Civil rights staff laid off by the U.S. Department of Education will begin returning to work in September, the department told a federal judge this week.
Roughly 25 employees from its office for civil rights are slated to return starting Sept. 8, in the first wave of reinstatements set to run through early November, department leaders revealed in a filing submitted to a Massachusetts federal court on Tuesday.
The reinstatement schedule comes two months after U.S. District Judge Myong Joun told the agency to bring the staff back—and days after he said the department wasn’t complying with that directive.
It’s the first time the Education Department—which has been under court orders since May to reinstate workers—has said it will actually bring any back. The Tuesday court filing was in response to Joun’s order in June to restore the hundreds of office of civil rights positions it slashed during a massive reduction in force earlier this year.
Joun in May had ordered the Trump administration in a separate case to reinstate laid-off employees from across the Education Department, but the Supreme Court last month sided with the administration and allowed the layoffs to move forward. Joun’s order related to OCR specifically, however, has remained in effect.
Under the department’s plan, 264 OCR employees who were part of the March 11 reduction in force and have not voluntarily quit will be reinstated in five steps, according to the document submitted by Steven Schaefer, the deputy assistant secretary for OCR. Those employees have been on paid administrative leave since March; they’ve been paid nearly $1 million a week in total while they’ve been sidelined, according to Schaefer’s filing.
After the early September wave of 25 staffers, another 60 employees will return by the end of the month. Another 120 will return by the end of October, followed by 60 more in early November.
The department will send return-date notices to employees roughly a week before they are expected to resume work.
The agency has asked Joun to set aside his order in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling last month, but the judge denied that request last week in an order in which he said the agency had not “substantially complied” with the directive to bring staff back.
The Education Department has since appealed.
The document outlining the return schedule “kind of looks normal on its face,” but time will tell if it’s simply the department trying to run out the clock while it waits for the appeals process to play out, said Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina who specializes in constitutional law and public education.
The office for civil rights, which investigates cases of discrimination in schools and universities across the nation, was one of the hardest-hit divisions in the March downsizing that came as part of President Donald Trump’s pledge to eliminate the Education Department. One of the largest civil rights enforcement bodies in the federal government, OCR had about 560 employees and 12 regional offices before the March layoffs. In addition to the layoffs of more than 260 staffers from the division, the Education Department closed seven of its regional offices.
Civil rights advocates and current and former staff have worried that the office, which receives tens of thousands of complaints each year, would be unable to keep up with the volume of work with a reduced workforce.
In fiscal 2024—which ended Sept. 30, 2024—OCR saw a record number of complaints: 22,687. It resolved at least 15,250 cases, according to its report that year.
The department argues that it has been able to keep up with the flow of complaints and investigations, saying in the most recent court filing that, since March 11, it had received 7,231 complaints and resolved more than 500.
“The question is, is OCR protecting students?” Black said. “At the end of the day, what the department is going to have to do, not only in this case, but in its other cases ... is to prove that it hasn’t left students high and dry, and you can’t tell” from those numbers.
