The mass termination of employees in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has had devastating effects on the ability of vulnerable students to rectify the discrimination they’ve experienced. In March 2025, seven of OCR’s twelve regional offices were closed, and half of its staff laid off, rendering the office incapable of fulfilling its vital duties to ensure students can learn in safe environments.
The New Yorker spotlighted the human toll of these policy decisions in a recent article. Glenn Agre clients Tara Blunt and Karen Josefosky both have children who faced constant bullying. After trying to resolve the issues on their own, they finally turned to the OCR for relief. But their complaints with the OCR were delayed and eventually abandoned after the Department of Education laid off so many OCR employees that the office was unable to fulfill its mandate to address discrimination.
Blunt, whose son was targeted with racist harassment, eventually took her child out of public school and enrolled him in a private school. “I felt we didn’t have a choice—for his physical safety and his mental health,” she said. “Every day, he would come home and say, ‘They made fun of my hair,’ ‘they called me this,’ ‘they called me that.’ He would say, ‘My heart hurts,’ or ‘I can’t take this anymore.’” The harassment escalated to physical violence when one of the students physically assaulted him, shoving him to the ground and stomping on his head during recess.
Josefosky’s son faced traumatizing harassment from other students who taunted him about a life-threatening dairy allergy and, worse, repeatedly exposed him to dairy. A pediatrician recommended that Josefosky remove him from school because he was frequently in danger from classmates putting him in contact with dairy products. He is now homeschooled, but Josefosky laments that he “doesn’t have community” and tries to hide his allergies to avoid further bullying.
Glenn Agre attorneys Reid Skibell, Jonathan Friedman, and Megan Reilly, and co-counsel Public Justice continue to fight to restore OCR’s capability to address such discrimination against students through a lawsuit against the Department of Education. The law requires OCR to help students when their civil rights are violated.
