Help Protect Education Funding for Students and Adults with Vision Loss

AER is urging lawmakers to reject the Administration’s proposed cuts to vital U.S. Department of Education programs serving individuals who are blind or have low vision. These programs provide essential support for early intervention, teacher preparation, and rehabilitation services—needs that states cannot meet alone. Without sustained and increased federal funding under IDEA and the Rehabilitation Act, students and adults with vision loss will be left behind. We need champions in Congress to protect and expand these lifeline services.

Dear [Lawmaker],

I am writing to urge you to protect and expand funding and managerial support for the most critical programs and initiatives overseen by the U.S. Department of Education, which meet the unique learning and rehabilitative needs of children, working-age adults, and older individuals with blindness or low vision. As Congress presses ahead with the appropriations process for the coming fiscal year, I implore you and your staff to stand guard against efforts to diminish, consolidate, or otherwise retreat from our national commitment to America’s students and clients with vision loss. Indeed, we desperately need champions like you to push for the continuation and expansion of current funding levels and management, so that we can finally begin to meet historically unmet needs.

In the Administration’s proposed budget for the Education Department, I was deeply disappointed and alarmed to see the potential abandonment of our historical commitments. How can this country hope to maximize the employment potential of adults who are blind or who have low vision if, as proposed, funding for preparation of rehabilitation professionals is eliminated? How can each state in this country, already facing increasing budget challenges and administrative burdens of their own, possibly be saddled with a new task foisted on them by a federal government that, as proposed, would reduce resources while expecting them to sort out all of the challenges of teacher preparation in isolation? What heights of success do we honestly think K-12 special education students will be equipped to achieve when the early childhood intervention we offer during their most formative years is, as proposed, withheld or left in limbo? And how can we at all reasonably think that the least advantaged and most systemically fragile populations and their service providers, especially the DeafBlindness community, hope for meaningful education, productivity, and quality of life when, as proposed, the singular and far-too-limited resources we have allowed them will have the rug ripped out from under them?

It is Congress’s job to make spending decisions, and these spending decisions must be in line with the laws that authorized such spending in the first place. To advance appropriations measures in line with the Administration’s proposed Education Department budget would be both out of bounds and out of touch. Our national special education law, particularly so-called Part D of IDEA, is crystal clear; Congress has established a system of vital funding support to assist states in meeting a host of needs that they have repeatedly shown they cannot meet on their own. Far from being a top-down seizure of control, Congress sought to support states as they struggled with the persistent and overlapping complexities of preparing teachers and meeting vastly heterogeneous needs. This is particularly acute with a so-called low-incidence population like that of children with vision loss. It is categorically unreasonable for states to be left to navigate the effective distribution of further decreased funds to serve the smallest special needs populations when doing so requires interstate and national coordination.

To put it simply, I need you to fight to preserve and increase the funding levels, along with the structural integrity of funding delivery, as called for in the Rehabilitation Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Congress’s abandonment of such prior commitments would harm states, not empower them, and the students and clients we should all be concerned about will ultimately suffer the avoidable catastrophic consequences of such forsaken promises. I am looking to you for your leadership, and I thank you in advance for your follow-through.

Sincerely,
______

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