A
fter teaching
for several years
at public and
charter schools,
Brianne Dunn was
frustrated. Not by
the work—she enjoyed the work—but
because of the wide range of problems
and inequalities she had seen firsthand
within the educational system. As
a teacher, she felt she wasn’t well
positioned to address the challenges.
“I realized there were a huge
number of educational inequalities out
there producing a real achievement
gap,” she says. “But I didn’t see how I
could fix it as a teacher.”
So last year she enrolled at the
School of Law. Loyola appealed to
Dunn because the Education Law and
Policy Institute offered a setting in
which she could dig into the broad
range of educational issues affecting
children from both practical and
theoretical perspectives.
“I know what issues look like
from the educators’ viewpoint,” she
says. “But I wanted to understand
how we can address them from a
policy perspective.”
Finding the common threads
between child and education law is
the institute’s goal, says Associate
Dean Michael Kaufman, who founded
the institute under the umbrella of
the Civitas ChildLaw Center.
“There’s so much overlap
between the two areas,” he says. “By
building a separate component to
the School of Law devoted to those
areas, I thought we could find ways
to better serve the educational
needs of children through the law.”
The institute offers an array
of courses, conferences, and
counseling options so that students
can tailor their experience to their
interests, Kaufman says.
The curriculum alone is vast.
The first of the institute’s 16 courses
is “Education Law and Policy,” a
first-year elective that examines the
American education system’s legal
and political structures. By letting
students enroll in one of the institute’s
courses during their first year, the
School of Law seeks to create what
Kaufman calls a “funnel of interest”
that helps students find the particular
areas of child and education law—
such as issues related to labor, school
discipline, and special education—
that interest them.
Many students discover areas
that pique their interest during their
second year when they work in a real
practice setting in conjunction with
the Education Law Practicum and the
Civitas ChildLaw Clinic, says Miranda
Johnson, the institute’s associate
director. Johnson supervises students
who represent parents and students
in school discipline and special
education cases.
“The buzzword within the legal
education community is creating
‘practice-ready’ lawyers,” she
says. “We’re offering students an
experiential curriculum, giving them
the tools to jump right into legal
practice when they graduate.”
Those skills translate regardless
of whether they go into practice
representing school boards or parents
and students, or even in areas that
don’t necessarily relate directly to
child or education law, she says.
For example, Johnson has
overseen law students who directly
represent high school students in
school expulsion hearings. Preparing
for a hearing requires students
to conduct an initial intake to
understand each incident so that they
can develop a theory of the case and
determine how to defend the student
at the hearing. They then make an
appearance with the school district to
get records, prepare witnesses, and
ultimately, work on the full hearing.
While the hearing takes place
in an administrative setting rather
than a court, the experience gives
students an opportunity to develop
a relationship with a client and make
a concrete difference, Johnson says.
“These are children who otherwise
wouldn’t have this type of access to
resources,” Kaufman adds.
Beyond direct client work, the
institute also serves the broader
education community by hosting
conferences that address issues
such as early childhood education
and school discipline.
Each conference is a
collaboration, and the events
are often cross-disciplinary. For
example, last year the institute
cosponsored a seminar for school
administrators on school discipline
with the School of Education and
the Illinois State Board of Education.
Bringing together different
perspectives helps everyone
better understand the issues the
conferences address, Kaufman says.
“We’re dealing with complicated
problems that have complicated
solutions,” he notes.
Last year, the institute hosted
its first annual “Education Law:
A Year in Review” seminar. This
event brings together attorneys
who represent students and
parents, attorneys who represent
school districts, hearing officers,
education law attorneys who
work at government agencies,
Loyola students and faculty, school
administrators and personnel, and
others interested in learning about
the major developments of the
previous year. “There’s so much
going on that it can be difficult
to stay up to date,” Kaufman says.
In providing a forum to keep
people current, the institute fills a
community need.
A hub that helps address
child and education law topics is
ultimately what the institute offers,
Dunn says. Education law covers a
wide array of issues; it can be easy
to get lost in the theoretical courses,
but the institute’s multipronged
approach makes sure students
don’t lose focus on what the field is
actually about.
“It’s good to get dirty digging
into the issues to find out what it’s
actually like out there,” she says.
■
Aunique
approach
DEPARTMENT UPDATE
Education Law and Policy Institute explores
serving children’s education through the law
T
here’s a lot going on in
child and education law. And
even with the Education Law and
Policy Institute’s broad curriculum
and counseling opportunities,
there’s always more to learn.
That’s why about 25 students
joined together in the Education
Law and Policy Society to deepen
their understanding of the law
and policy issues that affect children
and parents, teachers, and school
administrators.
The student-run organization is
a vehicle for connecting students to
the Chicago child and education law
communities, says 3L Calli Burnett,
the group’s president. It sponsors
events and provides volunteer and
networking opportunities.
“We want to show students
the different possibilities that
are out there,” she says. For example,
some Education Law and Policy
Society members serve as volunteer
mentors to Chicago Public
School students via the Working
in the Schools (WITS) reading
intervention program.
“Most of law school is about
reading, writing, and thinking,”
Burnett says. “Volunteering gives us
an opportunity to get out and work
in the community.”
By developing connections—
with other students, as well as
attorneys in child and education
law—the group aims to expose
students to the broad range of
opportunities in education
law and policy, she says.
■
“It’s good to get
dirty digging
into the issues
to find out what
it’s actually like
out there.”
— LAW STUDENT BRIANNE DUNN
Brianne Dunn is studying law so she can address educational inequalities from a policy perspective.
Calli Burnett
NEW STUDENT GROUP
Building
connections
14
LOYOLA LAW
SPRING 2015
15
