When the U.S. Department of Education closed the office for civil rights’ regional outpost in Philadelphia, the complaints investigators there would have handled from schools in Pennsylvania and four neighboring states were instead shuffled to one of five remaining offices—in Georgia.
The Philadelphia office was among seven that were shuttered when nearly half the Education Department’s civil rights investigation staff was laid off in March. Since then, the federal agency has announced 137 more layoffs from the civil rights office, which investigates discrimination complaints at schools and colleges and works to bring them into compliance with federal civil rights laws.
Though the latest layoffs are on hold, an enforcement staff that had 560 members spread across 12 offices when President Donald Trump took office will shrink by more than 70% if they go through.
In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Lindsey Williams, a Democrat from the Pittsburgh area, said her office has heard from families with complaints pending before the Education Department, and school districts in the middle of OCR investigations, that haven’t been able to get answers from the agency since the downsizing. Parents and advocates have said largely the same thing in court filings: that investigations in response to complaints they filed have simply stopped.
“I think one thing that people underestimate in the education space is that the remedies are pretty unique from case to case, and are very specialized,” Williams said. “There’s a lot of expertise that helps school districts and universities navigate a complex remedy for a student that is also missing right now.”
Williams is drafting legislation that would create a state Pennsylvania office of civil rights in the state’s education department. It would give the state new authorities, and strengthen existing ones, to investigate and enforce federal and state civil rights laws “in the absence of a federal government willing to do so,” Williams wrote in a memo about the bill that’s still in the works.
If lawmakers pass the measure—which Williams plans to introduce early next year—Pennsylvania could be the second to roll out a state-level office to investigate discrimination in schools, after California last month passed legislation to establish one and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law.
Experts worry that without federal enforcement, a fractured interpretation of civil rights laws and protections could take shape across the country—leading to conflicting and politicized handling of cases depending on where students live and what laws are on the books. They worry students in one state might not have the same protections at school as students in another.
But some state lawmakers are worried about civil rights complaints not being handled at all.
Investigator caseloads have grown since OCR’s downsizing
The federal office for civil rights, which has been in the Education Department since it opened in 1980, receives tens of thousands of complaints each year about potential race-, disability-, and gender-based discrimination as well as sexual assault cases.
Caseloads for investigators were already high before Trump took office—the Biden administration sought to expand OCR’s staff—but they could now be in the hundreds following the reductions, former staff have said.
And as the number of people left to do the work shrinks, the Trump administration has ramped up use of the office to pursue the president’s political agenda. It has threatened to pull funding from numerous Democratic-led states if they don’t comply with Trump’s various orders on transgender student policies or diversity, equity, and inclusion. With so few staff, experts have feared the political cases could be all the office can handle.
Even though litigation is challenging the department’s downsizing—and OCR’s specifically—it could take years for it to play out and for courts to possibly order the office’s restoration. (Already, higher courts have overruled temporary, lower-court orders to restore staff.)
The Trump administration has said the civil rights reductions are part of a “process of streamlining operations and delivering services at a lower administrative cost to the taxpayer,” and that it will carry out the Education Department’s legal responsibilities.
During the ongoing federal government shutdown, civil rights enforcement is one of the functions that agency has paused.
States try to fill a ‘void’ left by federal downsizing
Concern about fading federal enforcement is part of the reason Pennsylvania’s Williams plans to introduce her legislation.
“This is an attempt to try to fill part of that void, realizing that we can’t do everything, but wanting to give students and families a place to go when their rights have been violated, because a right is not a right without enforcement, and that’s where families are now,” Williams said.
In California, the office—under the state’s government operations agency that oversees human resources and other functions—will work directly with school districts to prevent and address discrimination and bias, according to the bill. The office will employ coordinators focused on race-based, gender, and LGBTQ+ discrimination, as well as an antisemitism prevention coordinator. All will be appointed by the governor and confirmed by state senators.
Working with the state education department, the office will provide education and resources to districts to prevent antisemitism and other forms of discrimination and bias, share information about existing state laws and regulations related to discrimination, recommend strategies for fighting discrimination, and submit an annual report on discrimination in schools.
The legislation, stemming from the response in schools to the Israel-Hamas war, has already been met by a legal challenge, with plaintiff teachers and students arguing the law is too vague about what it considers to be antisemitism, making it difficult for teachers to navigate discussions and instruction and potentially violating their free speech rights.
State-level civil rights enforcement in schools is largely new
Historically, states have had commissions that investigate and issue reports on discrimination, particularly in housing and employment, said Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina who specializes in constitutional law and public education. But they haven’t had much power because they can’t enforce federal law or control the flow of federal dollars.
“The teeth, the leverage, that the federal government has to get you to stop discriminating is that they’re going to pull your federal funding,” Black said. “No matter how much staff, no matter how much expertise these state agencies might have, they don’t actually have that power.”
California’s law grants the office the ability to issue a financial penalty if a district or school doesn’t correct its actions within 60 days of the office flagging a violation.
For states—which send schools a much larger chunk of their funding than the federal government, about 45% vs. 10% respectively—it would be a seismic change to assume such authority, Black said.
“You need that office to be insulated from political actors, and you need to have a very, very well-thought-out plan for how you’re going to appoint the leadership of that agency,” he said. “We’ve seen this flip-flopping at the federal level, and that’s one thing when you’re talking about 10% of your budget.”
Pennsylvania and California are the only two states that have either passed or started discussing such legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks legislation in state capitols.
If others follow suit, it could represent a rebalancing of state and federal power over education, Black said—particularly at a time when the Trump administration says it’s trying to send education back to the states.
“We’re also talking about moving to a place in which there’s 52 or so different, potentially conflicting, settled opinions on what Title IX requires,” he said. “Should we have a system in which Title IX means one thing to gay students in Alabama, and another thing to gay students in Kentucky or Pennsylvania or wherever? I mean, that doesn’t sound right to me.”
