The Changemaker — September 2026
The org chart changed. The obligations didn't.
Four things that happened in the field this month, and what each one actually teaches.
Special education oversight just moved agencies. Here is what actually changed.
On September 10, 2026, staff from the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) relocated to the Department of Health and Human Services building in Washington. The next day, Kelly Rogers, who had led OSERS since May, resigned. Her statement expressed confidence in the new arrangement. Her departure, four months into the role and a day after the physical move, points to real strain inside the transition itself.
This did not happen overnight. On June 16, 2026, the Department of Education announced interagency agreements shifting day-to-day management of OSERS, including the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), to HHS, while separately moving Office for Civil Rights (OCR) disability enforcement toward the Department of Justice. The Department has framed the moves as a reduction in bureaucratic overlap. Disability rights groups, including the Arc of the United States and the National Down Syndrome Congress, have called the shift unlawful and warned it pushes special education toward a medical model of disability, one focused on diagnosis and treatment rather than classroom access and progress.
Congress has not settled the question. The FY2026 appropriations bill included non-binding language discouraging the transfer, and in July the Senate HELP Committee advanced S. 5046, which would block the Education Department from moving OSERS and three other offices to outside agencies, on a 13-9 vote. Committee chair Bill Cassidy voted no, saying he opposes moving special education to HHS but had process concerns with the bill itself. The measure has not had a full Senate vote.
What has not changed.
IDEA's substantive requirements are unaffected by an interagency agreement. The Department has stated that FY2026 IDEA formula and discretionary grants continue to run through the Education Department's existing grant system, with allocations moving to HHS systems as the transition proceeds. A district's obligations under 34 CFR 300.323, an IEP in effect at the start of the year, procedural safeguards, prior written notice, are the same in September as they were in May. FAPE is a statutory standard, not an org chart.
What has changed, and what to watch.
The people answering technical assistance questions, managing discretionary grant competitions, and setting OSEP's monitoring priorities are now embedded in an agency built around health care delivery, not K-12 systems. For directors, that raises a practical question rather than a legal one: when your team needs OSEP guidance on a monitoring finding or a Part B data question this year, who picks up the phone, and how familiar are they with school-based service delivery versus clinical service delivery. Districts that lean on OSEP technical assistance for IEP or Part B compliance questions should expect longer response times and less familiarity with school-specific context during the transition, and should document their own compliance reasoning accordingly.
The one thing to do this month.
Do not wait for federal clarity to make a determination you can defend on the record. If a compliance question comes up this fall that would normally go to OSEP, resolve it against IDEA, 34 CFR Part 300, and your state's process handbook first, and treat federal technical assistance as a second opinion rather than the first stop. That habit will outlast whichever agency is holding the phone.
- AOTA. (2026, June 17). New executive action to move IDEA from ED to HHS is a concern for special education. Read more.
- K-12 Dive. (2026, June 29). Ed Dept addresses "misconceptions" about special education outsourcing. Read more.
- Hoodline. (2026, September). Special education chief quits days before staff forced into HHS building. Read more.
- The Arc. (2026, July 9). Moving special education and civil rights out of Education Department risks a patchwork of rights for students with disabilities. Read more.
- usehighlighter.com. (2026, August). Did special education move to HHS in 2026? What changed and what didn't. Read more.
- 34 C.F.R. § 300.323 (IEPs in effect).
The shortage numbers for 2026 are in. Special education is now the most widespread gap in the country.
The Learning Policy Institute's 2026 state teacher shortage scan found that special education is a reported shortage area in 45 states, more than any other subject, ahead of science (41 states) and math (40 states). Nationally, states reported at least 425,412 teaching positions that were either vacant or filled by a teacher not fully certified for the assignment, about one in eight teaching positions.
Special education carries a disproportionate share of that number in ways a single vacancy count does not capture. Research from Michigan's Education Policy Innovation Collaborative found special education teachers are 31 percent more likely to leave their position than elementary teachers, and 55 percent more likely to leave mid-year, a pattern the researchers describe as consistent nationally. Mid-year exits are the hardest to absorb: a district can plan around a spring resignation, but a January departure usually means a long-term substitute finishing the IEP cycle for students who are already behind.
The shortage is not limited to teachers of record. Related-service positions are strained across the same systems. Paraprofessional vacancies are running into the double digits in some large districts, and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's 2024 schools survey found that 78.5 percent of school-based speech-language pathology employers report more job openings than qualified applicants.
Why hiring alone will not fix this.
Two factors show up consistently in the research on why special educators leave: compensation that does not reflect the complexity of the role, and caseloads that outpace the support available to carry them. Michigan League for Public Policy analysts point to both in explaining the state's shortage, and the pattern holds beyond Michigan. Neither factor is solved by hiring alone. A district that fills a vacancy without addressing caseload and support is likely to be filling it again within a year or two, given the mid-year exit rate above.
What this means for a director.
The instinct in a shortage is to focus entirely on recruitment, and recruitment matters. But the data says retention is the leverage point most districts are underusing. A new hire who leaves in January costs more, in compliance risk and instructional disruption, than the recruiting budget saved by not investing in mentoring and caseload relief for the staff already in the building.
One question worth sitting with this month.
Of the special education staff who left your district in the last two years, how many left mid-year, and did exit conversations surface caseload or support as a factor. If no one is tracking that, it is worth starting now, before this year's hiring numbers become next year's exit numbers.
- Learning Policy Institute. (2026). State Teacher Shortages 2026 Factsheet. Read more.
- Education Policy Innovation Collaborative. (2026). Key Findings from the 2026 Teacher Shortage Report. Read more.
- GHR Education. (2026, July 23). Understanding the special education staffing shortage: trends, challenges, and solutions. Read more.
- Spartan Newsroom. (2026, March 13). State struggles with shortage of special ed teachers. Read more.
States are betting on apprenticeship to solve the special education shortage. Almost none of it reaches the director's office.
Registered apprenticeship is having a moment in special education staffing, and the money behind it is real. Rhode Island secured a $3.68 million federal grant this year to build a registered apprenticeship pathway for special educators through Rhode Island College, Cranston Public Schools, and Narragansett School System, with additional funding contemplated through 2031. Pennsylvania's Department of Education has funded new special education teacher apprenticeships across multiple intermediate units, some training paraprofessionals into certified teaching roles, others building post-baccalaureate pathways for career changers. The District of Columbia and Anchorage, Alaska both run active apprenticeship-in-teaching programs with a special education track.
The design pattern across nearly all of these programs is the same: an aspiring teacher works in a classroom under a mentor while completing degree and certification requirements, earning a paycheck instead of taking on tuition debt for a credential they have not yet used. It is a sound answer to the classroom-level shortage covered elsewhere in this issue.
The gap the state investment does not touch.
What it does not answer is who leads the department once those classrooms are staffed. Every apprenticeship model surfacing in this year's state announcements trains classroom teachers. None of them are building a credentialed pathway into special education administration, the role responsible for compliance, monitoring, personnel, and the federal reporting obligations that come with running a special education department under IDEA. A district can grow its own teachers and still have no bench for the director's chair when the current one leaves, and director turnover carries its own compliance risk: a new director inheriting a caseload system, a monitoring history, and a due process file with no structured onboarding into any of it.
Why this matters for a director reading this now.
If your state's apprenticeship investment is aimed at the classroom, that is good news for your staffing pipeline and does nothing for your succession plan. Those are two different problems, and one being solved does not mean the other is being addressed.
Worth tracking.
The Lab's Assistant Director of Special Education apprenticeship, registered with the Department of Labor, is built specifically for the administrator pathway rather than the classroom pathway. It is early in a space where the state investment so far has gone almost entirely to teacher-level pipelines. Whether other organizations move into director-level registered apprenticeship in the next year is worth watching.
- Rhode Island Department of Education. (2026). RISE Initiative press release. Read more.
- HRTechEdge. (2026). Rhode Island wins $3.68M grant to build special education workforce. Read more.
- Pennsylvania Department of Education. (2025). Pennsylvania sees boost in certified teachers as educator workforce strategy delivers results. Read more.
- EDSI. (2026, April 30). Apprenticeship 2026: steer your apprenticeship to success. Read more.
A federal investigation into one district shows what least restrictive environment enforcement actually looks like
Last issue covered the Tenth Circuit's ruling in Jacobs v. Salt Lake City School District on least restrictive environment placement. This issue's federal investigation into Houston Independent School District shows the same question playing out in real time, in a district large enough that the outcome will be watched nationally.
In May 2026, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights opened a disability discrimination investigation into HISD over a plan to move certain special education students into a smaller set of designated specialty campuses starting in the 2026-27 school year. HISD serves more than 21,000 students receiving special education services. The district says roughly 5,000 of them, primarily students served in self-contained settings, would move to one of the designated campuses, while the remaining 15,000-plus students in inclusive settings would see no change. OCR's inquiry centers on whether the plan violates Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, both of which require that placement decisions be made individually rather than through a blanket policy that groups students by disability category.
HISD's public position is that the plan increases access to services in the least restrictive environment and improves the quality of instruction available to students in self-contained settings. OCR's then-Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, in announcing the investigation, stated that placement decisions must be individualized rather than driven by categorical policy. Those two framings are not automatically in conflict, and that is exactly what makes this case worth watching: a district can genuinely believe it is improving services while still triggering a legitimate LRE and civil rights inquiry, if the plan groups students by category rather than by individualized team decision.
A federal apparatus in transition.
This investigation is also moving through a federal civil rights apparatus in transition. As covered earlier in this issue, OCR's disability enforcement function is being shifted toward the Department of Justice as part of the broader restructuring announced in June. Advocates have raised the same concern here as with the OSERS move: whether an agency without a specific K-12 placement history will apply the individualized-determination standard with the same fluency OCR's education-focused staff have built over decades of LRE casework.
What this means for a director.
Any restructuring of self-contained or specialty programming, even one built with good intentions and better staffing ratios, needs to be able to show its work at the individual student level. A district can consolidate programs and stay on the right side of Section 504 and Title II, but only if the record shows each affected student's placement was reconsidered by their IEP team on its own facts, not assigned by category as part of a system-wide plan.
One question worth sitting with this month.
If your district changed the physical location or structure of a self-contained program in the last two years, can you point to individualized IEP team documentation for each student affected, separate from the district-level planning document that described the change.
- U.S. Department of Education. (2026, May 8). Office for Civil Rights opens disability discrimination investigation into Texas school district. Read more.
- Click2Houston. (2026, May 8). U.S. Department of Education opens disability discrimination investigation into HISD special education proposal. Read more.
- Houston Chronicle. (2026, May). HISD under federal investigation over plans for special education services. Read more.
- Disability Rights Texas. (2026, May 11). U.S. Department of Education announces investigation into HISD for disability discrimination. Read more.
- 34 C.F.R. §§ 300.114-300.117 (least restrictive environment requirements).
Compliance rigor and workforce investment are the same job, viewed from two different desks.
The Lab's registered apprenticeship builds the administrator pathway the state investment above is not building.
See the ADSE apprenticeship →