Last month, the Trump administration laid off over 460 people in the U.S. Department of Education. It included nearly everyone in the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), which enforces federal special education laws. A federal judge has temporarily halted the layoffs, but it’s unclear what will happen next. For people who work in or rely on special education services — including 7.5 million kids — the chaos and worry have already begun. So on this week’s Hyperfocus, we wanted to talk to smart people who could give us some perspective on what’s happening. What could it mean for families and for schools? And what does it say about how the administration views neurodivergent people in general? Our guests are Meghan Whittaker, a former chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Education, and Julian Saavedra, an assistant principal.
Last month, the Trump administration laid off over 460 people in the U.S. Department of Education. It included nearly everyone in the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), which enforces federal special education laws.
A federal judge has temporarily halted the layoffs, but it’s unclear what will happen next. For people who work in or rely on special education services — including 7.5 million kids — the chaos and worry have already begun.
So on this week’s Hyperfocus, we wanted to talk to smart people who could give us some perspective on what’s happening. What could it mean for families and for schools? And what does it say about how the administration views neurodivergent people in general?
Our guests are Meghan Whittaker, a former chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Education, and Julian Saavedra, an assistant principal.
For more on this topic:
Timestamps:
(03:04) A breakdown of the layoffs
(10:16) How worry is already hitting families and schools
(18:02) What to know about school vouchers
(29:50) “Find your space to serve”
For a transcript and more resources, visit Hyperfocus on Understood.org. You can also email us at hyperfocus@understood.org.
Meghan Whittaker: There is a stark difference in how educators view the needs of children compared to how folks in the medical field view the needs of children. I worry that we will move to compliance, to a medical model of disability, and we will not be thinking about children and how their environments shape their success and whether they can thrive.
Rae Jacobson: It's not easy to keep up with the news right now. With so much going on, even big, important stories can get lost in the noise. And one of those stories is that over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has been trying to completely gut the federal government's special education office.
Last month, the administration laid off over 460 people in the Federal Department of Education, including nearly everyone in OSEP, the Office of Special Education Programs. That's the office in charge of making sure federal special education laws are enforced. A federal judge has temporarily halted the layoffs, but that may be more of a reprieve than a save. It's unclear what will happen next, but for the people who work in and rely on special education services, the chaos and worry have already begun.
Now, if you're a regular listener of "Hyperfocus," first, hi, and thanks. Secondly, you've probably noticed that we've been covering a lot more news on the show lately. That's because, like I said at the top, in the flood of information we're all trying to wade through, it can be easy to miss really important stories. Stories that, taken together, tell a greater story about how the people who make our laws and shape our policies are thinking and talking and legislating around neurodivergence and disability in this very precarious moment.
So these layoffs, for example, they're a small headline in a sea of big headlines. But the administration's attempt to hollow out the federal special education office could have major consequences for the 7.5 million kids who get special education services. And if you're listening now, chances are you know one of these kids. Or, like me, you used to be one of them.
It's a lot to take in. So I wanted to talk to smart people who could give us some perspective on what's happening. What could this mean for families and schools, and what does it say about how this administration views neurodivergent people in general?
So today on the show, we have two guests. The first is Meghan Whittaker. Meghan was the former chief of staff at OSERS, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, working under the Biden administration. She was also policy director at the National Center for Learning Disabilities or NCLD, and now she serves as a program director at The Learning Agency. Our second guest, who had many questions of his own, is someone you might already know if you're a fan of "Understood's" podcast, Julian Saavedra. He's an assistant principal at a school in Philadelphia and host of "Understood's" "Opportunity Gap" podcast.
This week on "Hyperfocus," the uncertain future of special education in the United States.
(03:04) A breakdown of the layoffs
Rae: Megan, thank you so much for coming on here to talk to us. This is a really interesting time to be doing the kind of work that we all do. And you see it from a side that we don't often get to see, and you have answers that we don't often get to hear. So we're very, very glad to have you here today.
For starters, we're here in part because whether you've seen it in the news, whether you haven't seen it in the news, there is a big story sneaking around, which is the Trump administration ordered the layoffs of an enormous amount of people in the federal government across departments, but specifically 460 people at what was left of the Department of Education in the Office of Special Education Programs, or OSEP. Acronym number one.
Which is under the office that you used to work for, OSERS, which stands for Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. Am I getting this right?
Meghan: That's all right.
Rae: Can you explain sort of for us what these offices do and why they're important?
Meghan: Yes, absolutely. So this reduction in force that you're talking about, as you said, wiped out nearly all of the Office of Special Education Programs. I think there might be a handful, like less than five people still there. And I also want to caveat this, that this is all going through the judicial system. So a court has ruled that hopefully these layoffs will not go through under this shutdown. We'll have to see what happens there. But the purpose of the Office of Special Education Programs, their mission is to improve results for infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities. And they support infants through age 21. And they are responsible, really simply, for implementing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which people probably know of as IDEA, our maybe third or fourth acronym today.
And so there's two major functions of this office in implementing IDEA. One is to give away money, and the other is to essentially provide leadership through regulations, through guidance, and through monitoring to really make sure that states have what they need and know what they need to know to implement the law well. So that is in a nutshell what OSEP did and why it was important. They play a critical role in making sure funds are spent appropriately and that states are actually meeting the requirements under the law.
Julian Saavedra: So follow up to that, given that there's a large, large reduction of that force and and both ends. I'm just wondering about the funding part of it. Like you talked about school funding and how one of the big jobs is to make sure money is disseminated. As an administrator, so much of my job is about the money. And the vast majority of people don't realize how the money works. We just kind of see the results.
Most people don't realize that only 8% of public school funding nationally comes from the federal government, right? Like only 8%. It's a very small percentage in comparison. But that amount can vary increasingly among school districts for a whole bunch of reasons. Can you kind of break down in super simple terms, what are some of the big ways that federal money comes into local schools?
Meghan: Yeah, I think you made a really important point here. It is a small percentage of the total cost it takes to educate children in this country. State and local governments pay for the vast majority of our schooling. And there's a number of ways that the money comes into school districts. So there's formula programs, like IDEA. And these are formulas that are based on the number of students that are served in the state as well as the poverty rate. And funds go from the federal government to the state, and then the states give it to districts on a similar kind of formula basis. So Title I is another formula program, and there's a number of those that the government administers. There's also programs like Medicaid, which is about a $6 billion program that's funneling money into schools to help cover the costs of all sorts of school-based health services that are needed in schools.
And so as you said, it's a small portion, but these numbers are not small. We're talking $15 billion of IDEA funds. We're talking billions in Medicaid and in Title I funding. And so I think the good news here is that the funds will likely still make it out the door, right? It doesn't take a lot of people within the Department of Education to actually make sure that the grants are awarded and distributed to the states.
The challenge here is that there are not enough people there to do the oversight to make sure that the funds are being spent the right way. And I think, you know, we all absolutely want to believe that states and districts are making the right choices with these dollars, but these programs, Title I and IDEA are designed to serve the most vulnerable students. And these funds are meant to be reserved for those students. And so we want to make sure and make sure that there's oversight that ensures that those dollars are actually being used for the purpose that they were intended. And I think that's my major concern, is that even if the money makes it into states and districts, who is it serving and is it being used the way that it was intended? We may not have the staff capacity anymore to actually check in on that and follow up with states or actually review any of their data to know that the funds are being used the right way. That's I think the most concerning thing.
Julian: Yeah, I mean for those of us listening, again, as somebody at the school level, right? Like I get to help set the budget for a school every year. Title I funding is a pretty significant portion of our budget because it supports students who are on free and reduced lunch, right? So like students who have underprivileged backgrounds, Title I funding allows schools to get extra support.
And we use that funding to fund extra positions for our students. We have a 42% population of students with IEPs in my school. And so when we're looking at the positions that we need, we rely on Title I funding to allow that to happen. Pennsylvania has historically not funded the districts from a state level as much as they should. There was a fair funding act lawsuit that happened a couple years ago where Pennsylvania has not given its state the amount of money it should as a state. So our school districts like Philadelphia are strapped. Like we really don't have the funding that we need.
And so at the school level, if this money is not earmarked for what it's supposed to be, if there's nobody that's watching, that money could disappear, that money could not go into our budget, and that means positions are not there, which means I have students who don't have a teacher. That's what we're talking about. That's live and direct, exactly what we're worried about at the school level. And budgets happen in February. So we're already thinking about what are we going to do if some of this is not rectified soon. And I say all that because I, for our listeners, just to make it crystal clear, this is impacting thousands of schools across the country that are in the same position we're in.
(10:16) How worry is already hitting families and schools
Rae: You guys have identified so well some of the actual tangible impact that these layoffs could potentially have, that not having oversight can have, because one of the things I think is really challenging for families is understanding how will this affect me down the line? It seems very remote. But this is real, this is happening right now, and Julian, from what you're saying, this is something that people who are in schools doing this work are already feeling. Is that accurate?
Julian: Yeah, definitely. Today, before this recording, I sat in an IEP meeting with a family that the child is a senior in our high school. He has autism and intellectual disabilities. And so part of the process of a senior is to think about transition services. And in transition services, we seek out state and local programming to ensure that the student has a plan for when they graduate. Maybe not at the college level, but maybe there's a job training program or maybe there's vocational training that can be put in place. And that's funded by IDEA.
And so if that is not available or the funding isn't there, then we're not sure if that program's going to be available for this child. So I had a mom that literally was asking me, "Mr. Saavedra, what do we do if this isn't around? What are we going to do? I'm nervous about this."
And I'm sitting in the IEP meeting like, you know, I don't know either. Here's what we can propose. Here are a bunch of different organizations that we know are nonprofits that will help support you. And we're going to do our best to make sure we have a plan in place. But there's a real fear, and the fact that the parent unprovoked brought this conversation up during an IEP meeting, that tells me that people know and people are nervous. And quite simply, I understand why they are.
Rae: I mean, clearly this is something that is being felt on the personal level, on the school level, at the federal level, and just across the board. But you've done such a great job of identifying some of the potential gaps. Are there others, Meghan, that you can see from where you sit as in an oversight position?
Meghan: Yeah. And you know, we certainly don't want to be alarmist, right? The law is unchanged. The law has not gone away. The rights of students and parents have not gone away and are not changed, and the obligations that states and districts have under the law have not changed. So, you know, I certainly, I think you're right, Julian, the practical experience of parents is they're feeling uncertainty, they're feeling some fear. And so I want to reassure them that nothing has changed in terms of the requirements of the law and the obligations.
What is changing though, is the amount of oversight that we've talked about, the amount of oversight that is possible given the current situation. The way IDEA is designed is that schools have an obligation to serve the students and meet a whole bunch of procedural requirements. And then states have an obligation to make sure that LEAs or districts are doing those things. And then the federal government is like a layer on top of that, really overseeing to make sure that states are checking in on those districts and doing what they need to do.
So there's lots of layers here, and I think it will take some time for us to see the actual impact of the erosion of that top layer. But let's say a parent is having an issue with their child's school. They're not getting the issue resolved in IEP meetings or they're working through the district and it's just not making the progress that they want to see. The parent could typically file a state complaint, or they could file a complaint with the office for civil rights at the Department of Education, the federal Department.
And really interestingly, more than half of all the complaints that go to the Office for Civil Rights are related to disability. So those are two important avenues. You have your state complaints and you have your federal complaints. But if you remove that federal oversight, because let's remember here, this reduction in force eliminated much of the staff within OSEP, but also much of the staff within the Office for Civil Rights. There are maybe one or two field offices remaining to investigate these complaints.
So what happens then when a district's not complying? The state oversight should still be happening. And a parent can file the state complaint and hope that the state resolves it. But will it? Will that actually happen at the state level? There's lots of data around the number of state complaints and how those are resolved. Often times not in favor of families. And so, you know, I think it's, we absolutely have wonderful people in special education at the school level, at the district level, and at the state level. And I think it's really important that we encourage them and support them in continuing to try to improve practices and serve students to the best of their ability. But at the same time, we're facing a lack of resources and real resource challenges right now.
And so needs will go unmet. And the question is whether districts and states will rise to the occasion, continue to apply the law in these really challenging times, and navigate that without the guidance of the federal government, right? They often will turn to OSEP with questions, write letters and ask for interpretation of the law so they can make sure they're doing the right thing. And without that, I think it's just getting harder and harder for states and districts to do the right thing, particularly if no one's looking and conditions are getting harder. So I think it's really important for us to acknowledge that and realize that parents may not have the same avenues that they once had to seek recourse or to get the help that they need.
And, you know, looking at history, states didn't do the right thing before IDEA was passed. It wasn't until they were forced to provide these services to children with disabilities in 1975. And we're not, we're 50 years past that and we're still struggling to meet these requirements. So it's hard to feel as though returning this to the states and taking away the federal oversight and support and leadership will get us to a better place. It's it's hard to to forget where we were before 1975 and the conditions that kids with disabilities faced back then.
Rae: Absolutely. And I have to say, when you say needs will go unmet, that phrase hits very hard for me. And Julian, I would imagine you too. Like the idea that these are real people, these are real children who are going to have real consequences. That is a very serious thing.
And I want to know because I'm a parent of a kid who has learning differences. I have them myself. You say that a lot of the avenues that parents used to have are closed or closing. What can parents do now under this new circumstance? What is available?
Meghan: I mean, I think that parents should absolutely continue to partner with schools. That is always the first and best thing you can do is to maintain open lines of communication and try to work with schools as a partner to get your child's needs met. I think it's also really important to document everything, right? Julian acknowledged very real limitations. If you don't have enough staff, you can't possibly provide the services or the minutes in an IEP.
So document it and make a note, right? It's not that the school's unwilling to provide it, it's that there's no resources. And I think that the other thing that parents can do is to really build community. I think there's strength in numbers, whether you're talking at the local level or the federal level. It's important to speak to your school board, talk to your district when you're making budget decisions. Join those meetings and talk to folks about how the money is being spent and ensure that even if the federal government is not there, that locally you're holding them accountable and you're raising the hard questions. I think it's really important to do that in community with a group of parents, with groups of teachers, and doing that at the local level and the state level as well will be really critical without federal oversight.
(18:02) What to know about school vouchers
Rae: To that end, all these meetings that parents would be attending, like Julian, you sit in a lot of those meetings. You know what that feels like to watch people ask for things that you can't necessarily or may not in the future necessarily be able to provide. And one of the consequences that I can't help but see happening is that there will be families who begin to think of pulling their kids out of public school or looking for alternatives to public school. And since that is a highly unaffordable option for many people, they may be looking towards school vouchers. And I was wondering if maybe either of you could just take me through a quick description of what that really means for families.
Meghan: Absolutely. So I always like to remind people, IDEA has a mechanism to support children in a private placement if the public school cannot meet their needs. And so IDEA is designed for this. If there is a child who can't succeed in a typical public school setting, there's a mechanism called an LEA placing a child in a private school and paying for that for those services at the private school.
Voucherizing is different. Voucherizing is saying we are going to take all of this IDEA money and we're going to just give a share of it to families so that they could put their child in a private school. Now, we talked about the percentage of federal dollars that actually are, you know, part of the total education budget. That money is not going to go very far and is certainly not going to cover the cost of education for all of those children in a private school.
So a voucher becomes a coupon for those families who can already afford to send their children to a private school. And it means that everybody who cannot afford to send their children to a private school with that coupon are stuck staying in the public schools. And so essentially what it does is it drains money from public schools and then requires states and districts to support everybody who's left in the public school with less dollars. So overall, it's only serving those who might have gone to private schools anyway on their own dime. So as you can probably tell, I'm not a supporter of vouchers. I think it is certainly a priority of this administration to pursue voucherizing the federal dollars for IDEA, but I think it's important to remember IDEA is already designed to do this when necessary, and that we can call it choice all we want, but it is not a choice for everybody. It is a choice for those who can afford it.
Julian: Yeah. And I love that you zeroed in on the financial aspect of it. When I look at history, I was a history teacher for a big chunk of my career, and I look at public schools as the engine of social movement for middle class people. Like it really, if we look at the history of our country, public schools were the driver for so many people being able to move social classes, whether it be moving from working to middle class, whether it be moving from middle to upper class. Public schools and high-quality public schools were what drove that.
And so if we're saying we're going to take away the already strapped public school systems and give away small trinkets of financial assistance to a certain subset of people, then that's not solving the bigger problem. That's a bandaid. And when I look at so many of us who were products of public schools, we have to look at what the benefit of society is as a whole.
And I'm really questioning whether people truly understand what a voucher means. Like you said, it's not going to cover the entire cost of what public or private schools might entail. And if you have any basic understanding of microeconomics, like there's a supply-demand aspect of this too, where the more people who try to get out and go to private schools, the higher the tuition is going to be. And so those vouchers might be one price now, but if more people are trying to get in, the price might go up. And then that means the voucher doesn't mean anything anymore. And we're right back at square one. But now that money that was originally earmarked for public schools, it's gone.
And so I'm really worried about the language around vouchers. And so as a public school employee and a strong advocate of public schools, I think that there's a designation that has to be made between as you said, there's a mechanism where an approved private school for students who need that option, that's there. But in terms of pulling kids out, I make the argument to families all the time, if our school is not the right fit, we're going to find the best place for you. And we are going to work together, we're going to figure out what's the best fit for you, you deserve that. But we're going to work together on that.
Or we're going to try to find a way to support you in the space that we're in. I'm not going to sugarcoat and say that we have everything you need, but we're going to be flexible and we're going to work hard to figure it out. But I agree with you, right? It's hard to have those conversations sometimes when we don't have what a child might need and we don't have access to that. And that's not any fault of ours or any fault of even the school district we work in. That's just the reality of what the situation is. And so ultimately, for those of you listening, look deeper into the finances of vouchers before you become an advocate for them, because there's a lot of things to unpack when it comes to vouchers that people might not understand unless they look a little deeper into it.
Meghan: That's a great point. And I would add, I think informed consent is super important here because IDEA and other disability rights laws like Section 504 of the Rehab Act don't apply to private schools in the ways that they apply to public schools. And so I, legally, they will have to figure out how these schools can take federal dollars and not follow federal law. But right now, if a child goes to a private school, they are essentially waiving their IDEA rights, giving up an IEP, and receiving whatever kinds of services that private school chooses to provide.
And I think we also need to recognize not all private schools are equipped to serve the variety of needs of children with disabilities. And often times they are rejected in the enrollment process. And many parents who try to get vouchers for their child with disabilities actually cannot find a school who will take them. So as you said, Julian, there's a financial aspect, but also make sure you look into the kinds of schools that are around you and whether or not they can and will serve your child based on your child's needs, because many of them will struggle to.
Julian: And I have to call out those of you that are listening that are parents of families of children of color, there's also a racial aspect to this too, that there are many private schools that may not accept students of different backgrounds because of a whole bunch of things. So there there's a lot of layers to how this may work. And you know, we haven't touched on that as much yet, but that's also something when we're thinking about the oversight that the federal government provided with the Office of Civil Rights, now that's gone, or essentially like very much cut down to what it used to be. And there's a lot of worry about the double stigma of not having support for having learning and thinking differences, but also not having support if you are a person of color.
And so we have to call out the fact that there's a lot of things that we're putting up trust in the states. Do you think it's a good idea to have states take over control of funding and looking at the Department of Health and Human Services administer federal special education as opposed to the states doing? Like what's your thought on the states taking over as opposed to the federal government doing it?
Meghan: I mean, I think every state is so different. And by and large, states do control education, right? They set the tone in many ways. They make choices about curriculum and standards and all of those things. So my concern is not returning education to the states. It's been there for a very long time. My concern, as we've talked at length about, is the lack of oversight and the lack of a backstop when something goes wrong, when states mismanage money, when states have questions, the federal government can be a really helpful tool in providing more insight, more guidance about how to do this well. So that would be my major concern about returning education to the states.
I have serious worries about what we're hearing now, which is a potential interagency agreement to move IDEA from Department of Education to Department of Health and Human Services. When I was working at the Department of Ed, one of the major things that I worked on was Medicaid. And so I worked very closely with the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services under HHS because as we've said, they send $6 billion into schools every year to support school-based health services.
And there is a stark difference in how educators view the needs of children compared to how folks in the medical field view the needs of children. I worry that we will move to compliance, to a medical model of disability, and we will not be thinking about children and how their environments shape their success and whether they can thrive. And so I do have real concerns about an office that doesn't have the expertise in education and in the needs of the whole child and and more of a social model of disability. I think that would take us back decades. And I've I've seen kind of how those offices work and the things that they focus on and how they view medical services to kids is very different than how we would from an education perspective.
Rae: I have to ask a follow-up on that because, you know, we've been covering a lot on this show, included some of the more confusing or less fact-based issues that have come out of HHS lately, and a lot of them do focus on learning and they do focus on things like autism and ADHD. And the way that they're looking at disability now feels for lack of a better word, like retro. Like they are going backwards and they're starting to see it as something that is a negative that is to be fixed and cured. Like you said, the medical model of disability is very much rising to the top in those conversations. And the idea of them having oversight in education as well feels kind of frightening to me, frankly.
Meghan: Yeah, and I think as you mentioned, right, the medical model of disability is one that focuses on disability as a condition to be treated and an impairment, right? Something that we need to cure or fix. And if you look at the preamble or the beginning words of IDEA, I mean, it talks about like disability is a natural part of the human condition. We are all different in so many ways. And if we're not starting from a place of recognizing that everybody has individual strengths and needs and that everybody can thrive, I think we're doing a major disservice to children. You need people at the helm to truly believe in the potential of every person and to believe in the rights of people to receive the services and the supports that they need to thrive as opposed to a leadership that believes that these are problems to be solved and people to be fixed, because that those are such different views, and I think it would be really detrimental to children and how they view themselves and and ultimately what they achieve in life.
(29:50) “Find your space to serve”
Rae: Julian, to your point about school's being, public school being like a great equalizer, like it's a, it was a thing that existed in this kind of great society model where everybody would get a foothold in society, no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, what you look like, what your background was, where like how much money you had, right? There's all these different things and how you learn what your brain is like became something that until 1975 wasn't really considered in the same way. And then it was. And one of the concerns that I have when I see this is that it is all part of a larger project, that when you take away the things that create a foothold in society for everyone, or at least intended imperfectly to do that, it says more about how we view disability, how we view race, how we view people who have less than the people that are in power. And that to me is very concerning on a larger level. Like it's not just these day-to-day battles. Each of these are part of the larger thing, but as we're going along, it feels like there is a message about how we think about difference in this society that is being projected via policy, via the changes, via some of the language that's used by people in power now. We have a lot of people who have high positions of power using things like the R-word very loosely, very frequently. We've discussed that on the show. And I don't know if it's the kind of thing where you can say like, "OK, we can fight against this here and this here and this here," or if it's one larger battle all together. And I'd be interested in what you think about that.
Julian: Interesting. For me, again, as somebody that every day is in the work with children, with families, I think it's very easy to become disheartened and very easy to feel frustrated, but the long-term view is that the day-to-day interactions are what matter the most. And you don't have to do some big giant action to feel like you're doing something to support the things that we're talking about. It could be having a conversation with somebody. It could be sharing some little tidbit of information that you've learned. It could be talking to a child that might need a little bit of motivation.
The most dangerous thing is when people become complacent and don't do anything at all. And they become overwhelmed and say, "Well, forget it. It's too much. I'm just going to go about my day-to-day life." And we talk to our children about find something that is bigger than you. Our lives are not just about ourselves, it's about something bigger. When we talk about all of the things that might be impacted by the federal government and the language that's been put out there almost taking us back to a place that wasn't in existence before, the difference now is that we have the information, we have a precedent that's already been set. And everything can be temporary.
Right? So we really have to look at this more as what are we doing as those that have an ability to do something, are we doing anything? Because I'm going to be honest with you, I know the work, the people I work with and the children I work with, they're trying to survive. Like they don't have time to be thinking about how I'm going to go picket the federal government or go to a No Kings rally or all those things. They're trying to put food on the table and just make it. But those of us that do have the means and the time and the privilege, we need to be making sure that we're not only supporting ourselves, but we're doing more for those that can't.
And so I would put the charge out to everybody listening, at whatever level you can get involved, educate yourself on what your values are, educate yourself on what capacity you have to get involved, and seek out information. It's not just about the bigger actions, it's about the day-to-day. How do you show integrity in your daily lives? And how do you show up in your place of work or your place in your family to push back against some of the things that have been said and some of the language that we might be hearing? Our children deserve better than that. And we have a precedent for that. And so that to me, it's really about at the local micro level, that's where we can see the grassroots change and that's where we can see really the education that we can provide for our children if they see us doing something in our day-to-day lives, who knows what impact that can have for them moving forward?
Meghan: I agree. No one is more important to a child than their families and their teachers, right? Those are the people that day-to-day are going to shape what they believe about themselves and what they can do. And I think in a similar vein, people who are in positions of power also need to lead right now. If we're seeing that the law is being twisted in ways and interpreted in ways that don't align with what we know to be true about civil rights and disability rights, we need lawyers to stand up and say this is wrong and file lawsuits. We need state directors of special education and state chiefs to stand up and say, "This is not what that law is about, and I'm going to hold firm to what I know to be true and right for kids."
And so I think this is a moment where everybody needs to lead in whatever capacity they are in. We need families to just continue showing up for their children. We need teachers to continue showing up for their children. And we need to really hold high expectations for people who are in higher positions of power to do the right thing, because we know what that is, and there are going to be some who continue to do the right thing. And I think we need to to keep that in mind as we push through what can be a really unsettling and scary time for people who feel vulnerable given policies that are being put forward.
Rae: You know, my grandma said this thing when I was a kid, she said, "Find your space to serve." And I feel like that's what we, I've heard from both of you is: find the place where you can be of use. Whatever that use looks like, find that place and step in and perform the actions you need to do to make a difference for the people who need it most.
Julian: Mmm.
Rae: "Hyperfocus" is made by me, Rae Jacobson, and Cody Nelson.
Our music comes from Blue Dot Sessions. Our research correspondent is Dr. KJ Wynne. Video is produced by Calvin Knie and edited by Alyssa Shea.
Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. Production support provided by Andrew Rector.
If you have any questions for us or ideas for future episodes, write me an email or send a voice memo to hyperfocus@understood.org.
This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson.
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