What Happens When Special Education Oversight Moves From Education To HHS? A Parent’s Perspective
The coffee sloshed out of my paper cup and onto my IEP notebook mid-meeting last Tuesday, right as our district special ed coordinator paused mid-sentence to check a buzzing text. My 8-year-old Leo, who has dyslexia and ADHD, was already slumped in the chair next to me drawing dinosaurs on the back of an old consent form, so I didn’t panic about the stain. I did pay attention when the coordinator cleared her throat and said, “Sorry, that was the admin office reminding everyone about the new oversight shift for special education—you know, the one moving it from the Department of Education to HHS per the new executive order.”
After the meeting wrapped, I climbed into my minivan, nudged a crumpled granola bar wrapper and a lone neon kids sock out of the passenger seat, and pulled out my phone to figure out what this actually meant. All I found was screaming hot takes: one side said this was the end of public special education, the other said it would fix every broken part of the system. No one told me what it would mean for Leo’s 30 minutes of weekly speech and his fine motor OT. So I called Sarah, my special ed advocate who I’ve worked with since Leo’s first evaluation three years ago. She answered while stirring pasta for her own two kids, and I could hear her 10-year-old yelling in the background that he wanted extra garlic bread.
She broke it down plain for me. Up until now, the US Department of Education oversaw IDEA, the federal law that guarantees all kids a free appropriate public education, or FAPE, in public schools. That meant they enforced IEP requirements, allocated funding for school-based services, and handled complaints when schools didn’t meet their legal obligations. Moving oversight to the Department of Health and Human Services means all that rule-setting and enforcement will live under a department whose core mission is health care and social services, not public education.
I already know what it’s like to work with HHS for Leo. Right now, HHS covers the extra OT he gets outside of school through a Medicaid waiver for kids with disabilities. The school only provides 30 minutes a week, which isn’t enough to help him build the control he needs to write a full paragraph, so we get extra through HHS. Last year, I spent three months fighting HHS to approve that extra time, because they claimed the school’s services met all his needs. That red tape is fresh in my mind.
Sarah says there are two real sides to this change, no one-size-fits-all take. Some advocates who work with kids with complex medical needs support it. Their argument makes sense: for a lot of kids, disability is tied directly to health needs the Department of Education has never been good at addressing. If a kid has epilepsy that impacts their in-class attention, or cerebral palsy that affects their ability to move around the school building, coordinating all supports through HHS could cut down on the endless duplicate forms and missed connections between medical teams and schools. I’ve filled out the same basic medical and disability information for both Ed and HHS so many times, cutting that duplication would be a real win if it actually happens.
The big, common concern is simpler: IDEA is an education law, rooted in the idea that all kids deserve access to a public education that meets their needs. If the people writing rules and enforcing compliance work for a health-focused department, priorities could shift away from holding public schools accountable. It’s too early to tell how funding will shift, but most of the parents I’ve talked to are worried that school-based services will get cut as more focus moves to health care outside of public schools.
None of that big policy talk helped me when I was sitting in my minivan wondering if Leo’s services would get cut next year. Sarah and I talked through small, concrete things any parent can do right now, regardless of how this policy rolls out, and they’ve already made me feel more in control.
First, move all your kid’s IEP paperwork, progress notes, and approval emails from the school’s online portal to a labeled folder in your personal Google Drive, and keep a printed copy of the current IEP in a binder at home. Two years ago, my district switched IEP software and lost six months of Leo’s progress notes, and I only got everything sorted out because I’d saved copies myself. When government departments shift responsibilities, paperwork gets lost or misfiled, and it’s always the parent that has to prove what was agreed on.
Second, check your local special ed parent group once a day for updates, not just national Facebook groups full of hot takes. My local group has 110 parents of kids with disabilities in our district, and someone always posts early when paperwork changes or wait times for services get longer. Last month, someone posted that HHS was already backlogged on waiver renewals, so I sent mine in two weeks early and got approval before the backlog hit.
Third, if you have an IEP meeting coming up, just ask the team point blank: how will this oversight change impact my child’s current services, and ask them to write that answer in the official meeting notes. When I asked that at last Tuesday’s meeting, the coordinator wrote that Leo’s current speech and OT minutes are approved through the end of the 2025 school year, no changes. That’s a paper trail I can fall back on if anything shifts down the line.
That night, Leo was building a Lego dinosaur set at the kitchen table and got frustrated when a tiny leg piece wouldn’t fit. He threw half the sorted pile across the floor, and I knelt down to pick it up with him. I thought about how big this policy change sounds in the news, but how small it feels in the day to day. We still have to fight for every extra minute of therapy he needs. We still celebrate when he reads a whole chapter of his favorite graphic novel out loud without stopping.
I don’t know if this change will end up helping kids like Leo or hurting them. No one does right now—rules are still being written, districts are still figuring out how to implement it, and it will play out a hundred different ways across different states and different communities. What I do know is that the work we do as parents doesn’t change all that much. Keep your own papers. Ask the questions. Get the answers in writing. And after the meeting, stop for ice cream with sprinkles, because the hard work can wait until tomorrow.
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