Center for Disabilities Studies

Acting under the new Alex Eldreth Autism Education Law, the Delaware Department of Education (DOE) has assumed administrative control of the Delaware Autism Program from Christina School District. The program lacked a director for several months leading up to the DOE’s action. However, a district spokeswoman says Christina never indicated it wanted to cede control of the program. A Christina School Board member says the board was not notified of the DOE’s plan, and had contracted with the retired program director to resume his position temporarily. The board member also raised the possibility of taking legal action against the DOE.

While some federal employees are not receiving legally guaranteed back pay for their work during the shutdown, employees for federal contractors – including 2,000 people with disabilities – will likely see no money at all. Also, nearly 1,200 of those employees with disabilities have not yet been called back to work, according to an executive at SourceAmerica, the nonprofit that facilitated many of the hirings.

Gov. John Carney’s proposed Fiscal Year 2020 budget includes $1.56 billion for education, a 5 percent increase from last year’s budget, driven in part by the increase in students receiving special education services. At the beginning of this school year, Delaware had about 23,400 students in special education, comprising 17 percent of the total student body.

Ari Ne’eman, co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and current ACLU consultant, writes that President Trump’s State of the Union boasts about the record-low rate of unemployment among people with disabilities were “lies and self-serving applause lines.” Ne’eman argues that not only is Trump’s statistic misleading, Trump’s administration is hostile to a number of Obama-era regulations aimed at increasing meaningful employment for individuals with disabilities.

A director of the Learning Disabilities Association of America writes that the acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is endangering the health of mothers and children by loosening regulations on traffic-based air pollution and mercury emissions. Such pollution has been linked to increased risk of learning and developmental disabilities.