Special education funding for students with hearing and vision loss cut in DEI probe

WASHINGTON (OSV News) — The U.S. Department of Education has pulled funding for programs in eight states that is aimed at assisting students who are both visually and hearing-impaired, sometimes referred to as deafblind.

The cut comes amid the Trump administration’s efforts to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs, sometimes referred to as DEI, within federal agencies.

Kristi Arsenault, a Maryland mom whose 9-year-old daughter is on the deafblind spectrum, told OSV News those grants help fund state-based deafblind projects, including a Maryland one that has provided “so many services and resources, training, materials” for their family and for their daughter’s education, including “things that we could use to build books for our daughter.”

“In fact, they provided materials that we used for my daughter’s first Communion and first reconciliation,” Arsenault said.

Savannah Newhouse, press secretary for the Department of Education, said in a statement shared with OSV News Sept. 18, “The Trump Administration is no longer allowing taxpayer dollars to go out the door on autopilot — we are evaluating every federal grant to ensure they are in line with the Administration’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education.”

“The Department re-awarded over 500 IDEA Part D grants and non-continued fewer than 35 grants that do not align with the Administration’s priorities,” Newhouse said, arguing, “Many of these use overt race preferences or perpetuate divisive concepts and stereotypes, which no student should be exposed to.”

“The non-continued grant funds are not being cut; they are being re-invested immediately into high quality programs that better serve special needs students,” she said.

Arsenault expressed concern that these programs were erroneously identified as what the administration considers DEI because it included “words about inclusion” and expressed hope this would be reconsidered.

“It’s kind of hard not to talk about disabilities and ‘inclusion,’ right?” she said, adding, “Some of these grants are already awarded. These have already been funded for years, and so it was something they went back through, and they were screening it that way. And so they got targeted.”

Deafblindness is a rare condition. According to 2023 data from the National Deafblind Child Count Report by the National Center on Deafblindness released in February, 10,692 children were eligible to receive state deafblind project services.

In a statement on its website, the National Family Association for DeafBlind argued that “in a recent executive order entitled Improving Oversight of Federal Grant Making, President Trump declared, ‘Every tax dollar the Government spends should improve American lives or advance American interests.’ Then why is it that the federal government is eliminating funding for programs that do just that, IMPROVE and ADVANCE the lives of American DeafBlind children and adults?”

Arsenault said that although they are involved in their parish and that they are grateful for support from the local archdiocese for her family’s effort to educate their daughter in Catholic teaching, she is not able to go to Catholic school because they cannot meet her educational needs. She spoke highly of their local school for the blind, which also has a program for the deafblind, and said she was concerned about the impact of the cuts on schools like that one.

“We really need these resources, whether it’s public or Catholic, and hurting this population hurts all of us,” she said.

She added the impact of the cuts could be far-reaching, because some of the states impacted by cuts are home to training programs for American Sign Language interpreters or schools that “teach others how to transcribe printed media into Braille,” including the Bible.   

“We’re in a field that there’s not many people in it to begin with, special needs and the deafblind, we’re begging and dying to have people come and serve in this role,” she said.

This story was updated at 1:35 p.m.

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