Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed SB26-125 into law, creating a state-level system for enforcing disability civil rights in public K-12 schools. The law makes the Colorado Department of Education responsible for investigating complaints and ordering remedies, a function that the department previously told families did not exist at the state level.
The law prohibits school districts, charter schools, the state charter school institute, and boards of cooperative services from discriminating against students with disabilities. It requires them to provide reasonable accommodations and equal access. Each local education provider must adopt a grievance process, which can be the same process used for Section 504 complaints, and must name at least one employee responsible for compliance.
Complaints can be filed with CDE by a parent, guardian, student, or third party only after the local grievance process is exhausted or if the provider has not resolved the complaint within 60 days. The state must complete its investigation within 180 days, with a possible 60-day pause for attempted resolution.
Funding contingency
The enforcement and training provisions of the law are conditional on CDE receiving enough funding. The fiscal note estimates $668,414 in the 2026-27 fiscal year and $581,070 in 2027-28, enough for 3.7 to 4.0 full-time employees including two investigators. If the funding does not arrive by June 30, 2028, those sections of the law are repealed.
The fiscal note assumes CDE will handle about 60 disability complaints each year, of which up to 25 will require full investigations. For context, CDE received roughly 160 IDEA complaints in 2025 and conducted 64 full investigations. At the time the fiscal note was prepared, there were 120 open OCR cases involving Colorado public schools.
Governor Polis supported the law but raised questions about using gifts, grants, and donations to cover startup costs, according to the Colorado Sun.
What the law does and does not cover
SB26-125 codifies protections from Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act into Colorado state law. It does not create new authority over matters related to the identification, evaluation, placement, or provision of a free appropriate public education under an IEP. The local grievance process is not required to apply to IEP-related allegations.
The Colorado Civil Rights Division in the Department of Regulatory Agencies must refer complaints that fall under this law to CDE within ten days.
If CDE finds a violation, it can order audits, corrective action plans, compensatory services, reinstatement of wrongfully denied services or benefits, staff training, and new policies. The State Board of Education may withhold state funds from any provider that intentionally violated the law and refuses to enter a corrective action plan.
Federal context
The law arrives at a time when the federal Office for Civil Rights is being moved to the Department of Justice. The Trump administration announced on June 16, 2026 that OCR would shift to DOJ and the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services would move to HHS, both through interagency agreements without congressional approval.
OCR lost half its staff in a reduction in force in March 2025 and resolved only 112 cases in that year, the fewest in more than a decade. Disability-based discrimination cases made up nearly half of the roughly 12,000 unresolved OCR cases as of January 2025.
Members of Congress, primarily Democrats, have called the interagency moves illegal, but no meaningful congressional action has blocked them. The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 had proposed moving special education to HHS and civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department.
Before SB26-125, CDE's own website stated that it could not investigate alleged violations of Section 504. The site directed complainants to the federal OCR. The new state law creates that investigative authority for the first time.