GRANTEE SPOTLIGHT: EQUIP FOR EQUALITY’S SPECIAL EDUCATION CLINIC/HELPLINE

The Illinois Equal Justice Foundation has awarded Equip for Equality a $95,000 grant for the 2009 fiscal year to provide legal advice, information and referrals on special education legal issues through its statewide telephone advice and referral service.

"We are very grateful for this support from the Illinois Equal Justice Foundation. Without it, our Helpline would not have become a reality," said Olga Pribyl, the Managing Attorney of Equip for Equality’s Special Education Clinic/Helpline.

The mission of Equip for Equality is to advance the human and civil rights of children and adults with physical and mental disabilities in Illinois. It is the only statewide, cross-disability, comprehensive advocacy organization providing self-advocacy assistance, legal services, and disability rights education while also engaging in public policy and legislative advocacy and conducting abuse investigations and other oversight activities.

The Special Education Clinic/Helpline provides a critical service for the families of more than 320,000 public school students in Illinois with special education needs. A comprehensive 2005 Illinois legal needs study sponsored by various bar groups and foundations found that low-income households did not receive legal help for 92.1 percent of education-related problems. The study also found that 51.1 percent of all education-related legal problems of low-income Illinoisans involved either denial of special education services or provision of inappropriate special education services.

The Clinic/Helpline was launched in 2007 in response to widespread noncompliance by schools with the federal special education law, known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA). Under the IDEA, public schools must engage with the parents of children with disabilities to develop Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) that provide services and accommodations to help them learn.

More than 30 years after the passage of the IDEA, students with disabilities continue to encounter great difficulties when attempting to secure their legal rights. Many students with disabilities are not identified as needing special education services and are instead labeled troublemakers and expelled from schools. Other times, parents wait months to obtain evaluations from schools to determine why their child is failing or doing poorly. Many students identified as needing special education services do not have an appropriate IEP, while others have an appropriate IEP but the school fails to fully implement it. In addition, students with special education needs are often unnecessarily segregated from their non-disabled peers and thereby denied the development of social skills that they will need in order to eventually transition from the school environment to the outside world.

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