As Mayor Bill de Blasio lectures America on the success of his pre-K programs, his leadership has left the city’s special-needs children hanging in the wind.

Recent reporting by The City’s Yoav Gonen has exposed massive Department of Education incompetence and indifference that victimizes special-education kids and their parents.

Taken to the woodshed by state officials, the DOE admitted to being overwhelmed. Special-ed complaints soared from 4,734 in the 2014-15 school year to 9,695 in 2018-19. Yet it had as few as nine hearing officers available to hear cases — and only in one office in Brooklyn.

One reason for the growth: universal pre-K, which added tens of thousands of kids to the system, leaving it now serving more than 300,000 special-needs students.

Parents typically request a hearing because their child isn’t getting mandated services — often because the kid got assigned to a school that can’t provide for them. But the bureaucracy forces parents to jump through onerous hoops, plainly hoping they’ll give up.

Getting a problem fixed can take months, and even force parents to use their savings to fight for services. It also leads to lawsuits: The city settled 4,184 special-ed claims for $240 million in fiscal year 2017.

The problems go back years, but you’d think an administration that brags of leading the “fairest big city in America” would do better by the most vulnerable kids.

Yet, for all his thundering on other inequities, School Chancellor Richard Carranza is silent about how the system he leads fails low-income special-ed students.

Before adding to the mess by further expanding pre-K, the mayor and chancellor should beef up the number of hearing officers — and open hearing offices in every borough, so that parents don’t have to lose a day of work to ask for justice.