Education Department can cut half of OCR staff for now, appeals court rules

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Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Department of Education can move forward with plans to cut half of its Office for Civil Rights staff as litigation against the reductions proceeds, an appeals court ruled Monday. 
• The decision from the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a lower court’s order requiring the Education Department to restore the civil rights enforcement office to the “status quo,” and it comes as the agency had already begun returning staffers to the office in waves since September.
• At this stage, the three-judge panel said it could not “conclude that this case differs enough” from a separate but similar case challenging the broader Education Department layoffs, which the Supreme Court ruled in July to allow through. 

Dive Insight:

The Supreme Court’s emergency decision in New York v. McMahon in July allowed the Education Department’s reduction in force to take effect. It would have also applied to the OCR layoffs, had Judge Myong Joun of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts not ordered that the OCR be restored to the “status quo” in a separate case, Victim Rights Law Center v. U.S. Department of Education.

Joun had blocked the layoffs in both the McMahon and Victim Rights Law Center cases before the Trump administration appealed those injunctions to higher courts.

In August, Joun refused to walk back his initial order calling for OCR employees to return, saying the students who sought to stop OCR’s reduction experienced “unique harms” as a result of it. 

Joun’s decision compelled the department to return OCR employees to work. Since Sept. 8, it had brought back more than 80 employees, according to its most recent update filed in court. The department had planned to bring back the remaining laid-off staff, which totaled more than 260 employees, by Nov. 3.

“We are disappointed in the First Circuit’s decision, which removes an important check on the government’s plan to gut the Office of Civil Rights while the case goes forward and leaves families across the country without relief for children who face discrimination in school,” said Public Justice Senior Attorney Sean Ouellette in a statement to K-12 Dive. 

Public Justice is representing plaintiffs in the Victim Rights Law Center case. Ouellette said that despite Monday’s order, the court indicated that “we could still prevail at the end of the case,” as it said in its decision that Congress created OCR “to serve a key role in furthering equal access to public education in the United States by ensuring the implementation of federal legislation like the Civil Rights Act as well as the promise of Brown v. Board of Education.” 

Although Ouellette said Public Justice “will keep fighting to ensure that OCR can fulfill that promise,” it did not indicate whether it will appeal the First Circuit’s decision. 

The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to K-12 Dive’s request for comment in time for publication. 

Until recently, the Education Department was paying laid-off OCR employees about $1 million per week to sit idle on administrative leave, according to court documents. 

The layoffs came as OCR’s yearly caseload was steadily increasing.

In 2023, OCR logged 19,201 complaints — more than double the 8,934 received in fiscal year 2021.

Of last year’s cases, 12,709 were related to K-12, for around a 144% increase in that share since 2021.