Xaykham Khamsyvoravong, Brown University '06

After spending nine months at the Rhode Island Public Defender’s Office and four at the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office, it occurred to me that I should take a look at the world of civil law, and decided to use my Liman Fellowship to work at the Providence office of Rhode Island Legal Services (RILS). A lively, open-door office, attorneys and staff are constantly consulting one another regarding cases, or the daily injustices that occur in the chambers and dark corners of civil court. Despite the constant frustration, a sparkingly characteristic of RILS is that everyone seems to be happy with their job.

One thing that is striking about RILS is the startlingly few support staff that paralegals and attorneys have to assist them. Because of my familiarity with the state’s courts and agencies, I was able to efficiently assist attorneys with their work by obtaining and reviewing files, checking for body attachments and subpoenas with the court’s clerks, and escorting clients to and from administrative hearings. Bouncing week to week to the unit that needed the most help, I served on an ad hoc basis for the first month of the summer. Within these weeks, I standardized and drafted the office’s Social Security medical forms for doctors to fill out, researched regulations on ex-parte contact for administrative hearings, and researched the state’s welfare to work programs established by the 1998 Workforce Investment Act.

For the second half of my summer, the office decided that my experience would be best expanded by working with a young Georgetown Law graduate. Originally hired as a Skadden Fellow, the attorney works for the Education Law unit of RILS. Advocating for children struggling to stay in school, her work, like much work in this sector, can often seem to be like treading water. In addition to casework, she heads the Education Subcommittee. The Education Subcommittee is composed of leaders from community organizations who are dedicated to addressing the state’s embarrassingly high dropout rate. The specific charge of the committee is to investigate if many dropouts are actually pushouts (children implicitly or explicitly told to dropout) and if that is the case, to fix it.

I worked alongside this lawyer researching the dropout rate and pushout issues across the nation, preparing presentations, interpreting the Department of Education’s statistical data, and meeting with interested organization leaders to get them on board with our project. As a native of the state, with cousins in the very school systems facing 52% drop out rates (and equally sobering 62% graduation rates), it is a project I have latched onto and plan to stay onboard with as long as time allows.

I’ve lived in Rhode Island my entire life. I’ve had the privilege of attending the most advantaged public school system in the state, and continued my good fortune at Brown University. Always in the back of my mind are my cousins. They were never alongside me in class; they were a fifteen-minute drive away, but it seemed like a country away. Their lives were so different; they talked of fights in school, teachers who refused to listen to their ESL needs, and what it felt like to have classmates who had been told so many times that they wouldn’t graduate that they are now on a track to failure. My family was always in my periphery, but as I look at the plethora of other issues my home state faces, the memory of my cousins struggling through school suddenly takes center stage; education is at the core of my state’s problems.

I asked to work on the Education Subcommittee with the legal services attorney. The group is amazingly diverse, but uniquely focused on the issue of preventing high school dropouts. All members passionately and eloquently spoke about their experiences with the issue at hand and what they believed to be the solutions. At the first meeting, I watched my young mentor harness all of these ideas and tactfully unite the group, then re-channel the group’s momentum in one direction. In one sense, she is a mediator and a coordinator; on the other she is an attorney, with the power of her knowledge of the law behind her word. I watched as she was challenged by the federal regulations that limit the community advocacy work that a legal services attorney can undertake. The tact and ingenuity with which she acts in order to find better solutions to the problems her clients face was amazing to me. The amount of energy and passion in the field of public interest law always stuns me, but the matched enthusiasm from other professionals with parallel goals was equally inspiring. The ability to pull these organizations together to work in tandem is not the work of an average attorney; rather it is the work of the public interest attorney of the future, an advocate for not only the indigent, but the public.

I came to the realization through my experience that while a law degree is essential to making the changes I wish to, I will still lack many of the professional skills I need to help my state in the capacity I wish to. In July I applied to, and in August was accepted to, a fifth year master’s program in Public Affairs at Brown University. I plan to continue working with the Education Subcommittee while studying towards my master’s degree.