What Happens When Special Education Oversight Moves From ED to HHS: A Parent’s Perspective
The syrup bottle slipped out of Milo’s hand at 7:12 this morning, pooling sticky amber across the edge of our kitchen table right as my phone lit up with the call I’d been waiting for. Milo, 10, dyslexia and combined ADHD, froze mid-grab like he’d broken a rule he didn’t mean to. I waved him off, grabbed a crumpled paper towel from the drawer, and answered the district special ed coordinator’s call.
She didn’t beat around the bush. The recent shift moving federal special education oversight from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services under the Trump administration means no immediate changes to Milo’s IEP this semester, she said. But no one at the state level can answer what it will mean for service budgets, eligibility rules, or who covers things like occupational therapy and school mental health counseling next year. I thanked her, hung up, and wiped syrup off the IEP notebook I’ve kept on the table since Milo was in kindergarten.
I’ve sat on our district’s special education parent advisory board for four years, so I’ve had more time to unpack this change than most parents who are just juggling therapy appointments and IEP meetings on top of work and soccer practice. The first thing most people ask me is why the change matters, anyway. Isn’t it just a bureaucratic shift?
I tell them about last winter’s IEP meeting. The district’s new finance rep sat across from me and Milo’s reading specialist and said we needed to cut 30 minutes a week of Milo’s occupational therapy. His fine motor challenges—he still struggles to hold a pencil long enough to finish a writing assignment, can’t tie his shoes, gets frustrated cutting out paper for art—are a “health-related impairment,” she said, not an educational need. The district shouldn’t be on the hook for it, we should bill our private health insurance instead.
We fought that for three months. I won only because our state’s current special education rules, written to align with federal oversight from the Department of Education, explicitly require districts to provide any service a kid needs to access their learning. If federal oversight moves to HHS, that alignment starts to shift. Suddenly, framing more special education services as health needs instead of learning supports doesn’t just become common—it becomes the default.
That’s not a hypothetical fear. I’ve already seen three other families in our district lose speech services this year for the same reason. When I asked what they could do, the first concrete step I tell every parent is this: pull out your child’s current IEP tonight, highlight every related service (OT, speech, mental health counseling, physical therapy) and write a note next to each one that says what the district agreed to provide, how much time, and who is responsible for payment. Stick a copy of that highlighted page on your fridge. It takes 10 minutes, and when the district tries to change something six months from now, you don’t have to dig through a stack of old emails to prove what was agreed.
The second thing I tell people is to join your district’s parent advisory email list. Most people don’t know every district that receives federal special education money is required to have one. The group gets updates on rule changes long before they show up in national news, and other parents can tell you which administrators are open to working with you and which ones you need to come prepared with documentation to meet. I got a heads up about this oversight shift three weeks before it was announced in the paper, just from an email on that list.
If you have an IEP meeting coming up in the next six months, I also tell people to download one page: your state’s special education procedural safeguards document, which is free on your state’s education agency website. Print it out, mark the section that says you have the right to disagree with any changes to your child’s IEP, and bring it with you. You don’t need a lawyer to reference it. Just having it on the table makes it clear you know the rules, and in my experience, that cuts down on a lot of unnecessary back and forth. If a service does get denied, you can file a free state complaint through that same website— it takes 30 minutes to fill out the form, and I got Milo’s reading time restored that way two years ago without hiring anyone.
After I cleaned up the syrup, Milo pulled a drawing out of his backpack to show me. It’s a T-Rex for his science project, with “Milo” written all in capital letters under the frame, wobbly but all his. He’s been working on writing his name without help for two months. That progress didn’t come from a doctor’s prescription or a physical therapy appointment at a clinic. It came from 30 minutes a week of OT at school, from his reading specialist using colored overlays to help him track text, from small adjustments the school made because federal rules required them to meet his learning needs.
Right now, everything stays the same for us. Milo still gets his OT, still gets his extra reading time. No lawsuits have been finalized, no big budget cuts have hit our district yet. No one can tell me for sure what will happen next. Some policy writers say moving oversight to HHS will make it easier to coordinate health and education services for kids with complex needs. I haven’t seen that play out for any of the families I know, not yet.
I still pack an extra fidget in Milo’s backpack every morning. I still check the advisory email every Sunday night. I still update that IEP notebook on the kitchen table after every meeting. The change is big, it’s uncertain, but the small concrete steps are the only thing any of us can control right now. We’ll see how it goes.
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