Attorneys who helped manage the Department of Education’s thousands of open investigations into civil rights complaints said there was little to no coordination to facilitate the transition of cases after it became clear the attorneys handling them would be cut from the agency’s workforce.
They’re doubtful that the sudden reduction in force — which entailed shuttering more than half of the Office for Civil Rights’ regional offices and firing more than 200 attorneys — will allow the investigations to proceed smoothly after they’re reassigned to remaining personnel and offices.
According to three attorneys previously involved in this type of work in regional civil rights offices in different parts of the country, there were no department directives to help coordinate the transfer of casework to the offices and employees that remained after the RIF.
“There was no ‘Can you provide to this office your case list? Can you write up a transition memo?’ There was nothing that was given for us to do to transition our work,” an OCR attorney included in the RIF, who requested anonymity, told NOTUS.
The Department of Education did not respond to questions about how it directed these case reassignments or how it would affect investigators’ caseloads.
“To better serve American students and families, changes are being made as to how OCR will conduct its operations. OCR’s staff is composed of top-performing personnel with years of experience enforcing federal civil rights laws,” Madison Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the Department of Education, emailed NOTUS in a statement. “We are confident that the dedicated staff of OCR will deliver on its statutory responsibilities.”
It was the same statement given to other outlets earlier this month when the cuts to civil rights personnel and offices were first announced on March 11.
At the time, Education Department officials said employees would have until March 21 to “roll over” their responsibilities. But multiple employees told NOTUS they were largely locked out of agency systems by the next day.
“I have a spreadsheet of cases, and I went in to try to update them, just to give like, ‘Hey, this one was close to resolution,’ or, ‘Hey, this would be good for this’ or ‘Maybe look at this,’ — trying to do what we could to let them know what to prioritize,” the attorney said. “And I didn’t even have the ability to save the update. Our software was updated to where we didn’t have the ability to even do that.”
Brittany Coleman, American Federation of Government Employees Local 252’s national shop steward, was an attorney with the Department of Education’s regional civil rights office in Dallas until it was closed. She told NOTUS that the process of transferring thousands of cases to the regional offices that would stay open, all with less than 10 days’ notice, was “very hectic” and done with little guidance from the Department of Education about how to handle documents and communications with complainants and institutions.
“The hope is that if everything is still on our main system, that a lot of the information that’s been with those cases is still there,” Coleman said. “But as far as anything else that would have been sent concerning those cases, I cannot tell you if it was smoothly transitioned over.”
Two of the fired attorneys said they were blocked from sending external emails — there was no way for them to communicate with complainants and schools to let them know that they should expect new points of contact.
“There are people that may not even know exactly where their cases were moved to,” Coleman said. “I’m not clear if the complainants even got communication saying that the office that was handling your case is no longer there.”
Spokespeople for a school district in Texas and a college in Michigan with open civil rights investigations told NOTUS they hadn’t received any communication from the Department of Education about whether the OCR regional offices handling their respective investigations would be closing, or if those investigations would proceed.
Another fired attorney at the shuttered regional office in New York, who also requested anonymity, said the number of investigations that remaining civil rights staff will now have to handle is “unsustainable.” They estimated that the attorneys at that office were already handling between 80 and 140 cases each due to understaffing. They also worried that investigative materials and communications may have been lost because staff members were fired and locked out of systems so quickly — which would make the increased caseload for the lawyers and offices left that much harder.
“There are interviews that people have held that people weren’t able to record or create records of those contacts to the system. Investigative work and analyses of data is going to have to be recreated. The product that’s gone into it will be lost,” the attorney said. “Everybody was sort of cut off from the ability to save that information to the system.”
The National Center for Youth Law sued the Department of Education earlier this month for its slashing of civil rights staff and shuttering of offices, alleging those actions amount to incapacitating the Office for Civil Rights’ ability to investigate complaints and enforce resolutions.
One of the NCYL’s lawyers, Johnathan Smith, said he’s heard from current and former OCR staff members that they have been without plans for how to transfer the cases from closed offices to the ones that remain.
If that’s the case, he said the Office for Civil Rights staff at the remaining offices are “about to get a deluge of additional cases with no context, no transition memos, with no explanation about how to move those cases forward.”
“How can you meaningfully give [a case] to someone and say, ‘Figure out what to do.’ How do you do that with one case, let alone with thousands of cases, all at one time?” Smith said. “Call it a transfer or not, the meaningful quality is that these cases are dead. There’s not going to be a functional transfer.”
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Violet Jira and Emily Kennard are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.
Have tips? You can reach Violet on Signal at violetjira.14, and Emily at emilykennard.24.