02/06/2025
The following was published as an opinion editorial by the Richmond Times-Dispatch on May 24, 2025:
In 2021, Glenn Youngkin seized a rare political opportunity in Virginia to persuade a bipartisan majority of Virginians to sweep him into office under the promise of education reform and parental rights.
The watershed moment when everything changed occurred in his debate with former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who infamously said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Youngkin wasted no time skewering McAuliffe with his own words and exploiting that gaffe to win over swing voters. Youngkin’s express promise was to fight for parents to achieve education reform for Virginia.
Riding the wave of parental dissatisfaction with Virginia’s public school system, Youngkin was elected governor by Virginians who trusted that he would courageously confront structural problems in public education that have festered for decades. In the wake of his election, Youngkin has repeatedly asserted that “parental rights are not negotiable.”
The Virginia public school system is run by inflexible bureaucrats who have poisoned public education and caused student achievement and test scores to plummet. Youngkin’s rhetoric required little effort, yet the hard reality is that reform is daunting as these bureaucrats are a powerful, formidable force. For him to truly make good on his promise to effect education reform, Youngkin would have had to dig in for a long, difficult fight rather than chase easy headlines over gender issues like bathroom symbols and locker room controversies.
I am the father of a special needs child who has exposed a two-decade scandal in how Virginia has abused the educational rights of disabled children and their parents, and I bear witness that Governor Youngkin has not acted with courage to confront and reform the public school system for special needs children in Virginia.
To date, Youngkin has treated special needs children and their families as invisible — a community not politically significant enough to care about.
In 1975, Congress passed federal law now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to ensure that previously marginalized disabled children would have access to a fair and appropriate education. The centerpiece of this landmark legislation was the right of parents to challenge public schools that violate the IDEA before an impartial hearing officer in due process litigation.
In 2021, we discovered that the hearing officer who presided over our child’s own due process hearing had not ruled in favor of a disabled child in nearly 30 years. Yet, this hearing officer had been paid by the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) for decades as a purportedly “impartial” trier of fact.
We then fought the VDOE for a year to obtain non-public documents under the Freedom of Information Act that shockingly revealed that over at least two decades, almost two-thirds of all of the hearing officers in Virginia had similarly never ruled in favor of a special needs child in due process litigation. In fact, the Virginia public school bureaucrats have so badly rigged the system that only 1.8% of all due process hearings in the last 20 years have resulted in rulings in favor of parents of disabled children, compared to a national average of 30% parental success in such due process litigation.
We exposed this scandal in September 2022 by filing a class-action complaint on behalf of disabled children against both the Virginia Department of Education and Fairfax County alleging systemic violations of the IDEA and civil rights violations.
Our complaint also revealed that when it comes to IDEA violations, Virginia has been a repeat offender, as documented by the U.S. Department of Education. These abuses have been so chronic and persistent that the U.S. Department of Education placed Virginia under a formal compliance monitoring program.
We have since learned from other parents that Virginia public schools have systemically violated the rights of special needs children from the moment parents seek needed accommodations for their children’s disabilities. In January of 2023, we filed a nearly 140-page amended complaint that outlined in detail these systemic defects in the way Virginia treats the rights of disabled children. This complaint provided Gov. Youngkin a detailed roadmap for what needs to be reformed for disabled children in Virginia.
Critically, this class action does not seek damages, but only reform through structural change in the way public schools treat disabled children under the IDEA. Gov. Youngkin is well aware of the issues exposed by this class action as the media has extensively covered this case, and we have repeatedly approached the governor and his administration seeking his cooperation to effect reform.
Not only has he completely ignored our requests, he’s fought against reform. Gov. Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares hired the largest law firm in Virginia to fight our case with procedural arguments for the last three years. The case has been sidelined and is currently pending before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The case before the 4th Circuit Court is procedural in nature and has nothing to do with the underlying merits of the case. This has produced delay and plausible deniability for both Youngkin and Miyares so that they can avoid dealing with the issues exposed by our class action.
The “invisible” includes more than 180,000 souls in Virginia who suffer from disabilities. We have since learned that 50% of the families of these disabled children live at or below the poverty line, and two-thirds are nonwhite. In other words, the special needs community in Virginia is the very definition of a vulnerable community that the governor and his attorney general should be fighting for, not against — especially in light of repeated civil rights and IDEA violations.
The recent dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education underscores the urgency of state-level violations of the IDEA. The issues we have surfaced are national in scope and relevance. The U.S. Department of Education is the primary oversight authority for the rights of the disabled under the IDEA.
Who will prevent what has happened in Virginia and in other states? Who will fight for the rights of the disabled if the U.S. Department of Education is fully shut down?
Gov. Youngkin should be held accountable for the promises he made to all Virginians for education reform. It is not too late for Gov. Youngkin to act before he leaves office. He can still do the right thing and directly confront the scandal exposed by our class action.
Gov. Youngkin could start by not hiding behind his lawyers and talking to us about how Virginia’s public schools should be reformed so that this never happens again. We have already given him a detailed playbook. We set up a nonprofit called Hear Our Voices, which includes a website that outlines our class action along with detailed reforms that can be enacted now to cure these longstanding problems.
By refusing to confront this scandal, Gov. Youngkin will leave a legacy of inaction that betrays his fundamental promise to all Virginians. We call on the governor to stand up for the “invisible” — and take action.
Trevor Chaplick is one of the lead plaintiffs in the class action filed in the United States District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia entitled D.C., et al v. Fairfax County School Board, et al. Contact Chaplick at [email protected].
🔗: https://richmond.com/opinion/column/article_5fe2f83f-a157-4949-a71d-7203c5d693bc.html
“Who will prevent what has happened in Virginia and in other states? Who will fight for the rights of the disabled if the U.S. Department of Education is fully shut down?“
