UPDATE: A spokesperson for the Department of Education sent me this (I updated the title as well)
We have an IEP this morning and I wasn’t planning to blog anything, as I have two stories being published today. But then I was alerted to this.
BREAKING: Our children’s future. IDEA’s website is 404 not found. https://t.co/JvWYmJKOuJ #DumpDevos pic.twitter.com/0hbFJzJqf0— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) February 8, 2017
The IDEA website is not loading. The connection times out, so it could just be some kind of glitch, but we’ll see (yes, technies, I know it’s not a 404). There’s some archived information if you did through search results, but tons of the material is not currently accessible.
The Department of Education Office of Special Education and internet publications around disability law are not political. There is nothing especially partisan about IDEA, though there are debates around enforcement and the degree of education required (with a big SCOTUS decision coming down about it). It’s a bizarre thing to do.
Would a new Secretary of Education with a new head of OSEP want to revise pages? Sure. But to simply take them down, the morning after Devos was confirmed, especially given her wild incoherence around IDEA specifically … it’s a very odd decision.
Some of this stuff may be FOIAable, but I’m not an expert on that. Time to learn new research skills. I’ll dig.
But in the meantime, we really do have an IEP. It’s not just ironic timing.