In April 2025, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) attempted to end a decades-old legal dispute involving the federal government, local and state governments in Louisiana, and families seeking better access to high-quality education for their children.
The Justice Department lifted a school desegregation order in a school district near New Orleans, Louisiana, releasing the district from federal oversight. The oversight was in place because of alleged segregation of students on the basis of race, which is a violation of the Constitution according to federal courts. Trump officials called the original 1967 agreement, which required the school board to take specific steps to desegregate schools and fix the harm caused by past racial discrimination, a “historical wrong” that needed to be corrected. Louisiana state education officials joined in the DOJ’s court filing lifting the oversight, likely seeing it as potential welcome relief to other districts in the state that have also been under court oversight for racial segregation.
However, in November, a federal judge blocked a similar DOJ move to overturn a civil rights era desegregation order in a different Louisiana school district, citing evidence, according to the Associated Press, that “some families say the court orders are still needed to improve education at the area’s mostly Black schools.” While the judge offered the school district an opportunity to prove it has ended state-sponsored racial segregation, the district and the state have, instead, appealed the decision.
The legal entanglement is not confined to Louisiana, as there are more than 130 school systems, mostly in the South, under similar federal oversight across the country, according to CNN. Indeed, in August, the Justice Department announced dismissals of two more district desegregation cases—one in Florida and another in Mississippi—ending federal oversight in those districts.
It is worth noting that the federal government’s laws banning racial discrimination also apply to discrimination against children with disabilities, regardless of race, class, creed, or religion. When these protections disappear, all vulnerable children suffer. While the Trump Administration is touting the move to end the 1966 federal antidiscrimination mandate as “getting America refocused on our bright future,” its implementation of Project 2025 has triggered a systematic dismantling of civil rights protections that took decades to establish.
After the April DOJ decision, Louisiana state officials, including Attorney General Liz Murrill, were remarkably candid about their intention to roll back other civil rights protections in schools. Murrill vowed to work with Louisiana schools to help them “put the past in the past,” asking the Justice Department to close other orders stripping back civil rights protections in Louisiana’s education system. This rollback of civil rights protections in one district seems like something that could become a slippery slope.
These disputes are about more than the historical treatment of students and families based on race. Just like Black children were once turned away from schools because of their race, many children with disabilities have been turned away from Louisiana schools that don’t want to provide the support they need.
The roots of this crisis in New Orleans specifically trace back to the early days of the district’s shift to an all-charter school district in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. By 2010, a growing number of parents voiced fears that charter schools were barring their disabled children from adequate services, which led the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to file a lawsuit against the state of Louisiana for neglecting the needs of special education students. The SPLC lawsuit describes how parents of children with disabilities were turned away from four schools. Often, schools either told the parents that they couldn’t accommodate their children or suggested they consult other school officials to see if it would be somehow possible to provide the services their children needed. A later filing by SPLC found additional actions in 2014 as violations continued.
The suit was settled in 2015. Under the settlement, the defendants agreed to a consent decree that requires oversight from an independent monitor until they have achieved two consecutive years of compliance. But in July 2021, the Louisiana Department of Education and the Orleans Parish School Board filed a motion to be released from the 2015 court judgement that requires the monitoring which provides the only meaningful accountability for special education services.
Continued scrutiny of the district finds schools are still not in compliance, and parents have lost trust in the school system—and rightfully so. Even in 2025, the SPLC contended that the state is still neglecting its responsibilities for educating these students. And multiple Louisiana school districts may remain out of compliance with federal special education laws, according to a report by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor that found faults in the state’s monitoring of special education.
Research from 2012, which examined more than 200 districts across the country that were released from desegregation court orders, found that “racial school segregation in these districts increased gradually following release from court order” when compared to districts that remained under the order. Though the study did not examine the potential impact of rolling back federal enforcement of special education laws, it found strong evidence that federal oversight of discriminatory school practices has historically been effective.
The intersection of poverty and disability creates particularly acute challenges for many children and families in Louisiana. As SPLC attorney Jennifer Coco wrote in 2025, “Children growing up poor in New Orleans navigate homelessness, food insecurity, and exposure to traumatic events at disproportionately high rates compared to children in other cities. When you factor in disability in school, parents of New Orleans children with disabilities can end up fielding frequent phone calls from school expecting them to pick up their kids.”
Federal enforcement of the rights of students with disabilities stems from the passage of the landmark Education for All Handicapped Children Act fifty years ago. Advocates for these students now fear these vulnerable student populations will be denied access to high-quality education services, and when federal oversight of students’ education civil rights disappears, schools will have little incentive to serve students who require additional resources or accommodations.
Nationwide, approximately 15 percent of all public school students received special education services during the 2022-2023 school year, totalling 7.5 million children, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. As the number of children who’ve received documentation for conditions that require support services has increased, parents who have struggled to access special education services have faced pushback from government officials or had their children illegally denied access or removed from public schools.
Sometimes, denial of services is allowed by the state. For instance, in New Orleans, five of the most coveted charter schools have been granted “eligibility criteria” for either foreign language proficiency or academic eligibility—which provides the schools with a means for filtering out certain students that are more challenging to teach. Consequently, fewer than 5 percent of students in these schools have significant disabilities. This stark underrepresentation of students with disabilities points to their systemic exclusion from these schools, in defiance of federal law.
When public officials say eliminating anti-discrimination guidelines is correcting a “historical wrong,” they are in fact justifying a return to injustices of decades past. The rollback of desegregation orders and civil rights protections represents more than a policy change; it’s a fundamental assault on the principle that all children deserve equal educational opportunities. When we recognize that these protections benefit all vulnerable children, regardless of race or class, we begin to see the true scope of what’s at stake.