Megan Booth has long had to fight for her daughter Brylee’s right to a “free and appropriate public education” — something all students in the U.S. are entitled to.
It started in fifth grade, after her daughter was already enrolled in special education for ADHD. A group of other girls in Brylee’s Kerrville ISD school started bullying her, her mom said.
“Sixth grade was one of her worst years,” Booth said. "The bullying was so severe that she ended up in an in-patient hospital stay for coming home and saying that she wanted to end her life.
"Sorry if I get emotional,” said a tearful Booth.
They tried homeschooling, and later a new school in the district. But Booth said the bullying continued.
“Of course I was emailing and calling and documenting,” Booth said. “I had learned at that time, being a special-needs parent, you just document everything and that became my life.”
The district said it couldn’t comment on the matter because of federal student privacy rules.
Brylee, now 15, was ultimately diagnosed with autism, which required a new evaluation by the school. But Booth said that evaluation took too long to happen.
“During all of this, she's being bullied, severely still. She's hiding in the bathroom because she's overwhelmed, overstimulated. She's going to the counselor a lot," Booth said. "We have this kind of combined stressors on top of why is this evaluation not happening.”
Booth said after getting “no support” from the school, she filed two complaints last year with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. It was established to handle discrimination cases based on race, gender, and often disability.
“We thought, OK, we’re finally going to get more justice,” she said.
But the busy Dallas OCR hub was one of seven the Trump administration closed in March, part of its effort to dismantle the Department of Education. Booth’s case, along with many others, transferred to Kansas City.
Terri Gonzales, the chief regional attorney for the Dallas OCR, said that move left many Texas clients in limbo.
“There was absolutely nothing that we've been able to do in the interim,” Gonzales said. “All communication with external parties was cut off. There was no transition. We had to just absolutely drop everything and leave all of them in a lurch.”
With fewer OCR offices, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund lawyer Antonio Ingram worries students seeking justice for racial, gender, or disability discrimination won’t get it.
“They can't restore what was stolen from them by administrators,” said Ingram, “who did not seek to create environments that were healthy and affirming of their identities and their differences.”
A federal judge in May blocked Trump’s executive order to dismantle the education department and fire employees, but the administration says it will challenge that ruling.
Megan Booth ultimately moved Brylee out of Kerrville ISD and into a private, so-called micro-school with few students, teachers who know about autism, and a $500 monthly fee the Booths can afford. She said her daughter is thriving.
Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Research at the conservative-leaning Cato Institute, said that’s the way things should work — frustrating as it may have been to get there.
“The most efficient and effective way is we do as Texas recently did,” McCluskey said. "You attach the money to kids, and you let parents take their kids to different schools. So if you feel like you're being mistreated, you go somewhere else.”
That’s what the state’s new Education Savings Account law allows. ESAs allow families to use public dollars to pay for private schools.
McCluskey favors any move that shrinks government bureaucracies. That’s how he views the education department and the OCR.
“The idea is to reduce staff and then find out how you can become more efficient,” he said. “I think it's probably too early to say that OCR is not able to do their job effectively because you're still in a very early transition period.”
But Booth says the upheaval — however temporary — just delays kids like Brylee getting what they need. She’s still waiting for a resolution to her daughter’s case.
“Taking away things like OCR,” Booth said, “only emboldens schools to continue to deny these children what they are required, what's legally theirs, which is their right."
Bill Zeeble is KERA’s education reporter. Got a tip? Email Bill at bzeeble@kera.org. You can follow him on X @bzeeble.
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