The Changemaker 4/15/26
West Virginia has had cameras in special education classrooms since 2019. That original law came directly from documented incidents of physical abuse of students with disabilities — incidents that forced families of nonverbal children to fight for answers their children could not give them.1 The pattern repeated. More incidents. More families. More pressure. This year, West Virginia went further: "Oscar's Law" — named for the legal principle that being nonverbal or unable to communicate effectively shall not limit the protections afforded by the justice system — was signed on April 1, 2026, expanding and strengthening those protections.2
Florida, Iowa, Maryland, South Carolina, and Tennessee are now moving similar bills. The assumption underneath every one of them is the same: something wrong is happening in those classrooms, and cameras will catch it.
Nobody is asking what happens when they don't.
Special education is the most severe shortage area in 45 states. 98% of districts cannot fill positions.3 Many of those camera-monitored rooms have an educator hired on an emergency credential — not because they're the wrong person, but because nobody else applied. IDEA requires Specially Designed Instruction under 34 CFR 300.39. It requires behavior intervention plans. If that IEP was written to pass a compliance audit rather than actually guide an educator through a behavioral crisis, the camera isn't capturing misconduct. It's capturing what happens when someone is handed an impossible situation with no preparation and no support.
Here is the dichotomy worth holding:
Same technology. Completely different question. Completely different outcome for students.
Alongside mandatory cameras, Louisiana's law requires crisis intervention training for every teacher, paraprofessional, and administrator in self-contained classrooms, and limits the use of physical restraints and seclusion rooms.4 The legislature knew the camera wasn't the answer. The training was. The camera is what passed quickly.
We keep building accountability systems for the moment after preparation fails. The harder question — the one worth asking before the cameras go in — is why we never fully funded preparation in the first place, and who actually pays when we don't.
The trust deficit driving this camera wave didn't appear suddenly. It has a paper trail that goes back decades.
The camera legislation wave is, at its core, a story about chronic underfunding being punished after the fact. Families aren't wrong to want accountability. But surveillance without funding the preparation infrastructure that prevents incidents doesn't protect students. It documents what the system failed to prevent — and leaves district leaders holding the consequences.
Two things happened this week that will land on your desk whether or not they made your inbox yet.
After Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana converted most New Orleans schools to charter schools. Parents of students with disabilities sued in 2010, P.B. v. Brumley, alleging those charters were turning students with disabilities away and failing to provide legally required services. A federal consent decree went into effect in 2015, requiring intensive court monitoring of both the charter operators and the state education department.8
On March 31, Judge Jay Zainey ended that oversight — ruling that after eight consecutive years of substantial compliance, the systemic failures the decree was designed to address had been corrected.8 The district celebrated. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which represented the plaintiffs, did not.
"While we have seen some progress over the past 10 years, the school system still cannot guarantee that students with disabilities will receive the services they are entitled to under law."
— Neil Ranu, Southern Poverty Law Center, April 20269A judge says the system is fixed. Advocates say students still aren't getting what the law requires. Both things are true simultaneously. And when the court leaves, that tension doesn't resolve — it transfers entirely to local leadership. If your district has ever been under a corrective action plan, or avoided one narrowly, this is the question: when external pressure ends, what's driving compliance from the inside?
One more thing that opened this week: the Department of Education launched a new grant competition for Special Education Community Parent Resource Centers — up to $150,000 per year, deadline June 5, 2026.10 As federal oversight contracts across the board, the districts investing in real family communication infrastructure now — not because a court requires it — will be in a fundamentally different position when the next hard moment comes. The camera legislation wave is, among other things, a story about what happens when that relationship was never built.
And one signal we're watching closely: AI is moving fast in special education. 57% of special education teachers reported using AI to develop IEPs in 2024–25 — an 18-point jump in a single year.11 Most districts don't have a governance policy in place yet. We have guidance coming on this. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it.
This is the question I keep coming back to. Legislatures are moving fast — cameras in classrooms within a single session. I understand why. Something went wrong. Someone got hurt. Families are demanding answers.
But fast and right are not always the same thing.
This week at the Lab, I made the decision to pause something that didn't feel exactly right rather than keep moving for the sake of momentum. I'm not sleeping perfectly every night. But I know the system will be better for it.
Bold leaders build better systems. Even when — especially when — that means slowing down to speed up.
EdSurge published the most complete account of the classroom surveillance legislation wave on April 8 — naming the privacy concerns, the parent advocacy arguments, and the tensions no side has fully resolved, including the fact that most national advocacy groups have not yet taken an official stance.12
If this landed in your inbox from a colleague — get it directly every week. We have guidance coming on AI governance in special education that you won't want to miss.
View Past Issues & Sign Up to Receive the Weekly Changemaker