On June 9, the House Appropriations Committee passed its Labor-HHS-Education funding bill 34 to 28. Buried inside it is a detail every special education parent should sit with: IDEA Part B funding would increase by $35 million, Part C by $10 million — while Title I grants, which support public schools serving the highest percentages of low-income students, would see significant cuts.
Read that again slowly. The line that funds your child’s IEP services goes up. The line that funds the schools where a huge number of disabled Black and Brown children actually sit goes down.
I built SAFE HUB to run on three funding streams working together — McKinney-Vento, IDEA Part B, and Title I — because they’re supposed to catch the kids who fall through every other gap. When one of the three gets cut while the others hold steady, it doesn’t just shrink a budget line. It changes which children get caught.
The Question Most Parents Never Get Asked
So here’s the question I want you to actually ask, not rhetorically: if your child’s services depend on multiple funding streams, do you know which ones — and what happens if one shrinks?
Most parents don’t. I didn’t, for years. Nobody hands you that in an IEP meeting. You have to go looking, the same way every generation before us had to go looking for the parts of the truth that weren’t going to be handed over freely.
That’s not a new problem. It’s an old one wearing a new outfit.
An Old Discipline, Still in Use
In When The Drums Met The Cross, my uncle Eldon Brown and I write about what it meant for enslaved Africans to hold two systems at once — the one imposed on them and the one they carried inside — and extract what they needed from each without ever fully trusting either. That’s exactly what special education parents are doing right now. You learned, the way every generation before you learned, to take what’s offered, document everything, and keep your own record of the truth regardless of what the paperwork says.
Before you close this tab: find your child’s IEP and check which funding sources are listed. If you don’t see Title I anywhere, ask your special ed coordinator directly whether any part of your child’s program is Title I-funded — even indirectly, through staffing. You’re allowed to ask that. More than once.
If this confirmed something you already suspected — that the system was never going to volunteer this to you — you’re not paranoid. You were paying attention.
That’s the same discipline my uncle and I write about: holding what’s true even when no one official will confirm it for you.
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Sources: Autism Society, “Capitol Connection: June 11, 2026”; House Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Committee vote, June 9, 2026.
The Alani Jacob Foundation is the public-facing initiative founded by Salima Levy, dedicated to ancestral memory, disability advocacy, and community transformation. Learn more at alanijacobfoundation.org.