Kelly Rogers, the acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, announced her resignation Wednesday morning — less than four months into the role and less than a day before her staff was scheduled to relocate to the Department of Health and Human Services. Some employees, NPR reported, were shocked by the timing.
Rogers wrote in an internal email that she was departing effective September 11 to return home to Florida. Education Department press secretary Savannah Newhouse told NPR that Rogers was leaving to take on a great opportunity and be closer to her family.
OSERS oversees roughly $15 billion in annual federal funding that flows to states and school districts under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — the federal law guaranteeing students with disabilities a free and appropriate public education.
The Trump administration announced in June that it would transfer OSERS to HHS through interagency agreements, bypassing Congress. The move follows a blueprint set out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which called for shifting special education oversight to HHS and converting federal funding into individual family vouchers.
Disability advocates have opposed the transfer for more than a year. “IDEA is fundamentally an education law — not a healthcare law — and should continue to be administered by education policy experts who understand schools, teaching, learning, and accountability,” said Phyllis Wolfram, executive director of the Council of Special Education Administrators, when the transfer was announced.
In July, Rogers held a private briefing with disability rights groups. She insisted HHS was “not taking over IDEA. Period.” But she also confirmed that OSERS staff would move to HHS buildings and offered no timeline for the changes. Chad Rummel, who leads the Council for Exceptional Children, said the call resolved little: “Today we heard that there is no clear and transparent plan around the move to HHS.”
Jacqueline Rodriguez, CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, described the stakes for families at the time: “The concern is not that IDEA disappears overnight. The concern is that the administration is preserving IDEA at the Department of Education on paper, while moving much of the work that makes IDEA real for families somewhere else. For students, that could mean more confusion, slower guidance, weaker monitoring and less accountability when services are delayed or denied.”
The strain of inadequate special education support is already visible in local school data. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the school board met this week to confront declining outcomes for students with disabilities. District data from the 2024-25 school year showed that reading and math proficiency for Exceptional Children students fell across all grade levels.
Board member Leah Crowley blamed staffing cuts in part: “We let go a substantial amount of EC assistants, EC TAs. It’s left a situation where the general population and the EC population is not being served.”
Board member Trevonia Brown-Gaither described walking into general education classrooms where teachers were overwhelmed. “If I walk into a school, I’m getting people pulling me left and right,” she said. “And the teachers are at a wit’s end.”
OSERS is now without permanent leadership at the moment its staff is being moved to a different agency. The Education Department has not announced an interim replacement for Rogers.