Advocating for Students with Special Education Needs

This is what being a Legal Aid lawyer looks like these days. Since many of us are on week three of self-isolation and working from home, we’ve become quite familiar with the challenges of technology and working away from our colleagues and our usual resources. Students with special education needs are even more familiar with these challenges. 

Currey Hitchens, attorney in our Kinship Care Unit, has been doing IEP meetings with schools and families to figure out how to serve children with special education services in their homes. These meetings are intended to address each child’s unique needs, and put a plan in place to meet these needs. In some cases, the schools are refusing to even provide laptops to students who otherwise don’t have a way to access their online classroom resources. This obviously creates an inequity, where some children will be more prepared than others upon returning to the classroom. 

Attorney Hitchens is working with schools to figure out how to improve access to remote education tools during the shutdowns as a result of the pandemic. As Currey explains, “It is hard to determine what will provide a Free and Appropriate Public Education under the current circumstances, but I will keep advocating for what my clients need and what other students already have — technology to access online lessons.” 

Thank you, Currey, for continuing to fight your hardest for our clients!