Cyd Fremmer, The Edlaw Project

I began my fellowship with The EdLaw Project in September 2004 with a plan that sought bridge the gap between criminal representation, educational advocacy, and social services for Latino youth in Boston. The EdLaw Project, which was founded in 2000, was born from the awareness that an astounding proportion of youth involved in the juvenile justice system have educational needs that go unmet, and that continued failure to meet these needs perpetuates disenfranchisement, poverty, and a cycle of incarceration, release, and re-incarceration. The three EdLaw staff attorneys provide direct representation in school discipline and special education proceedings for individual clients, many of whom are referred to the Project by the juvenile public defender of Massachusetts. My project, in its original formulation, sought to expand EdLaw’s reach in three ways: (1) by providing direct representation to Latino students in particular (a third of whom, in Boston, drop out of high school); (2) by training staff of carefully chosen social services organizations in how to interpret school issues (e.g. to consider whether a child’s disruptive behavior stems from academic frustration and might be better addressed by additional academic supports than by repeated suspensions) and in the rights of students; and (3) by training Spanish-speaking parents in their rights and the rights of their children and working with them in partnership in an effort to empower them to speak on behalf of themselves and their children.
 
The first six months of my project were spent largely on individual representation as I learned the intricacies of the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) and the personalities and convolutions of the Boston Public Schools. In the second six months, I continued direct representation but also sought to expand my collaboration with and training of parents and staff of social services organizations. I worked closely with several such organizations that focus on assisting Latino families, including City Life/Vida Urbana and JPPOP, and also formed a relationship with the Arts Incentive Program, a non-profit organization which provides arts programming and case management to at-risk females.

In a shift from my original plan, I spent significant time working with and training mental health providers. These relationships arose most frequently from my individual representation of a client. Many of my clients were seeing psychologists, psychiatrists, and clinical social workers, and it was my regular practice to make contact with these providers in order to obtain a better understanding of my client’s needs. These professionals tended to be thoughtful, caring, and generous with their time, and yet to know surprisingly little about the realities of special education, the rights of students, and the important role which they could play. Many of them were unaware, for example, that schools may not mandate that students take medication and may
not exclude them for the failure to do so – which many schools in Boston frequently attempt to do. Had they known that, they could at least have counseled their clients appropriately when faced with such a situation. Similarly, because of a lack of knowledge of the system, many of
them were unable to gauge whether the services being provided by the Boston Public Schools were or were not in keeping with their professional recommendations, and were likewise unaware of the weight their recommendations could carry in a school-based meeting or administrative hearing.

What began as a discussion about a single shared client frequently led to more far-reaching discussions about education in general and ultimately trainings, sometimes for two or three practitioners at a time, sometimes for the entire staff at once. I came to work with and train individuals and groups of individuals at Massachusetts General Hospital, Children’s Hospital, Boston Medical Center, The Martha Eliot Health Center, The South End Community Health Center, Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center, and the Home for Little Wanderers, among others. (These individuals, especially those at the health centers, tended to serve the same population on which I was focused: the Latino youth of Boston, which made sense, given that our relationship arose out of our client overlap.) In certain ways, the training of and collaboration with mental health professionals may have yielded greater benefits than working with social services organizations, as social services organizations often receive contracts from the Department of Social Services to work with families for a limited period of time (usually three months), whereas the insurance that pays for mental health services is generally more generous, and the mental health provider’s relationship with his/her patient is much more likely to extend over a period of years. Another hoped-for benefit of developing these relationships did materialize: many cross-referrals were made between the mental-health professionals and EdLaw.

The two issues that most crystallized for me in the last six months of my fellowship, however, and stand out starkly for me as problems desperately in need of redress, arose out of my individual representation of clients. The first is the failure of Boston Public Schools to provide adequate – or any – transitional planning for its older special education students; the second is the absolute opacity of Boston Public Schools, which alienates parents and students, leads to unfair treatment for which there seems to be no remedy, and which I was never able to penetrate successfully.

The lack of transitional planning became evident to me in the course of my representation of two students in particular: J.R. and M.V. J.R. was a sixteen-year-old student, in ninth grade for the third time, who had a diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and related mild mental retardation. Though he struggled with abstract concepts – algebra, a graduation requirement, was particularly difficult – his social skills were adequate and his daily living skills were normal. The administrators in Boston Public Schools, recognizing that meeting graduation requirements was going to be very difficult for J.R., wanted to place him in a vocational program – not necessarily a bad plan, but for the fact that their only vocational programming was for the severely handicapped, and taught skills such as separating recycling and identifying salt from sugar. M.V. was an eighteen year- old junior of average intelligence but suffering from severe dyslexia; at 18 and in 11th grade, on his way to graduate more-or-less on time, he was functionally illiterate. The administrators claimed that the services M.V. was currently receiving were perfectly appropriate, and cited as proof the fact that M.V. had passed the MCAS (the standardized test which Massachusetts students must pass to graduate from high school), ignoring the fact that M.V. had taken this exam with the help of a reader and a scribe.

Though their disabilities were very different, J.R. and M.V.’s situations were similar in that both were facing life after high school without having received the skills necessary to survive independently in the work force. Although IDEA mandates transitional planning precisely to address situations such as these, neither student had such a plan, and the immediate situation of each was so dire that the focus of our litigation and mediation was on the school year to come, though we were not unaware of the need for long-term planning.

The second issue was exemplified by the experience of B.G., whose relationship with the public school system was an unmitigated nightmare. B.G. was a student who came to Boston from Puerto Rico in eighth grade, never received appropriate bilingual supports, and whose severe language-based learning disability was not properly diagnosed until the end of his second year in ninth grade. In the interim, he was harassed repeatedly by one particular teacher, who falsely accused him of armed robbery (a magistrate judge refused to allow the complaint to go forward), and the principal of his high school, to a point where his family agreed, under pressure from Boston Public Schools, to receive home tutoring (three times a week for an hour and a half each time) in lieu of a regular education for the spring semester of 2005. Though B.G. had failed nearly all of his classes, he thrived under the tutor’s care.

For most of the spring, I sought to discover whether it would still be possible for B.G. to be promoted to tenth grade if he did well with the tutor; I could not get an answer nor an explanation of the standard a student must meet to be promoted. In June, the tutor administered final exams written by the teachers at B.G.’s former high school; though she said he had done well, I was then informed by the principal that B.G. had been deemed to have cheated, had accordingly been failed, and would not be promoted. There was no explanation of why he was thought to have cheated. There was no explanation of how his grades had been calculated and how or whether grades from the tutor had been factored into the end-of-year final grade. I could not get a copy of any teacher’s grade book from the fall or of the graded exams. We considered seeking these documents through a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order but had no cause of action (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act has no private cause of action). We could find no way to litigate under IDEA. We considered going to the press but B.G., and his sister, had several more years in the Boston public school system and we feared repercussions. I contacted every special education administrator involved in the case, the high school principal, several deputy superintendents, the school system’s attorney, the ombudsperson, and the superintendent himself. Almost no one returned my calls, emails, faxes. Those who did promised to investigate and then did nothing. We wanted to know a very simple fact: how had B.G.’s grades been calculated. There was no reason I could fathom why this could not have been explained to us through use of a spreadsheet and a calculator. A simple request, and I could find no way – legal or otherwise – to get an answer.

In hindsight, I believe I was able to meet some of the goals of my projects and not others. I did expand EdLaw’s direct representation to Spanish-speaking families, a group that had been previously unserved (though greatly in need of services), and was able to liaison with a number of social services and mental health organizations, forging relationships between these groups and The EdLaw Project that I believe will be ongoing. My original plan had been to work primarily with La Alianza Hispana, a community based multi-service agency that had been serving the Spanish-speaking low-income population of Boston for the last thirty years, but, just as I joined The EdLaw Project, La Alianza suffered a dramatic cut in its federal funding and had to eliminate half its programming and dismiss half its staff. Its family support services were drastically reduced. Its reorganization caused severe internal disruption, and we were not able to formalize a collaboration as initially conceived. However, I believe I adjusted relatively well in light of these external events, finding other organizations who served the same population with which to work, and taking advantage of unthought-of opportunities as they arose, such as the potential in working closely with mental health providers. There were flaws in my original plan; for example, I was not aware of the time-limited nature of most services provided by agencies such as La Alianza, nor was I aware of the extremely high rate of turnover at organizations such as these. One of the biggest problems in working with other agencies, and one for which I never found a solution, was how to prevent the collaboration from being merely a personal relationship between two individuals, one at each agency, which would simply collapse when one or both of the two departed.

The component of my project in which I feel I made the least headway was the third: mobilizing parents in the Latino community, or mobilizing parents in Boston in general. It became clear to me early on that in order to be mobilized, parents, like anyone else, need a unifying catalyst. While education of their children is always among the priorities, something is needed to move it to the top of the list. An expulsion hearing or special education proceeding can move education to the list for an individual parent but doesn’t have a unifying effect, and too often the parent is (rightfully) focused on the individual outcome to the detriment of larger structural goals. In my time with EdLaw, there did seem to be two opportunities in particular to mobilize a parent base to advocate for greater change, and both centered around the conduct of principals, one of a middle school and one of a high school. Both principals committed numerous and egregious due process violations; we had numerous clients from both of these schools whose parents were fed up and who told us other parents were fed up as well. In one of these schools, I had also worked productively with several teachers on an individual case and believed that they would likewise be interested in preventing the principal from making such unfettered use of his discretion. I thought it would be highly effective to create a partnership between the parents and teachers, and it seemed possible. But my case load made it impossible for me to devote the time or resources needed to make this happen and I do view it as an opportunity lost.

With this in mind, and with the benefit of hindsight, had I the opportunity to do this fellowship over again, I would make it a point to allocate my time more strictly between individual representation and the community outreach and social services organization training. While I think it made sense to focus my time on direct representation in the first six months, I believe at that point I should have been stricter about restricting or reducing my caseload and in placing aside a certain number of hours each week to work on the larger picture. This would have allowed me the opportunity to take advantage of what I had learned in the first six months about the most pressing problems in our education system in such a way as to (perhaps) do more to try to alleviate them, even if this meant only laying a framework.

Since finishing my fellowship, I have begun work as a staff attorney at a small firm in New Haven dedicated to indigent criminal defense. My time at EdLaw made me increasingly aware of the importance of due process to a functioning system of justice, education, and society, and led me to criminal defense work.