According to a September 29th ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) can move forward with plans to cut half of its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) staff as litigation against the reductions proceeds. The decision overturns a lower court’s order requiring the USDE to restore the civil rights enforcement office to the “status quo,” and it comes as the agency had already begun returning staffers to the office in waves.
As reported by K-12 Dive, at this stage, the three-judge panel said it could not “conclude that this case differs enough” from a separate but similar case challenging the broader USDE layoffs, which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in July in an emergency decision in New York v. McMahon in to allow the USDE’s reduction in force to take effect. It would have also applied to the OCR layoffs, had Judge Myong Joun of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts not ordered that the OCR be restored to the “status quo” in a separate case, Victim Rights Law Center v. U.S. Department of Education.
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