25,000 complaints, and 7 minutes | 2

When the Trump administration gutted the Office for Civil Rights, around 25,000 complaints from families were stuck in limbo. One of them was filed by a mom in southern Indiana on behalf of her two kids with autism, ADHD, and dyslexia. She’d spent years fighting for them after facing suspensions, exclusion, and a school that called her son a “bad kid.” 

In this episode, Anya Kamenetz spends a day with that family to see what it actually takes to advocate for a child’s education. The meetings. The paperwork. The years of being told your kid just isn’t trying hard enough. And what it means not that the office meant to protect their kids’ civil rights isn’t answering the phone. 

When a seven-minute lapse in supervision becomes the final straw, one family’s decision reveals just how much is riding on where a family happens to live.

• Read: How is special education funded?

• Read: What is the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), and what’s its role in special education?

Anya Kamenetz: I'm outside an ice cream shop in a small town in Indiana, being serenaded by a little girl with brown hair cut into straight bangs across her face. Her name is McKenna, and she's into my microphone. Her mom, Allison, warns her to behave. But I tell her she can go for it.

McKenna: I'm a K-Pop Demon Hunter. I'm done hiding, now I'm shining, like I'm gonna be. We are hunted, voice is stronger than the world believes, we're going up, up, up, ceremony.

Anya: I'm talking to a seven-year-old here, so being a K-Pop Demon Hunter stan is pretty much required. But Allison, McKenna's mom, doesn't take little moments like this for granted. That's because McKenna and her brother Tristan have been in special education since they were little. And they, and their teachers, and their therapists have worked hard on communication and social skills and lots of other things. Tristan, at this point, is nine. He was nonverbal until he was about six and a half. Okay, so who's this guy?

Tristan: This is Pete the Cat. He's a blue cat.

Anya: After we take our seats inside the shop by the big plate glass windows looking out on Main Street, Tristan shows me a picture he's drawn of a well-dressed cat holding a guitar, with musical notes coming out of it.

Tristan: And way he plays his guitar. And he has music, and he's colored, and he wears red and blue shoes.

Anya: Why do you like art?

Tristan: Because you can actually color something.

Anya: What are your favorite colors?

Tristan: Cyan.

Anya: Cyan? How come?

Tristan: Because it's like blue.

Anya: I like blue too. The reason I'm here goes back to episode one, when we met Beth Gelman-Beer, a kid in special education who grew up to be an attorney for the federal Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

Beth Gelman-Beer: It's a dream come true for a job.

Anya: In March 2021, the Trump administration laid her off along with about half of her colleagues. That left an estimated 25,000 complaints from families in limbo. When Beth told me about all of these thousands of unresolved complaints, I knew I had to find one of these families that was out there waiting for an answer.

But Beth and the other ex-OCR staffers were specifically not allowed to contact them. So, I had been searching high and low for months, asking everyone I talked to if they could help me find a family with an open OCR complaint. After all that, I found Allison in the simplest possible way: by opening up my laptop and Googling "what happened to my OCR complaint?"

That took me to her Facebook post. Allison had filed an Office for Civil Rights complaint on behalf of both of her kids in 2020 to the Chicago regional office. The Trump administration later shut that office down, and her complaint was transferred to Colorado. As she told me when we first connected on the phone:

Allison: You know, I call and leave messages, but they don't — I get no response, so.

Anya: I wanted Allison to help me understand what it means for OCR to be diminished. Because here's the thing: an OCR complaint is rarely a petty grievance. Often a complaint is a last-ditch effort from someone at their wit's end. It's an appeal from a real person who wants what everyone wants when they've been hurt: an outside party to look at the situation and say, "Yeah, what happened to you is not fair, and I'm going to fix it."

Allison's family is a case in point. She has faced serious challenges for years, feeling at times like the adults charged with educating her kids weren't on their side. Like a principal who said of McKenna, "Oh, she's just a bad kid." I'm like, she's not a bad kid, you know? Did they literally say, would they literally say your kid is bad?

Allison: Yes, the principal literally told me my child was bad for both of my kids.

Anya: And I should put in a disclaimer here. As you listen, I want you to keep in mind that this is Allison's side of the story. Her case hasn't been properly investigated by a neutral third party. That's kind of the whole problem here because with OCR reduced, it's harder to get that kind of oversight. And federal privacy law, called FERPA, makes it difficult for anyone from her kids' school district to talk to me on the record about her kids.

So, while I'll do everything I can to represent the educators' point of view, this episode is going to give you the saga of a mom who's had a hard road. I think it's emblematic of three themes that we're focusing on in this podcast. First, just fundamentally, how hard it can sometimes be to get a free appropriate public education for a child with disabilities, especially in a small rural district that's strapped for resources.

Second, how heartbreaking it can be for parents who have to fight to get their kids even seen as worthy of that education. And third, what might happen in more places now that federal oversight of the civil rights of students has weakened. I'm Anya Kamenetz, and you're listening to "Zero Reject" from Understood.org. This is episode two, "25,000 Complaints and Seven Minutes."

(06:21) The complexities of special education laws and the various supports required for students with disabilities.

Allison grew up on the North Side of Chicago, but she moved to this small town after she had her son. On a beautiful, windy spring day, we walked down the historic Main Street and through the town square, with its small bandstand. So do tourists come from Louisville or — ?

Allison: Oh, they come from all over. We have a popcorn festival like the Fourth of July. And the biggest thing about it is they spray popcorn on you from a snowblower.

Anya: Really?

Allison: It's hilarious.

Anya: That's so funny. Allison moved here when Tristan was a baby. Her ex-husband is around, but not regularly. Both of her children have autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and different behavioral disorders. What does that look like? Well, on the day we met, Allison had been up with first one kid and then the other most of the night. They both have trouble sleeping and a tendency to wander. At the ice cream shop, Tristan says, "When you look away from me for one minute, I'll be gone."

Tristan: Because I have a mind of a flipping pterodactyl. I can run like, when mom turns around, I would just like run to my room. And her turn her head around, and I'm not there.

Anya: Sounds fun for him and really scary for Allison. Like when he was almost three, and they were taking a nap together, and she woke up and found out he had walked right into the neighbor's apartment. That's what it's like at home. And then there's school.

Before we met in person, Allison laid out the whole story for me on a video call. She says Tristan started out in a special ed public preschool program.

Allison: He would go to the school every day for half the day and everything was fine. Then COVID hit when he was four, and so he was largely not socialized again because of COVID.

Anya: By the time Tristan turned five, schools had reopened. The local public school placed him in the general education kindergarten classroom. I should point out that putting special education students in the Gen Ed classroom is often a good thing. It's actually the law. The more opportunities students in special education have to be around typically developing kids, the better.

Nationwide, about two-thirds of students in special ed are in the Gen Ed classroom at least 80% of the time. This is best practice, as long as you have the right supports. But what are those supports? Part of the reason this stuff is so complicated and frankly so expensive is that every child in special education is different and they need different things.

For some, it's access, like a wheelchair ramp to physically get them into the building, or books in Braille. For some it's accommodation — being allowed to take a break or to have extra time on tests. For others it's special instruction, like one-on-one or small group tutoring. Others need therapies, like speech and occupational therapy.

And for still others, the main issues are behavioral, and they might need an aide to be safe during the day. It's all a lot for schools to deal with and plan for, because when kids show up for kindergarten, all their needs might not be identified yet. Plenty of kids like Tristan, of course, have combinations of needs. And Allison was especially worried about how Tristan would cope with Gen Ed kindergarten. He wasn't potty trained. He couldn't hold a crayon. He wasn't speaking yet.

Allison: I had asked them why they were putting him in general education and they said that they don't have the facility, they don't have a classroom for a self-contained class.

Anya: self-contained meaning a class with all special education students and with trained special education teachers. Having Tristan in the regular class did not work out.

Allison: Within the first three weeks, he had eloped from the classroom, made it out of the school. Very loud, screaming, meltdown type behaviors. And they were just chalking it up to "he's a bad kid." And I'm like, but he's not.

Anya: She said she wasn't seeing such severe behavior at home. She figured five-year-old Tristan was stressed out by the demands placed on him at school. She was hoping to work with the school to figure it out as a team.

Allison: When I would say, well, what's triggering the behaviors because he's not — he doesn't act this way at home, they're like, "He was fine and then he wasn't."

(12:54) Attorney Catherine Michael discusses the lack of legal representation for families and the resulting lack of accountability for school districts.

Anya: She couldn't do much with that. As Tristan's kindergarten year went on, things only got worse. And Allison says the school reacted by excluding him.

Allison: So he was in kindergarten, five years old, being suspended days and days and days at a time.

Anya: Allison says the principal would call her to come get Tristan whenever he had a meltdown. And that was a lot.

Allison: I was being called three to four times a week. It was a lot of "you have 30 minutes to come pick your kid up. If you don't pick him up within 30 minutes, I'm calling CPS. We're going to list him as abandoned."

Anya: This is a serious threat. According to Allison, the school was saying, "If you don't come get him as soon as we call every time we call, we're going to call social services and potentially have your son taken away and put in foster care." And these calls were coming so often that Allison says she couldn't reliably show up to her job as a hairstylist.

Allison: I didn't work for five years. You know, I couldn't — I couldn't work. I was a stay-at-home mom, a single mom, and you know, lived on my son receiving disability.

Anya: A 2022 study found parents of children with autism were significantly less likely to be employed. According to Allison, Tristan's school didn't just send him home several times a week and they didn't just threaten to call social services. They told Allison it would be best for her son if she sent him away altogether. Within a few months of Tristan's enrolling in kindergarten:

Allison: The school tried to get me to agree to put him into a residential treatment program where he would live in a hospital. And this was my five-year-old baby who, you know, still drank a bottle to go to bed at night and would crawl up and rub my face to fall asleep. So that was never going to happen.

Anya: The mere idea of being separated from her kid, Allison told me, made her hysterical. She will be the first to say that Tristan's behaviors at that time were absolutely very difficult to deal with. But asking that her son be able to attend a local public school, this is in line with both what special education experts say and what the law says.

This goes back to the fundamental principle in special education law that I mentioned in the first episode. It's the title of this podcast, it's "Zero Reject." The idea that all children, no matter how much they need and no matter how expensive they are to serve, must be educated for free by public schools. Students are not supposed to be punished by being kept out of class if their behavior is part of their disability. And sending them away should always be a last resort.

Now as I mentioned, FERPA, the federal privacy law, makes it difficult for anyone from Allison's kids' school to give me their side of the story. I did email a little bit back and forth with the superintendent of the district. He said basically, "You know I can't talk about any particular family." I asked him if he could talk to me about the district in general, and I sent a bunch of questions.

He wrote, "I would simply be regurgitating the concerns that I'm sure you're already keenly aware of in education today." In other words, yes, his district is underfunded and understaffed. Indiana ranks 38th out of 50 states in its spending on education. And the special ed services where Allison lives are provided by a cooperative that serves the whole county, instead of each school having its own teachers and therapists.

When we say underfunded, by the way, there's a stat that everyone in special education likes to quote. When the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed in 1975, Congress committed to fund 40% of the average per-student cost for special education. They have never, ever come close to that. The federal share of the costs is now less than 12%. So states and districts have to somehow make up the difference.

Even though the district couldn't or wouldn't talk to me, I still wanted an outside expert opinion on Allison's case. And luckily I found Catherine Michael, a special education attorney. Or should I say the special education attorney. The parent advocates I talked to said that you're a rare bird in Indiana. Is that true, that there's not too many lawyers that specialize in this?

Catherine Michael: There's not. I think I am the only one left doing it full-time. There are very, very few attorneys doing this because it's an uphill battle for parents to go against school systems, and it's often so costly that it drives a lot of practitioners out of this business. And it really leaves the schools without a lot of accountability.

Anya: Catherine Michael is not Allison's lawyer, but based on what I shared with her, she said that what Allison reported — putting Tristan into a classroom that didn't have the right services and then sending him out of that classroom several times a week — was common in Indiana and in other states that are less well-funded. And what's also common is schools getting mad at the parents for kids' difficult behavior.

Catherine: And I also see teaching staff not knowing what they're going in for. And so what happens is they start to get angry and resentful at parents. I look at emails all the time where they're blaming a parent for an autistic child who's eloping from class, who's throwing temper tantrums. The parent is not in that classroom and they can't do anything about it. And that parent is already struggling with the fact they're trying to care for a special needs child. And it's not solving any problems, blaming these parents and saying, you know, they should keep their child at home.

(19:15) Allison recounts her efforts to secure a dyslexia diagnosis for her son and the importance of parent advocacy groups.

Anya: When Allison refused the hospital idea, the school took Tristan out of the general education classroom. He wouldn't get any more class time at all with other kids during the day. Instead they offered him a little bit of essentially tutoring after the regular school day was over.

Allison: He would go to school for one hour a day from 3:15 to 4:15. And it was by himself. He was still having issues. He would crawl under tables, he would try and run away. So his first year of kindergarten, he got no education.

Anya: Allison didn't know if she had the right to ask for more.

Allison: He's my first child. I did not know at the time what I could do. I was kind of going off of what the school was leading me with.

Anya: At the end of the year, Allison requested to hold her son back for another year of kindergarten, and the school agreed.

Allison: I held him back because he didn't know numbers, didn't know letters, couldn't — couldn't put a word together.

Anya: That second year things went a little better. He was able to be in the regular classroom more. And he bonded with his teacher.

Allison: The teacher he had at the time was amazing with him. Like, she became his school mom. And when he would start to act up, she would just use her mom voice and he would straighten up real quick.

Anya: By this time, Allison was going through some of the same problems all over again with her daughter McKenna, who was in preschool.

Allison: And I had to beg them to even test her because she was having problems in the classes. I walked in asking them to test her and they're like, "Oh, we don't do that in preschool." It's a part of child find. You do do that, but they did not.

Anya: Again, Allison is right. Under federal law, states have a responsibility referred to as child find: the responsibility to look for, find, and evaluate kids who need special education from birth. Allison kept feeling like the school was being less than forthcoming with her. For example, after that first year in kindergarten with Tristan:

Allison: I had asked if my son could do like summer school. And they say, "Oh, we don't do summer school." Well, I did not know it was called Extended School Year. And they knew exactly what I was asking for, but they denied it because I called it summer school.

Anya: So they feel like they're playing games with you kind of.

Allison: I do feel like they're playing games with me. I still feel like they're playing games with me.

Anya: For kindergarten, McKenna was being excluded from special activities like field trips. And that wasn't all.

Allison: For me, the biggest issue was they were getting out of school early.

Anya: Allison says the bus with the special education students, including her two kids, was leaving school early every single day. And it was every day?

Allison: Every day. Because they're on a special education bus, I have to be there to get them off the bus. And there were days that the bus was pulling up to my house at 2:40, while school doesn't let out until 2:45. And it's — I mean it's not a far drive, but it's not warp speed either.

Anya: At first blush, 15 minutes less class time might not sound like that big a deal. But to Allison it very much is, and here's why. Unless there's a really good reason, all children are entitled to the same class time. It is a violation of the law. Here's the lawyer, Catherine Michael again.

Catherine: Missing 15 minutes every day getting out early, which translates to an hour and a half every week or five hours a month, purely because they're disabled is problematic. They are missing out on that instructional time. And you know, there are other ways for schools to manage that. But I do see it done frequently in districts. We're doing something for administrative convenience, not for really serving this child's needs.

Anya: The second problem with the early exit every day is that it hurt Tristan and McKenna's feelings. They felt left out when they could see that they were missing out on what other kids were getting to do. This was super hard on McKenna, Allison's daughter. Allison and I were sitting in a coffee shop when she started talking about this.

Allison: That was her biggest problem, is that their specials — so art, music, gym — was the last class of the day. And she was constantly getting pulled out of it. And she would have a total meltdown on the bus. She never brought artwork home because she never got to finish it.

Anya: So at this point, Tristan was in first grade, McKenna was in preschool, and Allison had been around the block more than a few times. She was tired. So she did what a lot of parents do in this situation: she reached out to another local special ed mom she knew for help.

Yolanda had a son with learning disabilities, and she had been Tristan's assistant teacher for a while in preschool. She had a knack for communicating with him before he could use a lot of words. Allison joined Yolanda's Facebook group and met Mary, a retired teacher whose own grandkids were in special ed. Mary volunteers now as a free special education advocate, and she agreed to do that for Allison.

Allison says that spring she had back-to-back IEP meetings scheduled for both of her kids. And when she walked in with Mary by her side, everything changed. Because Mary had been an educator, she knew how to talk to the educators. She knew the law inside and out. That first pair of meetings lasted from nine in the morning to five in the evening.

Allison: I was not getting up and leaving the table without making sure my kids had what they needed. And it was then that the — everything switched. The attitude switched, the — the school started really listening.

Anya: You'll hear more about this in the next episode. But from the beginning, even before there was IDEA, family members have always been the most powerful positive force in special education. Parent advocacy is so important that the federal government funds special education training and information centers for parents in every state, and for specific communities like immigrants. This is yet another special education program that has lost funding and staffing in the Trump administration and is being moved to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Allison said that teaming up with Mary and Yolanda transformed how she saw herself. Google and ChatGPT became her best friends, she said. She did her research, she learned her kids' rights, and she wanted to give back to the community that had helped her.

(25:22) Teachers and attorneys reflect on the high rates of burnout and the lack of proper training for special education staff.

Anya: Allison became an administrator along with Yolanda and Mary of a Facebook group called Parent Empowerment and Special Education. That's where I first found her post about her OCR complaint. Sometimes they would get messages in the middle of the night from families all over the country that were struggling. Allison would always share her knowledge and try to help. And when it came to her kids, she was no longer taking no for an answer. Like when she wanted her son tested for dyslexia on top of his autism diagnosis.

Allison: What's really funny to me is they were like, "Oh no, he's not that far behind." And I walked into an IEP meeting and I said, "Okay, let's go to brass tacks. How many words can he read?" And it was four. And he was seven and a half years old. And two of the words were "A" and "I." I'm like, those are not words, those are letters.

Anya: Just as a comparison, a typical second grader should be able to recognize more like 220 words. Allison was really frustrated.

Allison: And they found that acceptable. And they, even though I'm communicating with them and asking them, emailing them, like, where is he at, what's his reading level, and I was getting, "Oh, well, you know, all children learn at their own pace and it's all subjective so we can't hold everybody to, you know, the same standard." If my child is — you know, and this is for any parent. If you feel your child is struggling, you know. And I knew, but I allowed people who are supposedly more educated than me to talk me out of it.

Anya: Allison got her son tested at the local children's hospital and sure enough, they diagnosed dyslexia. Now in third grade, after a lot of hard work, she says he can read exactly 73 words. This feeling Allison had that the school is full of people who are more educated than she is, who are telling her that they know better than she does about her own kids, that's part of what makes this system feel so adversarial and combative sometimes.

There are so many special ed families who feel like the deck is stacked against them because of income, race, or immigration status. In Allison's case, it's a stigma she's been fighting her whole life.

Allison: I was a special ed student. I have severe dyslexia. I didn't learn to read until I was in second or third grade. I dropped out of high school and you know, got a GED because I wasn't passionate about what I was learning. When I found something I was passionate about, I became a hairstylist and I was a really good hairstylist for 25 years.

Anya: Her own life experience made Allison the perfect advocate for her kids. She strongly believes that her kids can learn and grow up to do things they love if the school would take the time to find out what their interests are, how to work with them. And she said there were some teachers who knew how to do that, like Tristan's teacher the second time around in kindergarten, who she calls his school mom. Allison also had a special education teacher in elementary school who made a huge difference in her life. So she knows just how powerful good teaching can be.

Allison: She always told me, "Don't let them tell you what you can't do." And it was something that always stuck with me. And she goes, "If you're going to do it, do it big."

Anya: So it really hurt her feelings when teachers didn't show up that way for her kids.

Allison: My son has some amazing teachers. He really does. And so does my daughter. But they've had some really bad ones too. I've had a special education teacher tell me my daughter couldn't learn in an IEP meeting. Oh, I told her that it's literally her job title: to teach her. You're a teacher, you teach her. Because no child can't learn.

Anya: It sounds like such a tough moment. I know from talking to special ed teachers that they often feel unsupported and overwhelmed. The profession has especially high rates of burnout. And since the pandemic, more than half of schools say they are having trouble filling special education positions. And even though I couldn't talk to McKenna's teacher, I wanted to hear from a special education teacher here.

Karina Kim, who you met in the last episode, is a special ed teacher at a public school in Denver, Colorado. Last school year, her workload doubled from 19 to 40 kids. The school had an unfilled position and relied on substitutes all year. She pulls kids out of classes all day to work on math and reading in what are supposed to be small groups.

Karina Kim: My ideal cap on a group size is like six. I have one this year that is 12, with me being the only full-time special education teacher. There's just not enough time in the day to make them smaller. It — it really kind of breaks my heart ethically. I don't think it's the right move.

Anya: She carries a radio. Besides her small group time and her planning time, she spends the day sometimes literally running around the building, responding to students who are having meltdowns or eloping from class. I asked her if a student had ever hit her or otherwise become physical, which is something that used to happen with both Tristan and McKenna.

Karina: Oh yeah, earlier this week. It's definitely not uncommon. We — we've been hit, we've had some kids make like false accusations, we — a lot of like furniture throwing, a lot of swearing. It's very draining. It can be very draining. And when a student does become unsafe, you also have 29 other kids to be thinking about as well as yourself. So it's — it's a lot of moving pieces and a lot of quick thinking that really start to wear on your psyche, I would say.

Because I know I get overstimulated a lot. And that's not excusing anybody like speaking out against a child in a way that they shouldn't be, but I think that it's really easy to overlook how challenging it can be to be in a teacher's position and have so many kids and want to meet their needs and want what's best for them, but have very little support and very little resources to do so.

Anya: Catherine Michael had some thoughts about this too. Besides her law practice, she also teaches teachers in a class at a law school on special education law.

Catherine: Most people who go into education go into it because they like children and they want to make a positive difference. I would equate it to we tell someone, "Hey, do you want a job pouring coffee?" And we bring them into a coffee shop like Starbucks and all of a sudden they see all this really difficult-to-use equipment and customers coming up and saying, "I want a half-fat caramel macchiato with half-whip," whatever it may be.

And they can't figure out how to do it. They're going to react by disliking the customers, right? Not liking their job because they have no idea how to do it. And they're not being taught how to do it, and they're not being provided the supports on how to do it. And so what I see is not that any of these teachers are malicious bad people. I see young women and men coming into these jobs they were never trained to do.

(31:37) The episode concludes with Allison making the difficult decision to move her family back to Chicago for better educational resources.

Anya: What these conversations really brought home for me is that Allison and all the other parents in my experience, mostly the mothers, like her, aren't just fighting for little bureaucratic pieces of paperwork or for 10 more minutes of speech therapy or for field trips to the pumpkin patch. They're fighting for their kids to be seen as full human beings with value and potential. And individuals, including parents and teachers, have their failings. But it's really the system that fails them all.

Once Allison, Yolanda, and Mary started reaching other families through their Facebook group, it turned out that kids going home early on the special ed school bus, that wasn't just happening to Allison's kids. Or just in her district.

Mary: Well, and I was going to add on to what you're saying that —

Anya: This is Mary, the retired teacher and volunteer advocate. She was dressed up in a blazer and had a big binder on the table in front of her because she was heading to yet another family's IEP meeting after we met.

Mary: I was sitting in an IEP meeting and the parent brought up, "Why does my son have his coat on in this picture and everyone else is painting?" And they said, "Well, that's because he's getting ready to leave." And we were like, "Wait a minute, what? So he misses 20 minutes of class every single day?" And they're like, "Well yeah, because that's how the bus schedule works." But we said, "We don't care about your bus schedule. The law says — "

Anya: At this point, Allison had been struggling for three years as a single mom of two kids, unable to work, coming back to the school over and over again and as she told me, ugly crying in meeting after meeting, to push for what she believed her kids needed and what the law said they should get. She didn't have the money to hire a lawyer. She had one option left, and that was the federal Office for Civil Rights.

With Mary's help, Allison decided to file an Office for Civil Rights complaint against the school district with their closest regional office in Chicago. They spent two hours on the computers at the local library, just a few blocks down from this coffee shop, filling out the complaint.

The complaint alleged that her children weren't getting the supports or accommodations they were entitled to in their IEP. She heard back from OCR within a few months, in late 2020. They were going to investigate her case. They were especially interested in the early dismissal issue because it sounded like it might affect all the special ed students in the district.

Allison: The thing that I had always said is it's not just my kids I'm fighting for, because it was all of the kids who were leaving classes early. It was all of the kids who aren't getting the accommodations and it's not fair that they're doing for some but not for all.

Anya: Allison, Yolanda, and Mary even got a feature on the local news from the investigative team called "The Troubleshooters."

News Reporter: investigation into complaints the "Troubleshooters" have been investigating for weeks. They come from parents of special needs students in Southern Indiana who maintain some school districts have been violating federal laws by not complying with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Allison: This is my daughter's current IEP I received last night and I'm going through it and all the sticky notes on here are things that I found that aren't right.

Anya: It was an exciting moment.

Allison: They were going to talk to teachers and gather more information from the school. And then right when that happened and they were in the process of doing that because my OCR complaint was going through Chicago, Chicago shut down.

Anya: After Chicago shut down, Allison's complaint was transferred to the OCR office in Colorado. The last she heard from anyone there was in May of 2021. It was a huge letdown. And in the meantime, while her complaint is hanging out in the ether unresolved, Allison still has to support her kids every day. At the ice cream shop, McKenna told me about struggling with her reading that day on a test called "I Read."

McKenna: I had "I Read" and I was just guessing because I didn't know how to read. So I just guessed.

Anya: That must have been hard. Did it make you feel nervous?

McKenna: I got all the answers wrong.

Anya: "I got all the answers wrong," she said. Then she asks her mom, "Will I get held back and have to repeat first grade if I don't pass this?"

McKenna: Mom, will I get held back if I don't pass "I Read?"

Anya: Allison explained partly to McKenna and partly to me over McKenna's head, the principal can choose to pass them both to the next grade even if they don't make much progress in reading. Still, she said:

Allison: I feel like, you know, with reading being such an essential skill, they would work on it a little harder with them.

Anya: McKenna looked down at her Superman-flavor red and blue sherbet with a little shrug of resignation.

McKenna: I don't feel like I'm going to pass next year.

Anya: In episode one, you heard about Christine in Denver and her son Frank, who also had experiences of failure in school and a lot of negative self-talk.

Christine: He would say, "I can't read, I'm stupid, I'm dumb, everyone else can read but me, and I'm never going to be able to read."

Anya: Thanks to the Office for Civil Rights, their school district moved Frank to a new school within the district where he's getting support for reading and math and his behavior, and he's thriving. Allison's family hasn't been that lucky. And so what we have here might be a little bit of a before and after snapshot. Before when we had more federal oversight of students' civil rights, and now when it's a lot more spotty. One consequence of that change might be even more disparate outcomes for families depending on where they happen to be in the country. Allison, for one, is hoping that turns out to be true. On the day that we met in the coffee shop, she has big news for me, Yolanda, and Mary.

Allison: Well, there's going to be some changes. The kids and I are leaving Indiana.

Anya: Allison tells us she's moving out of state with her kids, back home to Chicago.

Allison: The school lost my daughter for seven minutes two weeks ago.

Anya: McKenna, she says, had been left unsupervised and wandered off.

Allison: They just let her walk out of the room, they didn't check the hall, they didn't follow her, they didn't even radio ahead to let the other staff member know that she was coming. I mean the fear — they were a minute and a half away from putting the school on lockdown and calling the cops because they couldn't find her, she was just gone.

Anya: Chicago is going to be a lot more expensive as a place to live. But Allison has longtime friends there and the school district is literally 100 times bigger and spends a lot more money per student. That means hopefully more resources and more opportunities. That could help Tristan and McKenna. But it won't help the rest of the kids they're leaving behind.

The worry here is that with a much-reduced Office for Civil Rights, there is no final boss at the federal level looking over the shoulder of school districts, making sure that they are doing the right thing. And so while the civil rights principles and laws like IDEA, Section 504, and the Americans with Disabilities Act might stay in place, a pillar of enforcement is gone. Districts might feel more free to simply dismiss the complaints of families like Allison's. What we've had up to now is admittedly an imperfect system. But the worry is that what comes next might be even worse.

Next episode, we're going to take you back to what the reality was for kids like Allison's in the years before IDEA, and how we got here. And in a future without a federal Department of Education or where it's really diminished, what might special education look like then?

Allison: The school bus would come down our street and not stop at our house.

Anya: It might look more like it did 50 years ago, before IDEA was passed in the first place. That's next time on "Zero Reject."

"Zero Reject: The Uncertain Future of Special Education" is written and reported by me, Anya Kamenetz, and edited by Neil Drumming. Sound design by Cody Nelson. Briana Berry is our production director. Anna Rothschild is our senior producer. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Additional production help from Erica Audi. Ezgi Kaya is our legal counsel. Our music was composed by Marcus Bagala. Justin D. Wright mixed the show. This series was brought to you by Understood.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people navigate the realities of neurodiversity.

From Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key and Scott Cocchiere. Additional editorial support from Jordan Davidson, Andy Kahn, and Janet Decker. Special thanks to all the families who shared their stories with us. If you want to help Understood continue this work, consider making a donation at Understood.org/give.