defund or
35:27
provide poor services, it kind of fits into the narrative that
35:31
it's not working. Right. It's, you know, the way that we set up teaching and
35:34
learning with civilians is not working. So maybe we should privatize it. Right. Because it's
35:40
like a self fulfilling prophecy. You defund it, you make the
35:43
services very poor. And then you pointed out that, see, it doesn't work.
35:47
Why we don't just give money to people and let
35:50
them go to whatever school they want. Yep. You can see the whole journey,
35:55
the whole path. Yeah. All right, let's set that there because we should
35:59
go in a rabbit hole here and I'm concerned about your mental health for the
36:02
rest of the day. What should we looking at?
36:06
Last question. What should we looking at in the next 10 months if people
36:10
wants to follow this issue, what they'd be paying attention to?
36:13
I think we want to make sure that funds are continuing to be distributed,
36:17
that states are staying in compliance.
36:20
I think we need to look a lot more at state capacity. If we're diminishing
36:25
our capacity or making it harder for our federal
36:29
government to do their oversight jobs, really making
36:33
sure that states are doing okay. And you
36:37
know, we'll learn a lot in the next 10 months about how this
36:41
is going to work or not work. I think
36:45
at the end of the day, I mean, CEC has been raising
36:49
and waving the red flag for a long time on this. But at the end
36:53
of the day, our ultimate goal is not Department
36:57
of Education related. Our ultimate goal is services for kids in schools.
37:01
It's why we're so steadfastly supportive of the Department
37:05
of Education and not doing all of this. But it doesn't take away from
37:09
the fact that our members are actually serving kids
37:13
with disabilities, doing special education research,
37:16
preparing the next cohort of special educators,
37:20
et cetera. So, you know, hopefully their
37:24
jobs don't get too much harder. But that is really, at the end of the
37:28
day, the core of our mission and of our membership. All right,
37:33
well, thank you so much, Kuna, for being with us. Next time, it's going to
37:36
be a better one. I know it. Amen.
37:40
Thank you so much for having me.
37:44
Thank you for listening to Thai Bear. I hope you learned
37:49
from this episode as much as I did. Please help us to spread the word
37:52
about the show. See you next time.