Education Law Clinic of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative

For the past year, Harvard Law students in the Education Law Clinic have travelled back and forth to the Massachusetts State House to lobby state legislators to pass an Act Relative to Safe and Supportive Schools. On August 13, all that work paid off, when Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed the Safe and Supportive Schools provisions into law.

The Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, a nationally recognized collaboration between Harvard Law School and Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC), recently published the second volume of its landmark report “Helping Traumatized Children Learn” which offers a guide to a process for creating trauma-sensitive schools and a policy agenda to provide the support schools need to achieve that goal.

Eight Harvard Law School students in the HLS Education Law Clinic of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (TLPI) recently spent a full day at the Massachusetts State House, testifying before the Joint Committee on Education and lobbying legislators to garner support for legislation proposed by the Clinic to create safe and supportive school environments.

Adriaan Lanni and Matthew Stephenson ’03 have been promoted to tenured professorships of law at Harvard Law School, and current Lecturer on Law Michael Gregory ’04 has been appointed as an assistant clinical professor of law.

Susan Cole, HLS Lecturer on Law and director of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative Clinic at the WilmerHale Legal Services Center at HLS, was interviewed in the Washington Post on the Supreme Court’s recent special education ruling in Forest Grove School District v. T.A.  The Q&A, “The Special Education Ruling,” with Cole and the Post’s Stacey Garfinkle appeared in the July 6, 2009 edition of Washington Post.

As a witness to terrible domestic violence until the age of eight, “Jamal” still carries his worries into the classroom everyday. Even though he and his mother are now safe, he’s unable to focus on his schoolwork, frequently acts out, and has been suspended from third grade.

Joey Diamond was born in 1994 with cocaine in his system. Two years later, he was found wandering alone in a city park late at…