Human Rights
Volume 24
Number 1
Winter 1997
Introduction
By Theodore W. Small, Jr.Justice Thurgood Marshall and other past legal heroes led the struggle to ensure that children would not be denied equal access to the public schools. But the need for lawyers to be involved with the public education system did not end wit h removing the legal obstacles that once kept some children out of public schools. This year, the Section of Individual Rights & Responsibilities has established a new public schools committee to develop models for engaging lawyers in the business of improving America's public schools.
The challenge today is to improve the quality of learning that takes place inside our nation's classrooms so that public schools are once again the schools of choice. The public education system once served as a door to opportunity, a bridge between the rich and the poor, a great meeting hall for different races and religions and a training ground for civic responsibility. This great and valuable American institution is now in a state of crisis.
These days, ever increasing numbers of our children attend public schools that don't challenge every child to reach his or her highest potential. Public school classrooms are most often racially, ethnically and economically homogenous. These separate classrooms are also once again unequal receiving such inadequate funding that teachers covet even basic supplies like crayons, rulers and paper. And instead of graduating to college and upwardly mobile jobs, each year more and more public school children graduate to street gangs, prison, and the cemetery.
On the macro-level, the solution to the problems in the public education system depends on our resolution of broader national policy debates on equity and adequacy in funding for public schools, standard-based reform, charter schools, site-based management, and so on. Over the next year, subcommittees of the new public schools committee will work to develop policies in each of these areas and others as needed.
The school children, however, cannot wait. Right now, they deserve the more personal involvement of the local professional communities that earn their living based on the strength of their own education. We must all give something back. The legal community which has exercised such great leadership in the fight for ensuring equal access to our public schools has a special responsibility to lead the effort to improve the quality of those schools.
Consistent with this immediate need for direct lawyer inreach, the public schools committee has identified as its priority, the expansion of lawyer participation in existing models for community involvement in America's public schools. The committee will examine ways that more lawyers can become involved in traditional tutoring and mentoring programs like Reading is Fundamental (RIF), Everybody WINS, MENTOR, America's Reading Challenge, and how more law firms can establish programs like Holland & Knight's Opening Doors for Children program which supports tutoring, mentoring and scouting and other children programs throughout the firm.
The committee will also consider ways in which lawyers and law firms can become advocates for effective parent groups that are seeking to have a voice in funding and other issues affecting their school. For more than 25 years, such parent groups have relied heavily on local legal services attorneys and national support organizations like the Center for Law and Education. While this support still exists, recent cuts in Legal Services Corporation funding make it crucial for lawyers to supplement this system by developing advocacy initiatives at the local level. Models of such local school advocacy initiatives include Chicago's Lawyer Reform Advisory Project, Washington, D.C.'s Public Education Legal Services Project sponsored by the Washington Lawyers' Committee For Civil Rights And Urban Affairs, and San Francisco's Education Reform Project sponsored by Public Advocates and Appleseed.
The success of these new lawyer involvement initiatives will be measured not by the filing of lawsuits, but by the number of children supported by meaningful, regular contact with potential role models and mentors, and by the improved programs and resources that the school receives simply because parents are able to sit down and talk with the right school official, present testimony before the appropriate legislative committee, or even develop links with others in the business community. Our meaningful involvement as lawyers is necessary because it does take an entire village to raise a child and lawyers have a special responsibility to participate actively in the public schools which have been and should always be a central part of that village.
Theodore W. Small Jr. is the chair of the new public schools committee of the ABA Section of Individual Rights & Responsibilities. He practices in the litigation area at Holland & Knight and currently does pro bono work full time on the firm's Community Services Team. For more information, please contact Small c/o Holland & Knight, 2100 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Suite 400, Washington, D.C. 20037-3202; e-mail tsmall@hklaw.com; 202-955-3000.