WASHINGTON – For generations, people with disabilities have fought to secure the right to attend school, participate in community life and live alongside people without disabilities — gains that some advocates now worry may be under threat during the Trump administration.
Last month, the Education Department said it would shift responsibility for special education oversight to the Department of Health and Human Services, which is headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy’s remarks about the limitations associated with disabilities such as autism have prompted strong criticism from disability advocates and members of Congress.
At the same time, after a White House effort aimed at addressing homelessness, the Department of Justice issued guidance that advocates say makes it easier to place people with disabilities in institutions.
Together, those steps point to a troubling shift toward an era when people with disabilities were excluded from everyday community life, advocates warned.
“It’s a direct, frontal assault on the rights of people with disabilities to live their lives the way that people who are nondisabled live their lives,” said Selene Almazan, legal director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. “I can’t imagine that as a country, that would be something that we would agree we should go back to.”
The shift away from institutionalizing people with disabilities
Since the 1960s, federal laws and court rulings have steadily broadened protections and services that allow people with disabilities to learn with nondisabled classmates and to live and work in their own communities. Earlier generations of people with mental illnesses or developmental and intellectual disabilities were often placed in institutions instead.
Disability rights groups have long challenged the so-called “medical model,” which treats disability as a flaw to be fixed. They have instead promoted a “social model” of disability, emphasizing that differences can be supported through accommodations, allowing disabled and nondisabled people to study, work and participate together.
Families and advocates have warned that moving special education to a health department marks a return to the medical model. They’ve also been angered by Kennedy’s attempts to link vaccines to autism, going against decades of research that show no such link, and his framing of autism as a debilitating disease.
Kennedy’s comments last year, where he said children with autism would never write a poem, pay taxes or hold a job, raised questions about how he would oversee an agency meant to help students develop those skills. Kennedy later said he was referring to people with ” severe autism ″ or those who are nonverbal.
“Many of the things he said autistic people will never do, (special education) is in charge of making sure students with disabilities have the opportunity to do,” said Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. “Will he execute that faithfully, or does he consider disabled students a lost cause until we find some medical cure?”
The Supreme Court weighs in
In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled that segregating disabled people who are otherwise able to live in their community with proper supports was a form of discrimination. The Olmstead v. L.C. decision led to requirements that government agencies provide disability services in the most integrated setting possible — in mainstream schools, homes and workplaces.
But in a memo issued in June, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel upended that guidance. It argued that neither the Americans with Disabilities Act nor Section 504, two major disability rights laws, requires states to provide services in the most mainstream setting. While the memo does not change the law, it signals how federal agencies may interpret and enforce civil rights issues related to the topic — and it could embolden states or school districts to decline to support people with disabilities in mainstream environments.
The White House has already acted on a similar philosophy. Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order on homelessness that endorsed civil commitment, where a court orders individuals into involuntary hospitalization or treatment programs. Trump directed HHS to reduce barriers to institutionalizing people with mental illnesses.
In its memo, the Justice Department acknowledged its interpretation of the Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision is “out of step” with the common understanding. If a state starts to provide services in institutional settings, legal challenges likely would follow, the DOJ said.
The Trump administration’s steps fit a worldview in which the government has no obligation to support people with disabilities, said Claudia Center, legal director at Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.
“It’s dark, and it’s awful,” Center said. “And I think it’s contrary to the majority view in our country. … It’s out of touch with where our society is.”
Families say their kids thrive in mainstream classes
The moves have created a deep sense of uncertainty for students with disabilities.
Lindsey Althaus says home and community-based services in northwest Ohio have been instrumental to her family. Her 12-year-old son, Whitman, has autism and a neurological disorder called apraxia, in which the brain struggles to tell muscles how to move to form words or perform other motor skills. For some of his school career, with proper support services, Whitman was able to spend much of his school day in a classroom that included kids without disabilities.
Through a Medicaid waiver program, Althaus pays her mother to care for Whitman in her absence. That allows him to spend time out in the community with his grandmother while Althaus and her husband are working or away with their daughter.
Under the Justice Department’s new interpretation of Olmsted, states would have fewer obligations to fund and support those programs. And Kennedy, in testimony to lawmakers on Capitol Hill earlier this year, criticized similar programs as subject to fraud.
“We want to be able to have him in the community,” said Althaus, who works as a disability rights advocate. “It’s just starting to feel like Whitman’s not going to be welcome anymore. We’re going back to this: You’re either perfect, or you’re not in the light.”
For many students with disabilities, schools are where they receive the majority of support services and where they are integrated among their peers. Before Magda Nakassis’s 8-year-old son, who is autistic and nonverbal, started public school in Maryland, his preschool experience had largely been defined by being kicked out of things, she said.
In school, Nakassis said, she found teachers and staff members who understood her son’s needs and told her to stop apologizing for them. A program at his school called Fantastic Friends teaches mainstream fifth graders about autism, and they spend recesses with children in the autism program. Every year, Nakassis said, there is a waitlist to be a Fantastic Friend.
Nakassis said that it has been difficult to see the ways autism in particular has become politicized. Every child is entitled to a public education in this country, Nakassis said, and special education is a response to the fact that some children have differences that require additional support.
Regardless of his diagnosis, his right to an education is not a medical issue, she said, but rather a question of equity and access in a society that often pushes disabled people to the margins.
“There are lots of kids like him out there, and I sometimes wonder, ‘what did we use to do?’” Nakassis said. “I can’t believe it was better.”
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