<h2>It's simple to contact your Senator and Representative! Just follow these steps:</h2>
<ul>
<li>Enter Your Information: Fill in your personal details on the contact form. This helps your legislators know you're a constituent.</li>
<li>Review Your Message: Take a moment to read over the pre-written message. Feel free to personalize it at the end with your own thoughts and experiences to make an even bigger impact!</li>
<ul>
<li>Note: <span style="color: rgba(0,0,0,0.87);background-color: rgb(255,255,255);font-size: 16px;font-family: Helvetica Neue;">When filling out the form, you'll be prompted to enter an optional personal message first, followed by a pre-filled message. You can choose whether or not to include the personal message.</span></li>
</ul>
<li>Send the message</li>
</ul>


Tell Congress to keep Bookshare free for all students

Help ensure that students continue to have access to Bookshare and other supportive services currently provided by the US Department of Education.

As Congress prepares to consider FY26 federal funding bills this summer, I am writing to urge you to ensure special education students continue to have access to the supportive services and tools currently provided by the U.S. Department of Education. I specifically want to share my concerns about the Administration’s FY26 Budget Request for the U.S. Department of Education and how this proposal could negatively impact students in our State.  

The FY26 Budget Request proposes to eliminate funding currently allocated to the Educational Technology, Media and Materials Program (Ed Tech) within the Office of Special Education and instead block grant that funding to individual states which could disrupt and jeopardize services to special needs students.   

Under the Individuals with Disability Education Act (IDEA), schools are required to provide students with print disabilities accessible versions of books like audio, enlarged text and Braille. The Ed Tech Program provides annual funding appropriated by Congress to make it easier and more cost-effective for schools to provide accessible educational materials available to students with qualifying disabilities such as dyslexia, blindness and low vision through a program called Bookshare. Bookshare is currently in year 3 of a 5-year competitive grant and receives $9 million annually from the Ed Tech program to support its operational costs.  

Bookshare is an online learning solution which serves students in every state, congressional district, as well as territories with a print disability at no cost to eligible students so they can access educational materials at the same time as their non-disabled peers. Bookshare serves all students with a print disability in public, private, and charter schools, as well as home school students. As a result, over 1.1 million U.S. students with print disabilities have been provided with crucial educational materials in accessible digital formats, free reading tools, and software. Students can instantly download more than 1.3 million educational titles, including textbooks, educational books, children’s books and free assistive reading apps. Bookshare also uniquely applies technologies like Artificial Intelligence that allow for complex STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) content like equations to be accessible. These supports allow students with special needs to learn and graduate, adding for every student an additional $1.2 million into the US economy over their lifetime through participation in the workforce.  

Bookshare has been making educational materials accessible to special education students for over 20 years and has received federal support from the Ed Tech program since 2008. Under the Administration’s proposal, federal grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education for Bookshare and other programs that serve special needs students would end on September 30, 2025.  

In its place, the Administration proposes to create a 50-state funding model for programs like Bookshare, which will take months for states to adopt and implement. In the process, this will jeopardize Bookshare’s ability to continue serving special needs students who depend on the accessible educational materials that Bookshare currently provides. This is also the time that students most need accessible books as the new school year starts. Without continuity in funding, Bookshare will be unable to support students leading to an interruption in service. The Administration’s approach would jeopardize a program that works and replace it with a new funding model that creates uncertainty and would likely be detrimental for students who need supportive services that are currently being provided. 

Bookshare is able to efficiently and effectively serve every eligible student in all 50 states and territories because it has spent over two decades building its library of accessible titles, developing a user-friendly online platform, and negotiating agreements with over 1,000 publishers to make copyrighted educational materials available at no cost to Bookshare users in accessible formats. There is no readily available alternative to Bookshare and state and local school districts would not be able to replicate comparable services on their own.  

I have witnessed the essential resources Bookshare provides to students who need assistive reading support firsthand. Without these services, students with dyslexia, visual impairments, cerebral palsy, and other disabilities that prevent them from reading from traditional books will be at great risk of falling behind in the classroom and achieving their full academic potential. Without Bookshare, making accessible educational materials available to students would often require scanning and converting books manually into accessible versions. In many cases, this would mean special needs students wouldn’t receive accessible versions of classroom materials until weeks or months after their non-disabled peers.   

I am urging Congress to maintain the existing federal funding framework for Bookshare through the Ed Tech program at the U.S. Department of Education to ensure Bookshare is able to continue to meet the needs of every student who depends on its supportive services.   

Thank you for your support of special education funding at the U.S. Department of Education. If I can provide any additional information, please do not hesitate to let me know.