Children's Legal Alliance

Legal Services of Eastern Missouri - 040064

Abstract Number: 040064

January 2005

Legal Services of Eastern Missouri developed the Children's Legal Alliance to help children access appropriate educational services. The program uses a combination of legal and social work support to accomplish this mission. The project provides legal assistance to less fortunate children and their families in order to help them obtain appropriate special education services, prevent discrimination based on disability, overcome barriers to school enrollment and defend against inappropriate suspensions or expulsions. The program provides social work support to students and their family that include assistance with accessing mental health services, linking families to housing programs, collaborating with other agencies to provide wrap-around services, finding after-school or summer programming, case management, and informal advocacy services.

Due to the vast need for educational support services among the client population, the project's staff developed a four-hour training program to educate parents and social service providers about special education laws. As part of the training, the project distributes a sixty-five page-training manual that was developed by the program. Over the past three years, the training program and manual have been provided to over 575 parents and supporters. In addition, the project has been primarily responsible for developing education related materials that are available to students, families, and advocates on the statewide Missouri Legal Services website.

Furthermore, in an ongoing effort to assess the program's ability to help clients obtain the services necessary to be educationally successful, the project collaborated with the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University to develop an extensive program evaluation.

Lastly, the Children's Legal Alliance has recently developed a second training program that helps parents and lay advocates develop the necessary skills to effectively support children in the Individual Education Program (IEP) meetings. This second training program lasts eight hours and includes both lectures and three hour mock IEP meetings which allow participants to apply the learnt skills and strategies in a safe training environment. Data for the study is collected at multiple times during and after representation of clients. The types of data collected include baseline educational and mental health information, types of services provided to clients during the representation, and follow-up data regarding the progress of clients in four specific areas that are indicators of educational success. Responses to these training programs have been extremely positive.

Contact Information:

Jacqueline Kutnik-Bauder
Children's Legal Alliance
Legal Services of Eastern Missouri
4232 Forest Park Avenue
St. Louis, Missouri 63108
Phone: (314) 534-4200
FAX: (314) 534-1075

Updaetd 2008

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