Democratic state lawmakers are crafting a proposal they say will ensure the rights of Colorado students with disabilities are protected in spite of sweeping staff cuts to the federal Office for Civil Rights in March.
That office, housed within the U.S. Department of Education, investigates allegations of discrimination in K-12 schools — including complaints from families of students with disabilities who say their schools are not providing accommodations their kids need, who allege their students are being bullied or who claim a school is retaliating against them for raising their concerns. Parents have long relied on the federal office to act as a kind of enforcer and arbitrator to handle mistreatment at schools.
The federal government closed seven of the Office for Civil Rights 12 regional offices, eliminating 299 workers and slashing its workforce in half from its staff count in 2024. Those cuts have since been reversed. The federal Education Department in December ordered the workers they had previously terminated to come back to work, but Colorado advocates of students with disabilities say the damage was already done. The staff cutbacks over several months severely restricted the office’s ability to efficiently respond to cases across the country, including in its Denver office.
Lawmakers behind the legislation, who plan to introduce their proposal this month, say they want to enshrine federal protections for students with disabilities in state law and redirect students who bring forward claims of discrimination to the state education department for relief. That way, students and families worried they won’t get help from the federal office still have a path to document and report their claims that a school has violated their rights.
The bill would create a few new legal positions in the state education department, potentially a couple attorneys or an attorney and a paralegal, who would field parent complaints in place of the federal Office for Civil Rights.
Lawmakers sponsoring the bill said it’s still unclear how much the bill would cost the state or where the funds would come from.
“If the U.S. Department of Education can’t take care of our kids with disabilities, then you can bet that Colorado’s Department of Education will,” Rep. Jacque Phillips, a Thornton Democrat and prime sponsor of the bill, told The Colorado Sun.
Phillips, an attorney with her own practice specializing in civil rights and special education, says upholding the rights of kids with disabilities is “literally life and death.” Her legislation will focus on preserving the rights of students who require a 504 plan, which caters to a subset of students with disabilities who do not necessarily need special instructional services. These students might have a physical disability, a major allergy or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and need some modifications or accommodations.
If a school concludes a student would benefit from a 504 plan, which is a legal document, a school team devises the details, for example providing the student more time to finish tests or move from classroom to classroom.
“The cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action”
Since being gutted last year, the federal Office for Civil Rights has not had enough attorneys to take on all of the complaints parents file, Phillips said. Investigation of the cases they do take must be complete in 180 days, but a much smaller staff has made it harder for attorneys to abide by that timeline, particularly after the Denver office’s caseload exploded. Soon after the job cuts last year, the Denver office was ordered to look into 1,644 open cases across 13 states, up from 336 open cases in five states, according to a report released in January by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Madison Biedermann, acting chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Education, could not say how many staff are currently at the office’s Denver location, describing the number as “fluctuating.”
Sen. Chris Kolker, a Centennial Democrat who is also sponsoring the legislation, said he first learned in April how much the Denver office’s workload was growing at the same time its staff was shrinking. That’s when members of the Senate Education Committee listened to former U.S. Department of Education workers and Colorado education officials testify about how the cuts have hurt kids with disabilities.
“I see a wrong being done,” Kolker, who has a child with a 504 plan, told The Colorado Sun. “It needs to be fixed. That’s my personal stake. This community needs a voice, needs someone to stand up and recognize that what they’re doing at the federal level is not serving them so we need to replace that at the state level.”
Filling the gap left by federal cuts is a critical part of making sure students are receiving the accommodations that will help them succeed in school and keep them learning alongside their peers, Kolker said.
“We know that participation and integration in the classroom provides success,” he said. “The equitable access to education is really what it is.”
It will also give students with special needs greater awareness about their rights and empower schools and families to “get a remedy in a way that is less adversarial and less time and resource intensive,” said Emily Harvey, co-legal director at the nonprofit Disability Law Colorado, who is helping draft the bill.
“Hopefully it will mean that there’s more weight given to the power of these civil rights laws and more children will have the accommodations they need in school and ideally there’ll be less bullying if there’s a mechanism and less retaliation and less discrimination, more accessible schools.”
Additionally, advocates of the bill say it would protect schools from catastrophic liabilities and prevent costly consequences down the road. When schools fail to meet the needs of their students with disabilities, those schools and the families of students are often met with high litigation and settlement costs, expensive services and more reliance on health and social services, said Madi Ashour, director of K-12 education policy for the nonprofit Colorado Children’s Campaign, which supports the bill.
“The cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action,” Ashour said.
She added that the legislation will position teachers to keep all their students on track.
“When one kid in a class goes without needed services, everyone in that class suffers,” Ashour said. “Classrooms become harder to manage and teachers get stretched even thinner. We ask teachers to do more with less and learning outcomes decline for all. When systems fail students, teachers absorb the workload and this bill is designed to help Colorado prevent systems failure for kids with disabilities.”
The State Board of Education, which sets grade-level standards for students and oversees the state education department, has not yet taken a stance on the legislative proposal, department spokesperson Jeremy Meyer said.
Harvey, of Disability Law Colorado, acknowledges the many challenges educators face in supporting the variety of needs students with disabilities bring to school. At the same time, if families don’t have a way to make sure their kids are receiving services guaranteed by law, students aren’t the only ones who suffer. Schools do, too, she said.
“I think people that get into working in schools have the best of intentions, but I think our school system is underfunded, and people who work in schools are very strapped for time and resources,” she said. That perpetuates a system in which staff don’t have time to read 504 plans, schools aren’t giving those plans to every staff member who needs to read them and schools aren’t taking quick enough action when a student is being bullied, Harvey noted.
“And I think all of these things can spiral and stack up,” she said, “and if parents don’t have an enforcement mechanism for those protections, I think that families are going to pull more kids out of school and our already underfunded schools with enrollment going down are going to have even less enrollment.”