Year in Review
Summary of Work and Accomplishments
2008-2009
The Children’s Law Clinic at Duke Law School is in its seventh year of offering free legal services to at-risk, low-income children in Durham and the surrounding region. The Clinic continues to be a powerful learning opportunity for law students and a significant community resource. The Clinic received 137 requests for legal assistance during the year, and opened 99 cases. The cases provided law students a broad range of experiences from offering quick legal advice to engaging in more complex legal matters. Seventeen law students provided more than 2,500 hours of free legal services to children who otherwise would have been without representation. In addition, a local attorney provided several hundred hours of pro bono service to the Clinic.
The Children’s Law Clinic specialize in cases involving special education for children with disabilities, appeals of school suspensions, and appeals of claims for children’s disability benefits (SSI claims). Many of the cases handled by the Clinic are referred to us by local pediatric medical providers engaged with us in the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children in Durham. This partnership involves an interdisciplinary collaboration between doctors and lawyers designed to provide more holistic care for children. In Durham, the Duke Children’s Law Clinic joined with Legal Aid of North Carolina, Duke Primary Care for Children, and Lincoln Community Health Center to create a synergistic partnership in which medical providers are trained to spot legal issues and the legal providers accept referrals from them.
Core Work of the Children's Law Clinic
The Clinic has two basic missions:
- to provide opportunities for law students to learn the practical skills they will need to effectively represent clients
- to provide high quality, free legal help to low-income children in the Durham region.
During the seven years the Clinic has existed, it has become highly specialized in representing children in disputes arising under the special education laws and the school discipline laws. Few lawyers in North Carolina practice in these areas, making the Clinic’s service a particularly critical community resource. The Clinic Director and the Supervising Attorney, both on the Duke Law faculty, are sought-after experts in these fields. Both the law students and their clients draw on this expertise for help in solving the issues faced by the children.
Special Education Advocacy
In their work as representing clients in special education cases, the Clinic law students are often profoundly shocked and saddened as they learn of the situations confronting their clients. Parents, with few financial resources and sometimes limited education of their own, recount the struggles they have faced in understanding the impairments that are interfering with their children’s learning and in navigating through the complexities of the special education system. Parents share the frustration of watching their children fall further and further behind because they are without the academic support they need.
To help these parents, and their children, the Clinic law students must quickly develop an array of skills. First, they must master the state and federal laws that require all school systems to provide appropriate educational services to disabled children in the least restrictive environment. Then, they must learn how the law can be applied in an individual situation, and determine what kind of advocacy – from informal to formal -- might generate the result the parent seeks for her child. At the same time, to engage in effective representation, the students must themselves learn about the disabilities that affect children’s learning and about the various educational approaches to children with disabilities.
This year, as in years past, the Clinic has been successful in advocating for children with disabilities to obtain significantly enhanced special education services. Collectively, the children represented by the clinic will receive thousands of hours of private tutoring and additional educational services as a result of legal action or negotiation undertaken by the Clinic. One learning-disabled student will be placed in a specialized private school as a result of a settlement of her case, offering her the chance to make good academic progress despite her significant impairments. The Clinic’s advocacy resulted in the initiation of special education services for several other students who had been denied those services by their school districts, which will result in academic support and remedial tutoring that could make the difference between the student earning a diploma instead of dropping out.
Representation in School Discipline Cases
School discipline cases involve children facing long suspensions from school. Despite the lack of any evidence that extended suspension from school is an effective discipline tool, school districts in North Carolina continue to increase the time children are excluded from education in response to rule violations. State statistics show that schools meted out 5,225 long-term suspensions last year, leaving those children without access to education for months on end. This is nearly double the number from just seven years ago. African-American boys bear the brunt of the exclusions, further exacerbating the achievement gap and fueling what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
The Children’s Clinic represents long-term suspended students in hearings to try to reduce the amount of time those children are excluded from school. Especially when successful, this work is not only extremely gratifying for the law students, it gives them a rich learning opportunity. The law student’s work begins with investigating the grounds for the school suspension, finding and interviewing potential witnesses, and developing a theory of the case. The student then prepares an opening statement, direct and cross examinations, and a closing argument. If the initial due process hearing is unsuccessful, there are opportunities for written advocacy to the school superintendent and oral advocacy before the local board of education.
The Clinic’s representation resulted in reversals of suspensions for a number of students this past year. For several high school students, their year-long suspensions were reduced to one-semester suspensions, which will allow them to graduate with their own class rather than being a year behind. For a twelve-year-old middle schooler, the success of his appeal lifted a great cloud of depression that rested on him as a result of the severe consequences of a single mistake. Some of the suspended students were not allowed to return to school despite the Clinic’s efforts on their behalf. Questioning the wisdom of the long suspensions from school, one Clinic student made the following observation: “There just has to be a better way of ensuring security in school than harshly punishing teenagers for their marginally bad judgment. Bad judgment, after all, is a defining characteristic of what it is to be a teenager.”
SSI Advocacy
As a result of the Clinic’s partnership with local pediatricians, the Clinic has significantly increased its representation of children seeking Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. These benefits are awarded to severely disabled children living in very low-income families. An extraordinarily cumbersome and complex appeals process prevents many children from receiving this vital support. Representation by a skilled advocate can turn an initial denial into a successful claim, thus securing both retroactive and ongoing monthly benefits.
When assigned an SSI case, the Clinic student digs into a intricate evaluation process that requires an understanding of both the medical aspects of a child’s disability and the legal standards for determining disability. As children are constantly developing and changing, and the appeals process can take as long as two years, the law students are often chasing a moving target. Their work involves painstakingly gathering and summarizing a child’s medical condition and then developing a theory that will persuade an administrative law judge that the child meets the published standards. Developing a good relationship with the child’s medical providers – a task made easier by the Medical-Legal Partnership – can enhance the representative’s ability to present important information to the judge that might not be apparent from only the medical records. These cases provide the law students an excellent opportunity to practice their writing skills, as many cases are won “on-the-record” when the judge reads a well-prepared memorandum of law on behalf of the applicant. Clinic students and their clients have been rewarded in these SSI cases, as every case to have gone before a judge to date has resulted in a favorable decision.
Student Experience
As the law students participate in the Clinic, they not only develop the skills needed by practicing lawyers, but they gain great insights about themselves, the practice of law, and the legal system’s role in the lives of individuals. By keeping a journal of their experiences, the students regularly reflect on their work in the Clinic. Following are some of their observations:
- It has been a privilege for me to assist and provide advice to my clients. Yet it is a great responsibility to be entrusted to deal with my clients’ problems. The work that I do in the clinic actually has an impact on the lives of my clients. This is a huge responsibility!
- I feel like every day I am discovering a new government agency that deals with some other element of a child’s life when they have special needs. I do not know how parents, especially low-income parents who often are in the greatest need for these services, are able to figure out how to navigate the system.
- The most valuable thing I gained this semester was coming to the realization that learning to be a good lawyer is something that takes time. I think people come into law school thinking that at the end they will be ready to go out and conquer the legal profession. What I have seen this semester is that being a good lawyer requires various skills that must be developed and refined over time, which takes practice and feedback.
- The most important thing I have gained from this experience is confidence. I have gained confidence in my ability to spot the real-life issues and figure out a good approach to them. . . . Having the opportunity to make an oral argument that led to a tangible, successful result has done wonders for my confidence level in my speaking abilities. To know that I was able to speak and actually obtain a desired result for a client through my words is a great memory to have.
- My case challenged me to think from the perspective of a small law firm or clinic, in deciding whether it was the right choice to take a case or not. It required seriously weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the case and comparing that to constraints on the Clinic. This helped me to understand the important choices lawyers have to make on a day-to-day basis.
Community Involvement
The Children’s Law Clinic maintains relationships in the larger community that enhance its work. Once again in 2009, the Clinic faculty hosted the Special Education Law Roundtable, a day-long gathering at Duke Law School of attorneys from around North Carolina that represent parents and children in special education cases. The clinic faculty frequently offer workshops to interested audiences on special education law. They have mentored several attorneys in this area of law, consulting on cases and sharing their expertise. The Clinic participates in the statewide Special Needs Federation, an alliance of individuals and organizations dedicated to protecting and enhancing the rights of children with disabilities. At the national level, Clinic Director Jane Wettach presented a webinar (a web-based seminar) on special education mediation and resolution sessions for the Washington, D.C. -based Advocacy Institute and wrote a guide for parents who are attempting to resolve their own special education cases without attorneys, to be published by the Advocacy Institute.
Clinic director Jane Wettach co-counseled several appeals with attorneys at Legal Aid of North Carolina, helping to prepare the briefs and delivering the oral argument. The cases collectively focus on whether public school students have a right to alternative education during periods of suspension. Prof. Wettach is also working with a group of attorneys studying the state law on school discipline. As a result of this work, she was invited to speak at the statewide conference of school administrators focused on school law. Her topic was “The Impact on Students of Suspension & Expulsion.”
The Medical-Legal Partnership for Children in Durham has fostered continued relationships with pediatric providers in the community. These relationships have made a meaningful difference in the representation of the Clinic’s clients and have provided the medical providers new insights into the legal barriers that affect their patients’ health. Prof. Wettach has participated in the planning of a national conference to be held in Atlanta in the fall exploring partnerships between law schools and the health professions.
Conclusion
The Clinic is committed to continuing with its dual core missions of providing individual representation to at-risk children and training law students in critical professional skills. Since the Clinic opened its doors, more than 120 law students have been exposed to the striking legal needs of children, and have contributed to meeting those needs while developing skills and exploring their own styles of lawyering. Over five hundred families have directly benefited from the work of the Clinic, and many more have indirectly benefited from the community workshops and seminars offered, and the expertise of the Clinic faculty that is shared widely. The Clinic continues to be a highly valued resource for vulnerable children in our community as well as a rich training ground for the law students.
