The Brief

Fifty years ago, just after Thanksgiving of 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the landmark law that created special education as it exists today, and guaranteed all children with disabilities the right to a "free appropriate public education."

Yet, "rather than celebrating progress, we face a crisis," warned a recent letter to Congress, signed by hundreds of disability, civil rights and education groups.

That crisis, according to the letter, is "the dismantling of the very infrastructure Congress created to ensure children with disabilities could reach their full potential."

The Trump administration has fired, or tried to fire, many of the federal staff at the U.S. Department of Education who manage and enforce federal disability law, though Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said federal funding for special education is not at risk.

In a November op-ed in USA Today, McMahon wrote that "returning education to the states does not mean the end of federal support for education. It simply means the end of a centralized bureaucracy micromanaging what should be a state-led responsibility."

But, in interviews with 40 parents, educators, disability-rights advocates, subject matter experts and Education Department staffers, NPR heard a growing fear: that the Trump administration's efforts to cut federal staff and oversight of special education could return the U.S. to a time, before 1975, when some schools denied access or services to children with disabilities.

What special education means to one mom and her daughter

Maggie Heilman's 14-year-old daughter, Brooklynn, has never known a world without the 50-year-old law later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Maggie Heilman and her daughter Brooklynn play checkers. Brooklynn loves games, painting her nails and listening to Taylor Swift.

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The family lives in a Kansas City suburb. Brooklynn, who has Down syndrome, loves hanging out with her sisters, playing basketball and listening to music "all day, and on the bus," Brooklyn says.

"And she dances all day," her mom adds.

"In circles," Brooklyn says. "Over and over."

The teen is now in eighth grade, has her own special education plan, thanks to IDEA, and loves her middle school. But sixth grade was difficult.

"I was having a hard time," Brooklynn says.

In October 2023, Heilman says, she got a call from Brooklynn's school that her daughter had become agitated after refusing a request to come to the classroom's reading table. Eventually, Heilman says, Brooklynn was secluded for 20 minutes in a padded room the size of a closet.

"That 20 minutes changed the trajectory of our lives," Heilman recalls. "I had a child who loved to sing and dance and communicate and hug, and, after that moment, she stopped talking."

Seclusion in school, as a practice, is allowed in many states — if students pose an immediate danger to themselves or others. However, the practice can also be traumatic.

Heilman says she told school staff she thought Brooklynn's seclusion was extreme. Through the winter, she said, the school turned to informal seclusion, separating Brooklynn in other physical spaces or school offices.

Brooklynn, center, loves playing Uno with her mom and sisters.

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As a result, Heilman says, Brooklynn repeatedly missed some of her traditional classes. "And we just saw our daughter's health — physically, mentally, emotionally — deteriorate."

Finally, Heilman asked that Brooklynn be transferred to a different middle school, where staff assured her they don't seclude students. Brooklynn's situation improved dramatically, but, worried for the students who came after Brooklynn, Heilman still requested a state-level investigation into her daughter's previous seclusion. The state did not find the district at fault.     

Heilman also filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), arguing that Brooklynn had been secluded unnecessarily and that, as a result, she was denied her right to a free, appropriate public education.

That complaint kickstarted a new ordeal for Heilman and her family.

Counting on a federal system as it's being dismantled

OCR is the fail-safe for families who believe their child's civil rights are being violated at school because of their disability. A family can submit a discrimination complaint, and one of OCR's attorneys will review it and, if justified, open an investigation — no need to hire an expensive lawyer or advocate.

OCR has investigated a Texas district for restraining students; a Maryland district for how it handled the bullying of a disabled student; and an Arizona district for forcing students with disabilities to end their school day earlier than general education students.

Department records show OCR began investigating Heilman's complaint in October 2024.

But Heilman says her assigned attorney was removed around the same time the Trump administration began a broad reduction-in-force. According to emails Heilman shared with NPR, her case was then assigned to a different attorney.

Heilman says she has heard nothing about the investigation since June, when this second OCR attorney assured her, in an email, that Brooklynn's case is "currently still in investigation."

Several OCR attorneys spoke with NPR on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by the Trump administration. Two of them said Heilman's second attorney worked in an OCR office that was gutted in October, in a second round of layoffs. Those fired workers have since been reinstated, but Heilman says she has heard nothing about her complaint.

Of the administration's decision to cut many attorneys who protect students' civil rights, Heilman says, "it's telling families with children like Brooklynn that their hurt doesn't matter."

Before special education, children with disabilities were "invisible"

Before 1975, children with disabilities were commonly denied access to public school classrooms.

"They were invisible," says Ed Martin, who helped write the landmark 1975 law. "They had been kept at home. Our goal was to end that."  

Ed Martin began his career as a young professor of speech therapy at the University of Alabama. He was invited to Washington, D.C., in the 1960s to work on disability issues.

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In 1970, U.S. public schools educated just 1 in 5 children with a disability, according to the Department of Education, and excluded nearly 1.8 million children.

Martin, now 94, says he organized hearings for parents to share their stories with lawmakers.

"There was one mother who told us a story about the school bus stopping at the foot of her driveway," Martin recalls, "and her daughter standing in the window crying, saying, 'Why can't I go with the other kids?'"

When Ford signed the new law, it cemented a bold idea: that students with disabilities have a right to an individualized, public education and that the U.S. government would help pay for it.

Margaret Spellings ran the Education Department under Republican President George W. Bush, and says special education isn't just about doing what the law requires — it's a public good.

"We're talking about a lot of kids who have abilities and disabilities that can be remediated, that can make them productive citizens," Spellings says, "and that is in our interest as a nation to have these students meet their full potential."

In fiscal year 2024, the law provided nearly $15 billion to help school districts pay for specialized classroom instruction and speech and physical therapy, among other services.  

Including its early intervention programs for infants and toddlers, IDEA helps more than 8 million children with disabilities in the U.S.

To manage and enforce not just IDEA but a cluster of federal disability laws, Congress placed a pair of offices inside the Department of Education. The Office for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), which includes the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), oversees special education under IDEA, providing guidance to states and directly to families. The other key office is OCR, the Office for Civil Rights. It does not enforce IDEA but investigates allegations of disability discrimination, which often overlap with family complaints that allege IDEA violations.

Since these offices were created, support for their mission — to help families, districts and states in their efforts to protect and educate children with disabilities — has transcended politics. Spellings says, "We have long had, for the last 50 years — until this year — huge bipartisan support and fealty to the law."

Until this year.

Devastating special education cuts 

According to court records, the Trump administration fired 121 of 135 employees at OSERS during the recent government shutdown.

"We can't, in our wildest imagination, understand how the secretary can fulfill her obligation under the law with so few staff," said Denise Marshall, head of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA).

Since those cuts, the 121 staffers have been reinstated as part of the deal to end the shutdown, though the administration could lay them off again after Jan. 30.

When NPR asked the Education Department if it planned to retain these staff beyond that date, the press office replied with a statement: "The Department has brought back staff that were impacted by the Schumer Shutdown. The Department will follow all applicable laws."

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon during a television interview outside the White House. In an op-ed published in USA Today, McMahon wrote, "protecting students' civil rights is work that will never go away."

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"This is a part of the process of making a smaller federal footprint and turning responsibilities over to states," says Jonathan Butcher, acting director for the Center for Education Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Heritage's Project 2025, created as a policy blueprint for a second Trump administration, calls for IDEA funding to be "converted into a no-strings formula block grant" to be sent directly to districts — that section's author, Lindsey Burke, now works at the Education Department.

In her op-ed, and previously, McMahon has reassured families that funding for students with disabilities "will continue indefinitely." It's the federal oversight she's cutting or moving.

But an OSERS staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, worries that, without federal support staff, "states don't have the systems or the staffing to do this."

Ed Martin, who helped write IDEA 50 years ago, says that, without enough staff, there's also no guarantee the money will be spent on the children who need it most: "The administration has decided that nobody needs to watch [the money]."

"The secretary's words are hollow"

The Trump administration has also made deep cuts to the Office for Civil Rights. In March, it moved to close seven of OCR's 12 regional offices and to fire 299 workers, leaving roughly half the staff the office had in January. This is when Maggie Heilman lost her first attorney.

In October, the administration attempted to fire another 137 staffers, including gutting the office investigating Heilman's complaint. This left 62 employees at OCR who had not received a termination notice — about 10% of the office's January headcount.

"I'm just shocked that they can destroy an entire unit of an organization that's created by statute," said R. Shep Melnick before some cuts were reversed. Melnick is a professor of American politics at Boston College who has been writing about OCR for decades.

As at OSERS, the employees who were fired in October have since been reinstated, but, again, there is no guarantee they will be allowed to stay beyond Jan. 30.

In a statement, the department's press secretary for legal affairs, Julie Hartman, told NPR: "We are rebuilding and refocusing OCR to enable the office to protect students and enforce the law."

Thousands of languishing civil rights complaints

Even as the administration has tried to cut OCR's enforcement attorneys, it has aggressively used the office to enforce new priorities, going after districts and colleges that support transgender students or embrace diversity, equity and inclusion.

In a statement, Hartman told NPR that OCR had "strayed" under Biden and that Trump "is reorienting OCR to what it's meant to be: a law enforcement agency, not a social-justice advocacy arm of the federal government."

Public data suggests a shift away from disability-related investigations.

Since Trump took office, OCR has reached resolution agreements in 73 cases involving alleged disability discrimination. Compare that to 2024, when OCR resolved 390, or 2017, the year Trump took office during his first term, when OCR reached agreements in more than 1,000 such cases.

In these agreements, school districts often commit to a host of fixes — such as launching a program to monitor the use of restraint and seclusion — that help not just the student at the center of the complaint but other students as well. Still, they require labor-intensive investigations into complaints like Maggie Heilman's, with attorneys conducting interviews and collecting documents.

After Brooklynn's first day at her new middle school, her mother, Maggie Heilman, remembers, "She was smiling. She said, 'Thank you, Mommy. I fit in. I love you.'"

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In her USA Today op-ed, McMahon said, in spite of the cuts to OCR, "protecting students' civil rights is work that will never go away."

To that, Marshall, of COPAA, replied: "Bullcrap. The secretary's words are hollow."

It is possible some of OCR's responsibilities could be shifted to other federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, says Kenneth Marcus, who ran OCR during the first Trump administration and founded the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

That doesn't appear to have happened yet, Marcus says. But if it does, he says, "it is entirely possible that this shift will leave us stronger when it comes to civil rights, but we will need to see the details."

Spellings, the former Republican education secretary, says that if the administration continues to focus its diminished resources on high-profile political fights, it will run the risk of failing the parents of disabled children even as it says it champions parents' rights in general: "I believe it when they say, 'Let's put parents in charge.' … OK, so what about the parents who want their options as described in [federal disability law]?"

What's next?

The endgame for the Trump administration, as the president and his education secretary have said repeatedly, is to close the U.S. Department of Education and move the federal jobs and funding streams it considers essential to other agencies.

On social media, McMahon and her staff have openly mocked the department, which she has said is "mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states."

The problem with that view, says Jacqueline Rodriguez of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, is that states need and often want support when it comes to special education. And that support comes from the hundreds of federal staff the administration has been trying to fire.

Without them, Rodriguez says, "we are concerned special education will cease to exist."

"I'm fearful," says one state director of special education, who spoke with NPR on the condition of anonymity out of concern the government would retaliate against that state. "I think it's good for states to know there's federal oversight and that they'll be held accountable. The concept of leaving special education up to states sounds great, but it's scary. What happens if one state decides to interpret the law one way, but another state disagrees and interprets it differently?"

Fifty years ago, Ed Martin helped write the law that made clear to all states and all public schools: Children with disabilities deserve better. The law, he says, was "an affirmation of the values of the country."

He hopes that's still true.

Edited by: Nicole Cohen
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson

Copyright 2025 NPR

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

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It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.

The Venice Boardwalk after sunset has generally been a no-go zone for tourists and locals alike, as the beachside bars and restaurants close on the early side and safety is often an issue. Now, a group of artists is out to bring some vibrancy to the creative neighborhood with a series of new installations that will include live evening performances – and even a “Venice Opera House.”

“Let's play with light and let's play with sound and give people a reason to come to the Boardwalk after sundown,” said artist and entrepreneur Stefan Ashkenazy, who is curating the project and owns the buildings housing them. “I mean, let's just be open 24 hours a day.”

The concept doesn’t have an official name yet, but he’s been calling it “See World.”

Artist James Ostrer's space looks out from a bed through the fence to the ocean at Venice Beach.

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William Attaway, a longtime Venice artist, created a gallery space filled with various paintings and sculptures.

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The pair of modern buildings on the Venice Boardwalk at Thornton Ave. – with their big balconies, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and seven open garage-style retail spaces – have sat mostly empty since Snapchat vacated their beachside offices in 2019. Ashkenazy recently bought the building and recruited artists to fill those front-facing spaces with creative work until a full-time tenant comes in.

Over the past several weeks the installations have been created in real-time, in public.

All of the projects are loosely along the theme of “home,” with each artist claiming a “room” in the two buildings that stretch across a full block on the Boardwalk. Several local Venice artists are featured, including William Attaway, whose intricate mosaic work is recognizable on the Venice public restrooms along the beach. Attaway’s space features a floating larger-than-life-sized statue and various works in a mini-gallery. In the next room is Robin Murez’s pieces, featuring carved wooden seats from her beloved neighborhood Venice Flying Carousel.

Ashkenazy is no stranger to wild (and wildly successful) art ideas. He’s the owner of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, a longtime haven for visiting artists, and the founder of the decade-old Bombay Beach Biennale, where artists install all kinds of work in an annual event near the Salton Sea. Many of the artists from that community are featured at the Venice project.

A "Venice Opera House" will host pop-up music events throughout the summer.

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny's paintings on the wall of his Venice space.

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny and London-based artist James Ostrer have brought some of their work in the Bombay Beach Biennale to the Venice project. Their windows on the Boardwalk both speak to a child-like sense of wonder and creativity.

“I think it's just kind of exploring and playing a little bit, to have the freedom to be able to do that,” Haberny says of his imagined child’s bedroom space, which includes a fort made out of puffy cheese balls. “It's a big space, too.
It's beautiful.”

Ostrer is experimenting with a performance art idea where he sits in bed amongst a room full of his own artwork, which he describes as “happy art with an edge.” Looking out at the ocean from the bed, he’s invited passersby to sit and have chats with him about his work or anything else they want to talk about.

“It’s a very intimate space, so you have a different kind of conversation,” he said. “I use art to channel human creativity, and [talk about] dark things.”

While there are open fences that block off the spaces, they aren’t sealed up at night. Both Ashkenazy and the team of artists seemed open to the idea that anything could happen and that the installations are a conversation with the public – and with that comes some risk.

Greg Haberny (right) works with his assistants on an installation featuring kid-inspired graffiti art and a "cheesy puff" fort.

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“I don't really know if I [would] say worried, but I guess it's just the cost of doing business,” Haberny said. “I don't really make things to get damaged or broken, sure. But I have done [things like] burned all my paintings and then made paint out of ash.”

While he’s felt safe – and even slept overnight in the installation – Ostrer has been collaborating with a local female artist who performs in a pig mask in front of his installation some nights. Watching her perform, he said, has taught him about the vulnerability of women in public spaces like the Boardwalk. “I've started to, on a very fractional level, have seen how scary that is. Because I've sat in the bed behind her performing at the front here… the way in which men are approaching her and shrieking at her … it's shocking.”

Ashkenazy says he will keep the artists in the space, potentially rotating new ones in, until a fulltime tenant takes over.

“This is an experiment … and after acquiring the building, the intention wasn't, ‘let's open a bunch of public art spaces,’ he said. “It is kind of …what the building wanted and listening to what the Boardwalk needed. Let's play, let's have the artists that we love and appreciate have a space to play and engage and give the locals and the visitors to the Boardwalk something to experience.”

A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”