B26-0526, the LEARNS Act

Joshua Miller, PhD

Research & Advocacy Director, Open City Advocates

DC Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, Budget Oversight Hearing

May 6, 2026

Introduction

Chairperson Pinto and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to submit written testimony in support of B26-0526, the Leading Education Access for Reentry and Necessary Success Act. I am the Research and Advocacy Director at Open City Advocates, a nonprofit legal organization providing post-disposition representation to young people committed to the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. The credentials I bring to this testimony, however, are older than my time at OCA.

What I saw at the DC Jail

I came to the Prisons and Justice Initiative with several years of prior experience teaching inside Maryland’s Jessup Correctional Institution, where I ran an all-volunteer Prison Scholars Program serving more than 160 incarcerated students across fall, spring, and summer terms. In 2016, I helped develop a Second Chance Pell program with the University of Baltimore. When the Jessup program was abruptly canceled in 2017, I joined Marc Howard at Georgetown PJI as Director of Education. In partnership with the leadership of the DC Department of Corrections, including then-Director Quincy Booth and his new Education Deputy Amy Lopez, we launched the Georgetown Prison Scholars Program at the DC Jail in January 2018. I worked with students at both the Central Detention Facility and the Central Treatment Facility. I read their applications, their writing samples, and the records they were willing to share with me.

Every student admitted to our program was ready for college-level work the moment we met them. They were curious, articulate, and undertrained. They had been failed long before they were incarcerated, and the institutions that had failed them were DC’s public and charter schools. The disabilities the LEARNS Act now asks the District to identify and accommodate were, in case after case, present and unaddressed since elementary school.

When COVID arrived, the jail strained under conditions I would not describe as humane. Even so, the educational partnership we had built proved unexpectedly resilient. DOC procured tablets the facility had not previously had, and our program continued offering credit-bearing classes throughout the pandemic. When DOC leadership treated education as a priority in the worst conditions imaginable, the agency built the infrastructure to make it work. LEARNS asks the District to make that same investment, on behalf of a population the law has been failing the longest.

What I see at Open City Advocates

In my work at OCA, I see the other end of the same pipeline. Young people committed to DYRS with documented special education needs do not age out of the District’s obligation to educate them. They age into the Department of Corrections. On their eighteenth birthday, many are transferred from a juvenile rehabilitation facility into the same jail I have already described.

Some of them arrive with IEPs that have not been honored for months. Many arrive without ever having been evaluated, despite years of behavioral indicators that would have triggered an evaluation in any traditional school setting. None currently have a reliable path to the Free Appropriate Public Education that federal law has owed them since they were three years old.

The high school program at the DC Jail, run by Maya Angelou Public Charter School, serves only students who already have an IEP on file. A young person who arrives in DOC custody without an IEP cannot enroll in that school. Their only educational option becomes GED self-study, which for students with significant learning disabilities is functionally no option at all. The result is that the very students with the deepest unmet educational needs are the ones least able to access the only public school program inside the facility. LEARNS solves this by requiring DOC to identify and evaluate students who were not previously assessed. The bill creates the doorway that currently does not exist.

The District also has a structural reason to act because of its federal incarceration status. DC residents sentenced to prison serve their time in the federal Bureau of Prisons, dispersed across facilities thousands of miles from home and almost never near family or counsel. The federal BOP offers no special education services. For a young person with a disability who lands in DOC custody at eighteen, the DC Jail is often their last meaningful contact with a public education system that has any obligation to them at all. If the District does not provide FAPE during that window, no one will.

The District has already paid for this failure in litigation. The Charles H. v. District of Columbia class action found the District liable for failing to provide required special education instruction. The cost of refusing to fund LEARNS is not zero. It is the next Charles H., and the one after that.

On Transparency and the Grievance System

The bill’s third major provision is a publicly accessible digital grievance system that families, counsel, and oversight agencies can use to track requests inside DOC facilities in real time. A public tracking system makes administrative failures visible at the moment they occur, to the people who can address them. Other jurisdictions, including Minnesota and New York City, have already adopted publicly accessible digital grievance systems for their corrections departments. The District should not be the slowest jurisdiction in the country to choose transparency.

On the Fiscal Impact Statement

The coalition supporting LEARNS has documented in detail why the Chief Financial Officer’s estimate of $7.7 million in FY27 and $26.7 million through FY30 substantially overstates the true cost of implementation. The FIS assumes 521 new special education evaluations per year. DOC’s own data, including data the agency provided in support of the FIS itself, does not bear that figure out. The budget point I want to make is simpler. Leaving LEARNS unfunded only shifts the cost from the appropriations cycle to the litigation docket, and the District has already learned, in Charles H. and elsewhere, that the litigation docket is more expensive.

Conclusion

LEARNS guarantees what federal law already requires: a Free Appropriate Public Education for students with disabilities through age twenty-one, including in DOC custody. The District has spent more than a decade failing to meet that obligation. The young people I worked with at the jail and the young people OCA represents today are the same population, observed at different points in the same failure. Funding LEARNS will not undo what was lost. It will keep the next cohort from losing the same things.

I urge this Committee to fund the LEARNS Act in full.

Thank you. I am happy to answer the Committee’s questions.

Joshua Miller, PhD
Research & Advocacy Director
Open City Advocates
joshua@opencityadvocates.org