University of Tennessee Project

The College of Law plans to establish a Children’s Advocacy Network (CAN). CAN will be the umbrella for a number of child advocacy efforts already underway at the College, including legal representation of children in our Legal Clinic, a Community Legal Education course that places students in one of the area inner city high schools, and close faculty ties to youth-oriented projects in our region sponsored by such organizations as the Highlander Research and Education Center. CAN’s foundational project will be the Lawyers Education Advocacy Resource Network (LEARN).

The need for legal representation on behalf of school age children and youth is well documented on both the national and state level. In this climate of disciplinary exclusion and budgetary cut-backs, both regular and special education students–particularly low-income students of color and rural students– suffer from lack of adequate representation. On the national level, the Center For Law and Education, the National Council on Disabilities (“Back to School on Civil Rights” (2000)), and the Council of Parents Advocates and Attorneys (COPAA) have documented the compelling need for representation of students and families in disputes with school systems, particularly over issues of school exclusion.

In Tennessee, nonlawyer advocacy organizations (e.g., Project STEP, a federally funded parent advocacy and education group, which keenly recognizes the need for legal representation when lay advocacy efforts breakdown), public defender offices (e.g., the Knox County, Tennessee, Public Defender, which recognizes the compelling need holistically to serve juveniles involved in delinquency proceedings and those incarcerated in detention facilities and jails), and legal services programs have acknowledged the critical need for legal representation for students, primarily those who are being excluded from school and those who are not receiving adequate educations. The private bar–both small and solo practitioners and large firm pro bono attorneys– has also expressed strong support for a back-up center on education representation.

The sparse availability of legal representation for students is overwhelmed by the growing need for access to legal advocacy on behalf of this disempowered population. LEARN will seek to address this imbalance. The legal services programs that handle education cases acknowledge the need for a project that will educate more lawyers about the field, adequately support the handful of private lawyers who currently handle education cases, and cultivate new resources from the relevant professional communities to serve at- risk students.

The CAN Project emerged as an enterprise that would address the needs of this particularly vulnerable population. The needs of low income children in Tennessee are manifold, but a theme that resonates in all quarters is the poor quality of public education in the state. Despite a successful school finance lawsuit in 1993, Tennessee schools still are starved for sufficient resources to provide meaningful educational opportunities to all of their students. The burden is borne hardest by children in state custody, those in inner city schools, children in remote rural counties, students of color (who are expelled from school at disproportionately higher rates than majority students), and students with disabilities, particularly those with mental and emotional impairments. A recent study by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, “Suspending Disbelief: Moving Beyond Punishment to Promote Effective Interventions for Children with Mental and Emotional Disorders,” (2003), documents the failures of school systems properly to implement the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for the growing numbers of these students. Assuring effective treatment for these students from other responsible agencies of the state and from local service providers has proven to be a forbidding task for lay advocates who lack access to lawyers. Public defenders have also decried the lack of legal resources available to represent students with disabilities in the juvenile delinquency system. The “School to Prison Pipeline,” so strikingly identified by the Harvard Civil Rights Project and the Advancement Project, deserves head-on legal strategies directed to its exposure and dismantlement in places like Tennessee, where resources for this challenge are severely limited.

CAN is a new initiative of the College. Situated at the intersection of the College’s Advocacy Center, whose mission encompasses both curricular and public service components, the College’s nationally recognized Legal Clinic, and the student-directed UT Pro Bono program, CAN envisions developing a comprehensive advocacy and support center for a broad range of issues affecting Tennessee’s at-risk children. LEARN, its first project, confronts cross-cutting educational issues affecting children. The focus will be on inner-city students and rural students, groups that are disproportionately impacted by school district policies and practices that foster exclusion and unequal educational opportunities.

The College, located in Knoxville, is uniquely situated to serve both urban and rural areas. Knoxville is located in a metropolitan area of over 600,000; yet surrounding the metro area and only a short distance away lies a large number of small rural counties. LEARN will not only support litigation and administrative dispute resolution, but also will stimulate community legal education and the organization of effective groups of students and parents. Initially, the project will create an advisory panel composed of lawyers, lay advocates, students, and professionals. This panel will assist the project in targeting opportunities to strengthen the voices and influence of parents and students in confronting the hardships stemming from lack of equal educational opportunities. This work will complement the legal work performed by the lawyer members of LEARN and will assure that the Project in a collaborative way that helps to develop non-lawyer leadership.

Over time, we anticipate that the students who take the course and get involved with the project during law school will, upon starting their practices, become contributing members of LEARN. The placement demographics of our graduates show that a sizeable percentage practice in small firms throughout the state of Tennessee. These are the attorneys whom the Project primarily will cultivate, encourage, and support. Specifically, the Project will engage these practitioners through listserves and facilitate their access to the College’s substantial resource materials. The network will also meet on a regular basis to discuss practice issues. Private practitioners in the network would lead these group sessions, supplemented by the legal services and other lawyers who will be an integral part of the network. These lawyers would also play roles in the new “Education Advocacy” course. The staff of the Project will seek to deploy University-based resources (e.g., the clinical component of the Psychology Department) on behalf of the network. Faculty members have committed to assisting the Project in their areas of expertise (e.g., law and organizing, community legal education, civil procedure, family law, ethics, etc.) and are excited about finding ways, through CAN, to better connect and coordinate the College of Law’s varied work with and for at-risk children and youth. The Law School plans to assign staff and student work study resources to the Project as appropriate.

LEARN will also benefit from a recent initiative of UT’s College of Nursing. Recognizing the dearth of legal and advocacy resources for children and adults with disabilities, a Professor of Psychology at the College of Nursing is leading an effort, called the Family Advocacy Project, to cultivate ties among lay and legal organizations that have the potential synergistically to fill this yawning gap. The College of Law is cooperating in this fledgling effort. Also, Professor Ansley is exploring links with the University’s College of Social Work, whose fieldwork programs are designed to educate future social workers in the value of community-based advocacy, and some of these projects may also prove relevant to projects under the CAN umbrella.

The College of Law is committed to an ethic of public service and community involvement. The school’s Legal Clinic is the oldest continuously operating legal clinic in the country. Through a standing Committee on Pro Bono and Public Interest Law, the College charts new initiatives in course work and service. The Dean of the College, Tom Galligan, and the Director of Clinical Programs, Professor Doug Blaze, in recent years have served in leadership positions in the statewide Civil Justice Planning process. In 2000, the College hosted an Equal Justice Colloquium, where 120 lawyers and advocates convened to discuss issues affecting access to justice in Tennessee. The Colloquium was organized by the Association of American Law School’s Equal Justice Project, whose Director is Professor Rivkin. Other members of the faculty participate in public interest endeavors in the community and region. Professor Ansley, for example, is currently working to establish a state-wide Racial Justice Collaborative, one of whose projects will focus on immigrant youth in the juvenile court system. The College maintains close contacts with its alums in public interest law, including Gordon Bonnyman and Michele Johnson of the Tennessee Justice Center and Tutu Alicante of Southern Migrant Legal Services. Given the advantages of our size (470 law students) and geography, members of the faculty are in frequent contact with our alums in small and solo practices. Several of these alums serve as guest speakers in Legal Clinic classes, discussing both substantive practice issues (e.g., juvenile delinquency practice) and law office concerns (e.g., how to establish and sustain a small firm or solo practice).