CEC: Petition US legislators to sustain OSERS
What is this campaign about and how could one support it?
I received a mailer from the Council for Exceptional Children inviting me to send messages to my US legislators in support of keeping the US Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services as a part of the US Department of Education, not moving it to the Department of Health and Human Services. The following is the content of the message (note that I have sanitized the links1).
Tell Congress That IDEA Needs to Stay Within the Department of Education
Dear John,
Today’s the day! This afternoon, attendees from the 2026 Special Education Legislative Summit will head to Capitol Hill to meet with their elected officials. Please join our efforts by speaking up about one more issue: preserving the U.S. Department of Education.
Preserving the Department of Education and maintaining a strong Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) is essential to protecting the rights Congress established for millions of children with disabilities and ensuring the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) continues to fulfill its promise for future generations.
At its core, IDEA is an education law. Moving special education programs to the health department would de-emphasize the purpose of IDEA to provide a free and appropriate public education and other critical activities to infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities, and challenge the federal role to provide evidence-based research, personnel preparation, and technical assistance to advance the field of special education.
Please call on lawmakers to save the critical functions of ED.
I see this as an important action campaign. As discussed previously here on Special Education Today, the now multi-year effort to diminish special education is distressing. The US Congress has the authority and the tools to deter efforts. I encourage those of us who recognize the threat to take action.
One may act not only by following CEC’s links, but by simply contacting senators and congresspeople directly. Such messages may actually carry more weight, though CEC won’t have data about them.
This action is, of course, US centric. Although people who are not SU citizens are free to write to Senators and Representatives in the US Congress, those offices are likely to discount the importance of messages from international correspondents.
Footnote
By “sanitized the links” I mean that I removed extra data from the URL at which the link pointed. Those extra data—you’ve probably seen them in links you receive; they are strings of seemingly random numerals, letters, and other symbols—convey to the receiving server lots of facts and figures about who in the mailing list clicked the link.