The U.S. Department of Education has let go of hundreds of its employees charged with protecting the civil rights of students and educators. The agency also shuttered seven of its 12 civil rights enforcement offices, according to former department employees.
Offices in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Dallas, San Francisco, Boston and Cleveland have been closed. Those in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City and Seattle remain open, as well as the OCR headquarters in Washington, D.C.
In total, the seven closed offices of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights oversaw half of the nation’s states, impacting nearly 60,000 public schools and over 30 million K-12 students.
Those fired include scores of civil rights attorneys, according to an internal memo from the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252. The union represents nearly 1,000 of the roughly 1,300 Education Department employees laid off Tuesday evening as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to gut the department, including at least 240 OCR staff.
More than 6,000 investigations impacted
“The Department of Education has turned its back on civil rights in schools,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR under the Biden administration. “It’s not possible to resolve cases… effectively with fewer than half the investigative staff that the office had had two days ago”
The agency’s civil rights enforcement arm is responsible for implementing protections for all students, including underserved students. It is tasked with ensuring that, among others, students with disabilities, students from all racial backgrounds, and sexual assault survivors have equal access to education.
Doing so requires investigations of alleged civil rights violations and compliance reviews of school systems that sometimes take years — even with all 12 offices operating and fully staffed. The offices that were closed were in charge of many of those cases.
“You’re talking about cases being in the middle of mediation right now,” said Victoria DeLano, who worked for the Atlanta office as an equal opportunity specialist prior to her termination.
The cases OCR settles with schools and universities often set the tone for civil rights policies and practices in schools nationwide. The seven offices shuttered had over 6,000 open investigations as of Jan. 14, according to OCR’s website that was last updated under the Biden administration.
With the abrupt closures and layoffs, however, much of that is up in the air.
“I can’t even comprehend it — the fallout that this is going to have,” said DeLano.
Offices close as complaints climb
In the past few years, the office’s caseload had been steadily climbing. In fiscal year 2023, the office received 19,201 complaints, representing a 2% increase from 2022 and nearly triple the number of complaints in 2009.
Prior to the new administration and its sweeping layoffs, each OCR investigative staff was juggling a caseload of about 50 complaints, which Lhamon already considered “untenable.” In fact, the high number of cases and slim number of investigators at the time had prompted former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to request more funding from Congress, which would have helped hire additional OCR staff.
In contrast, the Trump administration has cited a desire to reduce the Education Department’s budget as part of the reason driving the sweeping layoffs.
Some of those cut as part of President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s effort to “end bureaucratic bloat” were onboarded just months before being fired without notice, according to DeLano, who was hired in December under the former administration and then terminated in February.
DeLano realized she was out of a job after being locked out of her government laptop, and she only received a formal notice of termination after six days of being denied access.
“It was done just completely heartless,” DeLano said. “I cannot believe that 50% of OCR is gone.”
The massive cuts come after the administration told OCR staff to hit pause on its open investigations, and — instead of addressing public complaints — directed its resources to addressing the president’s priorities, like scaling back Title IX to exclude LGBTQ+ rights. Following a Feb. 5 executive order barring transgender women from playing on sports teams aligning with their gender identities, the Education Department launched multiple investigations into athletic associations, colleges and schools over their sports policies.
Now, the slashing of over half of OCR’s civil rights offices leaves many questions unanswered: What happens to the thousands of cases under the jurisdiction of the impacted offices? Who, if anyone, will monitor school compliance in those regions? Where do students or educators in the regions overseen by those offices file their civil rights complaints? If schools in those areas have questions, how will they access resources like civil rights trainings that were previously offered by the OCR?
The Education Department did not respond to K-12 Dive’s multiple requests for comment.
“Frankly, we are in uncharted territory now,” said Lhamon. “Because the department has done something that I believe to be unlawful — to close these offices and to ensure that there are insufficient staff to meet the quantum of need that we have about civil rights.”
