Oregon kids can't afford education cuts

President Trump’s decision to ditch the Department of Education without a thought to what students and parents need is just another short-sighted, chaotic, and effed-up chapter in this administration’s miserable attempt to upset the status quo that doesn’t make meaningful change.

What’s more concerning is that he’s abandoning families who need help holding failing education departments accountable at the state level, just like what we are seeing here in Oregon.

For the past several years, I have experienced firsthand the failure of the Oregon Department of Education, ODE, to ensure kids with special needs, like my own, get the free and appropriate education they deserve. As I have worked with the administrators that serve my children over the past several years, it has become painfully clear that backlogs and apathy in processing parents’ concerns is the true hallmark of this agency. It seems that no matter how much new funding is appropriated, school districts still can’t produce the results we need.

Now, as part of the President and Elon Musk’s attempts to make the government “more efficient,” the U.S. Department of Education announced that it plans to cut nearly half of its workforce. That’ll lead to less teachers, larger class sizes, and the deterioration of an already struggling education system. We can’t accept that for our kids.

That’s why, instead of recklessly slashing the U.S. Department of Education, I challenge President Trump to tackle the actual problems in our education system. I challenge him to make fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act a priority for our students so school districts don’t continue to play shell games with their budgets and shortchange our kids. I challenge him to ensure no student is discriminated against at school based on their race, religion, gender, ability level or any other reason. Our schools should be a welcoming place for everyone. And I challenge President Trump to invest in career and technical education and community colleges to address the trained worker shortage we have all across America.

That’s how we can shake up the status quo to actually make meaningful change for Oregonians. If our state and the federal government prioritized these issues, we’d level the playing field for all of our kids and strengthen our economy in the process.

So here is my closing message: President Trump, do something more than just tear up stuff. Build what America needs!

And to Governor Kotek and the Oregon Legislature: Stand up for public education and stop accepting mediocre results for our kids. Hold our school districts and ODE accountable to deliver high quality education for all students. That is how we make our state the best choice for raising a family and building businesses for the future. It’s only when we inspect what we expect that will we deliver the education our children and state deserve.

Congresswoman Janelle Bynum is a working mom of four, engineer, small business owner, and former state legislator now representing Oregon’s Fifth Congressional District in Congress.