- MALHAR: Welcome to this training that we've been wanting to put on for a while. We'll start off with some introductions before we do, just to make sure you're in the right place. This training is about understanding more what is the unauthorized practice of law and what are some practical strategies you can follow to avoid engaging within that. So my, I'll start with introductions. My name is Malhar Shah. I am the Special Education Staff Attorney at DREDF, which stands for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. And I'll turn it to my co-presenter. CHERYL: Thanks, Malhar. Hi, my name is Cheryl Theis and I also work at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, but in our Parent Training and Information Center as a Senior Education Advocate. I'm happy to be here. MALHAR: Thank you so much. We're gonna go to the next slide, please. So we are going to be covering these general topics. What is the definition of unauthorized practice of law and what is the role of a non-attorney advocate in educating and supporting indigent and unrepresented Californians? And the reason that we feel that we wanted to provide this presentation is because our organization is quite unique, and I know Cheryl will talk about it in a second, but we have staff attorneys and then we have parent advocates within the organization who work independently of, and also sometimes in conjunction with the attorneys. And because of that dual relationship, we have a lot of parents who have children with IEPs, individualized education programs, who are seeking generally advice about what to do day-to-day with respect to their children's education rights. And parent advocates in the organization who are not licensed attorneys are put into this very unique position of having to walk this line between providing legal advice and providing parents with knowledge that helps them understand what their legal rights are. So the strategies that they've developed, we believe are applicable to a variety of situations, including ones that paralegals and legal assistants often find themselves in. Community organizers who are deeply knowledgeable about the law might find themselves in these situations also. So we feel that these strategies are very translatable and we hope that they will be helpful for you going forward in your practices. So let's go to the next slide. We're gonna kind of start off very broad with what even is the unauthorized practice of law? To be completely honest with you, California law and statutes aren't the most helpful. They define, they state that no person shall practice law in California unless the person is an active licensee of the State Bar. We'll cover examples and the rules of non-attorneys and attorneys and the repercussions about the practice of law in upcoming slides. But just we wanna start off with, and you can go to the next slide, talking about what the repercussions are. Unlawful practice of law is a misdemeanor in California, carries a sentence of up to one year in a county jail or a fine of $1,000 or both. And the California State Bar does actually work with law enforcement agencies to investigate when someone violates the law. So not only is it serious, but there is a risk, of course, of actually having prosecution aimed at you for the unlawful practice of law, which is why it's such a weighty subject. And, you know, California State Bar is very vigilant with respect to ensuring that the practice of law is generally protected. I can go to the next slide, please. So again, kind of going to the general definition, a member of the State Bar shall not aid any person or entity in the unauthorized practice of law. So the repercussions here are important because it's not only the non-attorney who is implicated, it is the attorney themselves. And there are a couple of ways in which an attorney can be held responsible. If we can go to the next slide, please. This probably gives a little bit more context. So when non-lawyers are not helping lawyers practice law, the general organization or the law firm, for example, must ensure that those non-lawyers are not engaged in unauthorized practice of law. And then when the non-lawyers are actually helping lawyers practice law, those are situations in which under the supervision of an attorney, there is more flexibility, there is more freedom for the non-attorney to engage in practices that we might consider practice of law because it's done under the close supervision of an attorney. But those are situations where the attorneys must make sure that the non-attorney knows what the ethical obligations are. Some examples would be ensuring that non-attorneys recognize and communicate to clients that even though an attorney might not be present, the communications are still integral to the attorney-client relationship and therefore attorney-client privilege. Cheryl, can you share a little bit more about some of your experience at our organization around your role as a non-attorney, both with attorney supervision and independent of it? CHERYL: Yes, thank you, I'm happy to do that. I think first of all, it is relatively unique in the way that we do it at DREDF because we do have attorneys here on site and there are some situations where our attorneys may be working on a particular case or a situation where they ask us to help just because we have that relationship with the families that we're serving. But it can be tricky because we also feel so compelled to help the families that are reaching out to us. And in the roles that we play in parent training and information centers, family empowerment centers, family resource centers, we often have experienced problems firsthand. We get it. And it's really easy to cross that line in the interest of helping a client. For example, we may be doing a training completely independent, independently of our attorney staff just as part of our grant to make sure that families understand their rights and how to use them. And it's not at all unusual for a person who's attending to say, "Okay, so it sounds like what you're recommending is that we should do X, Y, and Z." And it's really important when, because after all, our families and the people that we're serving don't necessarily understand how important the precision of language is in these kinds of situations, that we say immediately, you know, "Let me just clarify again, we are not providing advice. What we're trying to do is helping you, help you understand what the rules are, what the laws are, and how to use 'em effectively, and how to make sure that you are heard in these processes." But nothing that we're saying today is gonna be advice. Another common example is it's families sometimes walk into our offices and often they do that because they're in a crisis and they'll say, you know, "I got a notice of hearing. The school district is, you know, has requested a hearing, I just got a notice of hearing," or there's this other crisis. "And so, you know, I need you guys to help me with this and what can I do?" And it's really easy in that situation to want to start to interpret what a letter says. And again, this is a situation where we're much more, it's much more appropriate for us in our role to say, "We can help you understand what the letter says and we can provide you with resources about what your options are, including attorney referrals and so on. But what we can't do is interpret what this says for you or tell you what you should do in this situation." MALHAR: And we'll cover in more specificity what specific language to use. But we wanted to just give you a sense of what context this could come up in. Some other examples that we can provide are intakes. Sometimes paralegals or just non-attorneys might just be part of a meeting with a client and opposing counsel. These are situations where it's really important to take account of what it is like to, what language to use to avoid the practice of law. There might be a mediation also, for example, where a non-attorney, sometimes it's a friend, sometimes it's a parent who is going to assist their friend in a mediation. That's another situation that I think actually our parent advocate model is very analogous to. So we'll cover that in some more specificity. Can we go to the next slide please? So again, I, we keep coming back to this umbrella term and I apologize that the, that California is so circular with its, with this definition. Logically, the unauthorized practice of law means practicing law without having an active California license. As we said, there's really no real definition of it in the California Code or Rules of Professional Conduct, but there is some guidance and these are three things that we'll expand upon in our next slide. So it starts off with doing and performing services in a court of justice, legal advice and counsel. And then folks might be more, most familiar with this one, preparation of legal instruments and contracts by which legal rights are secured. So we're gonna talk about that last one first. Can we go to the next slide please? So generally when we talk about what is practicing law, we talk about advice based on the application of legal principles to facts, but it's a little bit muddier than that. And so we want to talk, start talking about what it means in the context of preparing legal instruments. So I'm gonna let Cheryl talk a little bit about what her experiences with filling out forms and complaints, but generally I wanna provide just the guiding principle that it becomes practicing law when you are starting to write it on behalf of a client or a friend or a parent, where you are doing some kind of interpretation for them instead of just merely transcribing or translating from a different language what they have to say down onto paper. So I'm gonna let Cheryl talk a little bit about what her experience is like and what she does as a, on a practical level. CHERYL: Yeah, thank you. So a common situation that we face here in our Parent Training and Information Center at DREDF is that a family will have limited English or they may come in and say, you know, "I'm being asked by this, by my school district to fill out enrollment forms or request for a meeting and I just don't know how to do it. Can you help me?" And there's a big difference between sitting down with a parent or even over the telephone or back and forth online where you're saying, you know, okay, help me understand, you know, what information you don't get. Where can I be of assistance? And you know, what this means is what is your child's birth date? What this means is why are you consider, why are you concerned about your child and why do you think they might need a, for example, a special education evaluation? There, it shouldn't be that we're saying things like, okay, so it sounds to me like what you're really concerned about is that your child might be eligible under, you know, the category of an emotional disturbance because you have a lot of mental health concerns. That's not our role. Our role is to say, you know, what are your concerns? And then to maybe say back to them, okay, so what I wrote down was, you're concerned about her struggle with attendance, you're concerned about the drop in her grades, you know, and just to make sure that we are reflecting back what the parent or client is saying to us, but not adding on, not embellishing, not adding our spin to that as well. And so it's common for families to say things like, "Well, what are my rights in this situation? Because they're not following what the special education law says." And we might say, "Well, one of your rights that, there's a range of options you have here, but you do have the right to file a state complaint." And the family's like, "Great, I want you to file a state complaint for me." And then we say, "Well, we don't file them, but the forms are pretty accessible. I'm happy to send you the forms," and so on. It is not at all unusual to have the parent then send back the forms all filled out and say, "I'd like your opinion about, well, how I filled out these forms." And again, that's crossing the line. I might ask something like, "Do you feel like you filled out the form in a way that reflects your concerns? Here's what you, we talked about in the meeting. It doesn't sound like you included that in the form. Is that something you wanna include?" But not to say, "Okay, I'm happy to edit it for you and I'll send you back my edits." I think it's also, I, and I'm gonna say this more than once, it's really important to constantly reiterate both in every contact before you begin helping someone, whether they walked in, they called in, they've emailed, or you're in a training and they give a question, that you're doing the disclaimer and we'll talk more about that. But you know, I'm happy to help you understand your rights and your options. I wanna make it clear that what I'm doing is not providing you with legal advice. If you feel like you need legal advice and you need an attorney referral list, please let us know. MALHAR: Thanks, Cheryl. And I think for attorneys who are supervising non-attorneys or who are just working with non-attorneys, whether or not it's in a supervision-type basis, it's important to ensure that they are, that you are constantly prompting non-attorneys to be, to remember that they are there simply just to provide that clerical service and not to be crossing that line into the practice of law. I think especially if it is on behalf of a client who is not actually being represented by you as an attorney, that is I think the clearer situation where there, the, supervision because you're not providing representation to the client. Now, you know, that could be, I am being told that my video might be frozen. Can folks still hear me? CHERYL: You're okay. MALHAR: Okay. So that is a situation where you would want to make sure that non-attorney retains that right line. Can we go to the next slide please? So we're gonna get a little bit now into the context of an adversarial context. Now, generally you cannot represent as a non-attorney someone in adversarial context like court. There are specific exceptions in California, for example, certain state administrative proceedings like unemployment insurance hearings. These are contexts in which California law carves out the exception for non-attorneys to represent people who need that kind of legal representation. It, but generally what I would say is that as a general rule, unless there is that specific carve-out, you cannot represent somebody at a contested hearing. And we'll talk a little bit about what we, how we see that line between representing and not representing in the context of an adversarial situation. You can go to the next slide, please. So, special education due process hearings, this is kind of where, this is our, this is something that's very closely analogous to what we're doing at our organization. For people who are not familiar, special education due process hearings are administrative hearings in the Office of Administrative Hearings in California. They are hearings that determine what students' rights are under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. There's an administrative law judge who makes findings of fact and some conclusions of law and decides contested disputes between the student, parent on the one hand and the school district on the other hand. And the California Attorney General has actually made clear that the, that in this context, the, a non-attorney cannot actually provide legal representation to a parent or a child. And this language here is a little bit confusing. I'm gonna read it out loud just because I think it's good as an exercise for us to walk through the language. It says, by no means do we suggest that consultants and other lay advocates are barred from due process hearings. We conclude only that a nonlawyer may not engage in the practice of law in special education due process hearings. So it's a little bit of a confusing statement because non-attorneys are allowed to be there in this adversarial context and you are allowed to speak. But the question of what you're allowed to say in this adversarial context is very situation dependent. So I'm gonna let Cheryl talk a little bit about what she does in the context of adversarial context, like a due process hearing or an IEP meeting. But before she does, I just want to say to everybody that there might be some ambiguity here in so far as a non-attorney is being supervised by an attorney who is not present at the due process hearing. One could make an argument that non-attorney is allowed to engage in some more practice of law, but it's really by no means clear. And what I would recommend is erring on the side of caution in following more of the model that Cheryl is gonna lay out. And if you want to do some, if you are an attorney who wants the non-attorney to do something more to call the California Ethics Hotline. We'll have the number at the end of the presentation, and get their advice on, get their position on this and see what they say Because it's a really murky area. So I'll turn it over to Cheryl for this. CHERYL: Yeah, so, you know, first of all, for anyone who works directly with families like we do, a lot of what we do is people will call us to say, "I have an upcoming IEP meeting where we're gonna discuss my child's behavior." We, they're called manifestation determination meetings, for example. "And my child might get expelled," and you know, we generally what our role there is to help the parent understand what this kind of meeting is, what typically happens in these kinds of meetings, help them get, clarify what information they want to present in that meeting. Not to tell them what they should present, but you know, help them to communicate effectively in that context. But there are times when a parent, and this is particularly true and we're very careful about this here at DREDF, in situations where a family is very vulnerable, for example, a family who is unhoused, a family who is, you know, dealing, really concerned about issues like their immigration status and so on, where they'll, you know, we'll decide that we will go with them to this sort of meeting, but it's as a support. We're not going to represent them. We're not going to speak for them. We're going because we might say to the parent, even through a text or you know, a quiet comment, it seems like maybe you could need a break, you know? Or it seems like you're losing your focus. Do you wanna go outside for a minute? So in that context, you know, we're there supporting the parent to participate effectively in the meeting. There have been a few limited situations with permission where I've gone to something like a mediation or at, you know, these more specialized meetings. Increasingly in the State of California, we are all learning more about the popularity of alternative dispute resolution, which is called ADR. And it's, there's no one definition I can give you about what it is, but it's basically meant to be a way to a less adversarial way to solve problems. And increasingly parents are saying, "Well, you know, that's not a hearing. Can you come with us?" And again, our role generally is to prepare a parent to participate in that kind of a meeting, to make sure that they understand and are communicating effectively. But there are situations where we might go, again in our role as support. And we, in those situations, we're very, very careful to say, not say things like, "We think you should get an independent evaluation." We, you know, that, the word we shouldn't be part of the conversation. It signifies that you're representing in some way. But mostly, you know, and I'll say this again, but we generally introduce ourselves and say, "I'm here, here's my role. I'm here at the invitation of the family to help them participate effectively today," to make it clear right from the onset that that's our role. And I think that's, you know what, that's my interpretation and I'm not, I can't interpret law, but I can interpret what the attorney general might be saying as just a member of the general public that we have to be very careful about that line where we're going to support someone and we're not going to represent them. So what could you do is really different from what should you do and so on. You know, there's ways in which we don't always know as non-attorneys, you know, we're not trained in legal strategy. We don't know all of the nuances of what we are or are not doing and how it could be used in the future by the school district, for example. But I know an attorney once said to me, you know, be very careful because when you go and you help the parent participate in these meetings, don't cross that line into providing advice or speaking too much for them. Because now the other side may use what you've said, you know, to sort of strengthen their case about why they're right and the parent's wrong. And so, you know, all of that is just to say it's extremely important to remember that people who go to law school get specialized training and do internships and practicums where they understand the implications of everything they're saying and doing. And we do not have that training and that's why we wanna make sure that there's a very bright line there. MALHAR: And Cheryl, if you could talk a little bit more about what the role of question asking is in an adversarial context. 'Cause I think that's a really good way to divide the way in which I might as an attorney say something on behalf of my client. For example, I could say, "Well, Your Honor, my, you know, my client believes that they were wronged by the school district in X, Y, and Z way." Whereas how would you present that, Cheryl? CHERYL: Yeah, thanks. That's a good example. So I might turn to the parent and say, you know, or even say to the hearing officer, you know, "I'd like to give my, the family I'm here to support some space to explain in more detail what they mean." Maybe you could provide an example family member or whatever, so that their voice is being heard, they're communicating clearly. If they start to lose their composure, which, you know, those of us who work in this field know that these are, these can be extremely not just adversarial, but emotional, high stakes meetings from a parent's perspective. And it is not uncommon for someone to really kind of lose their cool or whatever. And we don't want, we might be concerned that maybe the hearing officer or the judge is thinking, wow, this parent maybe isn't credible because they're, you know, volatile or something like that. So I might say, you know, can we take a break? Can we talk? Can we go outside and talk for a minute so I can make sure, I can say that the parent, you know, I don't think you're, you wanted to make sure that this, that you made this point. You know, I just wanna sort of help you refocus back to that was really important to you. But I wouldn't say to the judge, you know, "The evaluation the school district did is clearly inadequate or inappropriate because they didn't qualify the child." You know, that's not my role, but I might have prepared the parent to say, you know, "Here's the things you, that I think the school district didn't consider, and here's my, you know," I've helped them organize and be prepared. MALHAR: And what I love about Cheryl's model also is that she will figure out ways to get parents to say information that she believes is relevant without essentially telling parents that she thinks they should be doing it. For example, one thing that I've heard Cheryl say in IEP meetings, which I appreciate is, "Parent, you told me that, you know, your son was doing X, Y, and Z and you know, struggling with math, correct?" And the parent will kind of go a little bit more into detail about what that looks like. And it's a way for Cheryl to prompt the parent without using, without providing legal advice. And the advice in that situation would be that the parent should say X, Y, and Z and instead she's asking the parent in a way that's explanatory for the hearing officer and whoever else might be in specific context. CHERYL: Yes, I think, you know for example, a very common situation where that comes up is that the parent may be in disagreement or uncertain about how to proceed because the school district or, and when we say school district, we also mean charter schools by the way, public schools, may be saying that your child, we're not gonna evaluate your child for special education because your child has missed a lot of school. And that's, you know, the law clearly says that, you know, if you think the child isn't learning because they haven't been coming, that that's a reason why, you know, we might not wanna consider an evaluation. And I might turn to the parent, who often in those moments kind of is stressed and can forget, you know, "Do you wanna talk about, I remember one of the things you really emphasized to me is that there's a direct connection between your child's attendance and their education, you know, possible disability or what's going on with them in terms of their mental health. Do you wanna talk more about that connection? Because that seems like a point you really wanted to make." And then the parent will kind of remember, oh, that's right. Yeah, by the way, my kid has panic attacks when we get to school. I actually drive them and then they can't get out of car and so on. And that can be really helpful in making that connection that, you know, this child really does need an evaluation and here's the specific examples the parent, who knows child best, wanted to provide. MALHAR: One thing I find really funny in this situation is that is how much the non-attorney is doing the active listening and how much the attorney sometimes is not. So those of you who are married to attorneys just do the opposite of what they do. If you can go to the next slide, please. CHERYL: All right. I think, and I think this is a slide that I was gonna take, although Malhar, please jump in. We really wanted to emphasize that we're not trying to minimize the role of advocates who are not attorneys because frankly, I, we play a very important role in helping people access really justice and equity. It's just that we are not attorneys and we wanna be clear about our role. So for example, in the area of special education law, it is an extremely specialized area. And even some of our attorneys who will provide pro bono assistance to families will often not understand the special education world. And so the family may say, "Well, you know, I went to legal aid, or I, you know, went to this community organization and they just said, you know, we understand about, you know, the employment law, we understand about housing law, but you know, special education, you know, we just don't have that expertise." Now, obviously one of the things that DREDF does is we act as a purveyor of technical information for other attorneys. That's what, not what we're talking about today. But if you are, if you do need more help or guidance as an attorney, you know, you could reach out. But for many people, their first encounter with their child's rights or the issues are, is related to just wanting to understand what to even expect. What does this landscape look like? What are my options? How does the process layout and so on. And so we wanted to emphasize this slide because, you know, we, it's a 2019 California Justice Gap Study that points out that, you know, this was 2019, but I think it's still applicable or even more so about more than half of Californians at every income level had at least one civil legal problem in their household but didn't receive direct legal assistance. And so, you know, they're often reaching out more to community organizations or through word of mouth. They might hear about a family support system, like a parent training information center. So they're coming to us and often they're not coming to say, "I'm calling you 'cause I wanna get an attorney." I mean, sometimes folks call us here at DREDF about that 'cause they see that we have attorneys, but they don't understand that the parent center is different than the legal work that we're doing. But they're calling because they're in desperate straits and they need, they don't understand what's going on. They don't understand their rights and they're trying to reach out to us. And we make, we provide really important information, not just about what the laws are, but about how to use them to advocate on behalf of your child or if you're a young person on behalf of yourself. One thing that we really wanna suggest as a sort of a practice tip for anyone who's in this situation is we have learned over many years the importance of really maintaining good local referrals, including attorneys who will take sliding scale cases, will take pro bono cases and have this specialized knowledge. And we've tried to update that list. We don't say, "Be sure you call X, Y, and Z attorney 'cause they're the person for you," because then we appear to be like, you know, selling their services and we don't want any kind of conflict of interest. But we might say, "Here are three or four attorneys who specialize in this area of the law. And we've noted on our list, some of them will take a case at little to no cost." But we also always emphasize that we have no control over whether any particular attorney will take their case. And so, you know, it's important to again, to set that boundary. We can provide you with knowledge about who's out there and that we know that they have an appropriate, you know, authorization, Bar card or whatever that they specialize in this area of the law, but it's still gonna be your job to reach out to a few of them and see whether they will take your case. And I often, for example, will send information that we keep about how to choose an attorney because parents will say, "Well, how do I know if someone's good or not?" I'm not going to tell them, but I have a resource I can send them about how to choose an attorney. Next slide. So I think I really already covered this, but I think the number is important that about 85% of all Californians got no legal help or got inadequate legal help for civil legal problems. And again, special education falls into this area. There are others and people are desperate for that help. And we do play a very important role and in part, part of our mandate as a parent training information center, part of our funding from the United States Department of Education, and we tell parents this, that's who funds us. You know, we're here because we're on this side or that side. We're funded to help you understand your rights and use them. But we wanna help people solve things at the local level and prevent them, if that's possible. It isn't always possible, but if possible prevent them from escalating and becoming extremely adversarial because there's a lot of costs in that situation financially, emotionally, in terms of relationships with the people on the front lines in education who often, you know, really their hands are tied or they don't know the law or whatever. And so it's really important to fulfill our role, which is, you know, I can tell you what your options are. Let me start with the least adversarial step that you could consider taking, but you also have this option and this option and this option. And we share resources again from organizations that are specializing in alternative dispute resolution and so on just to lay out the continuum of what the options are. But we're not gonna say to a parent, "Oh, don't bother with a local complaint. That's a waste of time. Go straight straight to the state," because that would be basically escalating a situation without advising, sorry, without telling the parent that they have a variety of options, including the, that there are ways that they could try to resolve the issue without having to escalate it. Next slide. Okay. And I, you know, I said this a few times now, we don't wanna be redundant, but we really want to emphasize it. I've said for many years, I've been at DREDF for, you know, 15-plus years, that there are, there's such inequity in terms of who can access an attorney. And this isn't just a California problem, this is, you know, across the country. There's a Parent Training and Information Center in every state and territory in this country. And part of the reason that Congress funded us was that when these important laws were being passed, parents and disability activists and advocates said it's great to have rights, but how in the world would people ever know how to use them or navigate these very complex processes? And so the parent centers are one way in which, you know, we're trying to level the playing field. So we all know that there are parents who can secure an attorney and pay a very large amount of money upfront and move forward and try to get the things that they want to see happen for their child done. But there's an awful lot of Californians who don't, either don't have access to those kinds of resources or again, don't have access to an attorney who has a specialized knowledge. And there's also other reasons why people might not access an attorney. People are worried, clients we talk to are worried about child welfare, CPS and reports. They don't, you know, authorities are not necessarily something they're eager to engage with. The legal system isn't something they're eager to engage with and yet their child, things may be going very wrong for their child. They may be very, very concerned. And so, you know, we're trying to help people. I know a lot of our work here at DREDF in the last few years, we focused on these issues around marginalized families. And for example, in our Native American communities, families will tell us why in the world would I trust the school district or why would I wanna go to an attorney? Because, you know, I don't have that trust in these institutions. There's a long, intergenerational history here. And so we play an important role, but we have to be very, very careful about protecting ourselves, our organizations and also our families from these situations. Because a family may call back and say, you know, "You told me I should do this and it really backfired." And not only is there legal exposure there, but you know, we've let our client down if that happens or our family down. Next slide. All right, so I, you know, again, as parent advocates, this is just one form. Many, some of you may be paralegals, some of you may be education advocates or special education advocates who are out in the community with your own practice as an advocate. But I just wanna use the example of what we do here as parent advocates at DREDF, because our role is so important. We serve families of infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities anywhere from birth to 26 and sometimes even older depending on the situation. There's at least one of us in every state and territory. We don't represent families. We're always explaining that in every contact at every training. But we do provide resources and support and we model effective participation in part because everyone who works in the PTI either has a child with a disability or a family member with a disability or themselves has a disability or both, or all of the above. And so, you know, we have that direct, firsthand experience about what it feels like, what people are going through. And we want to provide, everything we do is free. We wanna provide this information for families. But we also know that different individuals, different people from different cultural backgrounds, from different spaces in society may choose to use those rights in different ways, may take different action steps depending on what their priorities and values are. And it's our job to help them figure that out, but not our job to tell them what they are. So we work, next slide, sorry. We work with parents, guardians, youth, and also we do a lot of work with community organizations including, for example, we do trainings for court-appointed special advocates who may be representing a youth because they may hold education rights for children who are in the dependency or child welfare system or juvenile justice system. We work with all of these entities and provide free support. But again, it's always around here's what this all means. You know, when this language is full of acronyms and so on, you know, we might start, stop and say to, in a IEP meeting, "Could you explain what you mean by FAPE?" Because you know, these terms, free, appropriate public education, there's a lot of specialized language. We help people prepare for meetings, we help them communicate their concerns or you know, they'll call us up and say, "I just think the whole process was awful. I didn't feel heard, I was invisible." And we'll say, "You know, well, did you know that one of the cornerstones of this special education law, IDEA, is that you are not a guest at the meeting? You are an important part of the IEP team." And so, you know, you might wanna share with administrators that you did not feel that you were able to participate meaningfully and so on. And then of course, we all keep a close eye on local resources, referrals, you know, support groups to try to know and direct people to what kind of help is out there for what kinds of issues and to make sure that it's up to date and relevant. So there's a link that's here, and yes, somebody asked earlier on whether we would be sending these slides out. Yes, we will as PDFs and all these links will be live links and you can expect that to come out in the next few days. Next slide. So I, we just wanted to give a shout-out to ourselves, forgive us, but we care about this work. We work really hard on it. Our Parent Training and Information Center at DREDF serves 30 counties in northern California. There are four of us. We have two advocates who are bilingual Spanish speaking, and we will get an interpreter for families who have other language needs. We serve a lot of families, more than 900 people per year. We have done, you know, in the past year, more than 60 trainings online or in person in both Spanish and English. We work with, and this is an important part of what we do. We work with our local state partners and community partners to improve the special education system. And one way we do that is by really encouraging families to get involved in that piece of it. You know, look, it sounds like you resolved the issue maybe with some support and information from us that was happening for your child, but you know, let's don't forget to pay it forward. Did you know you could get involved in these other activities? And that's a really important part of what we do to help, you know, pay it forward and change the system for everybody. Next slide. Okay, so Malhar, I've been talking for a long time. I hope you'll help me out here with this slide. But you know, we, and we've given you some examples already, but these are some of the challenges when we were developing this training for you all today and really collaborating on, you know, what, why is this so hard? Why is there so much pressure to provide legal advice when you're not an attorney? And why is it so easy to go down that slippery slope into legal advice when you really should not be doing that? So there's challenges that we all face. You know, we know that there's power differentials for many of our families. They face cultural, language and income, all kinds of other barriers to effectively participating in a process. Sometimes when I'm training, I will say to families and community providers, you know, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which establishes special education rights and law in this country, it depends, it's built on one foundational concept. And that is that every child with a disability or a suspected disability has a parent to advocate for them. And there are all kinds of reasons why that's simply not true for some of our families. Families need help doing that. They may be very intimidated, overwhelmed, they may not be present, they may be incarcerated, they may be deported. There's all kinds of reasons why, unfortunately, our families struggle with this. The other piece about it is, you know, as a parent advocate, you know, we see the ways in which families who maybe have more resources and can, you know, go hire an attorney right from the get-go might have outcomes that are different than some of the families we're serving. And you know, we wanna fix that. So there's a lot of pressure on us to try to level that playing field. Again, many of us are people with disabilities or have children or family members with disabilities, and we want to use all the hard-won knowledge and experience that we have and that we've learned along the way, you know, the hard way to help other families. And it, so it's super, super easy in that situation to say something like, "Oh, you know, don't be afraid to ask for, you know, an independent educational evaluation because that's the first thing you can do and it's the best thing you can do." And the minute you say the best thing you can do, you've crossed the line. And finally, you know, families are just desperate for help. And they constantly ask us, and I'm sure for many of you who are listening today, you've experienced this, "What should I do? What do you advise? Gosh, you just laid out all these choices, but if, what would you do?" And that's, you know, it creates a lot of pressure and a desire to help, which can result in us crossing the line. Next slide. MALHAR: One more please. CHERYL: Oops. MAHLAR: Thank you. CHERYL: All right. MALHAR: I'm gonna, I can go to this one. CHERYL: Yeah, thank you. MALHAR: So, that's a nice lead up to practical steps to avoid unauthorized practice of law. And Cheryl and I are gonna model one common situation that comes up in an individualized education plan meetings as just an example of how exactly we go about modeling for parents how they should advocate for themselves in the future without crossing over to legal advice. Before we do that, we just wanna, you know, make sure that you set the stage in every single meeting, email and call. And that is to make sure that the client understands that the advocate is not a lawyer and not providing legal advice. And that's as simple as saying on a phone call, "I'm not here as your attorney. I'm here as an advocate. I can tell you what your rights are, but I cannot tell you what avenue you should take and which avenue is better. I am simply here to help you understand better what your rights are." Cheryl, at the beginning of IEP meetings will often say, "I am not an attorney. I am here on behalf. I am here at the invitation of the family to help them participate more effectively." Once you start saying, as a non-attorney, I am on behalf of the family, that starts to become interpreted as you are there as an attorney. And it's important to know that oftentimes it, whether or not you are seen as an attorney in a situation is not based on your interpretation, it's based on the interpretation of the parent or even sometimes school district members, a hearing officer, the opposing party, the opposing counsel's understanding of why you're there. So having this disclaimer is really important. And this kind of gets us to what we were discussing a little bit earlier on, which is what does it mean to apply the law to the facts? Because there is always some of that going on in any situation, but there is a line at which it crosses over into becoming legal advice. So one really good example happens in the context of IEPs. And again, we're just using this as an example that we think is applicable in other situations. So under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, there are a tremendous amount of timelines that are triggered when something happens. And most of these timelines are quite clear. So for example, if a parent requests an assessment be done on their child, the school district then has 10 days to either create an assessment plan that the, to present to the parent that they can choose to sign or not sign, or they can deny that assessment through a written notice that we call a prior written notice. That's pretty clear. So if a parent says, "Well, I requested an assessment," an advocate can say, "Okay, great, well your rights under the IDEA is that you have the assessment plan in front of you or a denial of it in 10 days." That is. CHERYL: I think it's 15 in California here, Malhar, but just. MALHAR: 15, apologies, apologies, 15 days. And so that is an application in some ways of the law to the facts, but it's a very clear, bright line situation. An example that Cheryl provided when we were preparing for this is when a parent requests what is called an independent educational evaluation. Now the timeline there is that the school district cannot act with unreasonable delay. There's really no legal case that defines in California what that even is. And so because of that, that is ambiguous and that's a very clear, clear situation where a parent advocate or non-attorney can't say, "Well, it's been about 25 days. That seems like it's unreasonable delay." That's just something that you really cannot say. And so I think here our general principle is if it's, if you don't know the answer for sure, whether it's because you don't know how the law applies in this specific situation or you just don't know what the law is because the law itself is ambiguous, don't say anything. Just say you don't know. And it's more than okay to say, "I don't know. And this is a situation where an attorney is better suited to answer this question than I am." We wanna talk a little bit about what this might look like in a slightly more adversarial context in like an IEP meeting. One common situation that comes up amongst all of my clients and a lot of our, a lot of the parents that call in is a situation where a student, because of their disability, is engaging in disability-related behavior and that behavior is interfering with their ability to pay attention in class and just learn or the ability of other students to learn. This is a situation where school districts under the law are obligated to provide students with what is called a behavior intervention plan, and in some other instances are required to provide a functional behavioral assessment. These are essentially ways to figure out what is causing the student's behavior and what is a really good way to address that behavior, to help that student engage in learning? And so what I would say in IEP meeting is very simple. This student has been engaging in behavior for X number of days, X number of months. It's very clear that their academic performances decreased as a result. You have an obligation, school district, to provide a behavior intervention plan. And I think that you should also be providing a functional behavioral assessment because the strategies that you've been using have clearly been ineffective. That's how I would say it as an attorney. So I'm gonna turn it over to Cheryl to give the way more eloquent way in which she has to go about providing that information. CHERYL: Well, and you know, I would wanna say what Malhar said... so [laughs] now this is the whole problem is that, you know, we, it's easy to wanna cross over that line, but I might say something like, you know, "One of the things you, parent," and I'm looking at the parent and I'm talking to the parent, "Have shared with me is how concerned you are about the fact the school's constantly sending your child home or out of their learning environment because of behavior that you really see as directly connected to their disability or to maybe not following the IEP or whatever. One of the things I feel like I'm hearing in this meeting today, and correct me if I'm wrong, school staff or whatever, is that everybody's kind of in agreement here that behavior is becoming a major barrier to this child's ability to access and benefit from their education. You know, should we talk about what other assessments, maybe this team needs more information, you know, as a group to understand what the child's needs are." And you know, or I may have prepped the parent to say, "Well, I think my child needs a functional behavior assessment." And then I, and then that they might ask that and then the school might say, "Well, we'll consider that." And I might say something along the lines of, "Well, I, you know, just wanna make it clear that the, what the law says for special education in these situations is that there's a 15-day timeline once a parent submits a request. Parent are you formally requesting a functional behavior assessment? Maybe we can, I can help you, you know, with a sample letter to follow up after the meeting." Or "District, are you saying that you're in agreement for a functional behavior assessment? If so, isn't it true that parents should have an answer in 15 days just because that's what the law says is supposed to happen?" And because one of the things that we tell parents all the time is it's better to get an answer in writing or, you know, find out whether they're gonna do something than to just leave things in limbo and not get the answers that you're seeking. And again, it's not my job to tell them what answers they should seek or what steps they should take, but I do want them to know when there is a strict timeline because, you know, one of the advocacy strategies I might teach them is, you know, did you know that might be helpful to open up your calendar and, you know, count the 15 calendar days and if you haven't heard back from them, you know, you might wanna follow up. That's an option that you have. MALHAR: And I love the question asking, of course, and I think one thing that you also told me is that you might ask the district, can we discuss options that the parent has in this situation? And it's a really, that's a really good question to ask, to have the school district explain to the parent, well here's what we can do. And I think that's, that might be even more useful in context where like the legal right is not defined where, for example, the parent isn't asking for a functional behavior assessment that triggers all these requirements. But for example, if there's a student who requires a different literacy curriculum, I think it's a good way to say, okay, well what are the options here? Because a parent just needs to know what are the ways that you can move forward and it really gets the school district to spill their guts without crossing into over this, into this advocating on behalf of the parent. CHERYL: Yeah, that's a really good example. MALHAR: Can we go to the next slide please? So just a reminder, use disclaimers at all times. This is an unauthorized practice of law training and this is the easiest way to really avoid anyone interpreting what you're saying as legal advice. So use written ones when you are emailing parents or whoever else it might be. One example that Cheryl and I talked about was a walk-in legal clinic that she actually attended and it, and a paralegal I believe it was, was filling out a form on her behalf, but she actually was not sure if the organization was actually providing legal advice on behalf of her. So that's a situation where the paralegal should have said if they're not providing legal advice, "I am not providing legal advice. I am just filling out this form for you by transcribing what you have to say." Ensure that every email to the school district includes a written disclaimer. Often what might happen is that a parent emails the school district and then CCs, CCs a paralegal or CCs a parent advocate. Make sure that in all of your responses that you say, "I am not the attorney in this situation. I am just here as someone who's helping the parent understand what their rights are," or whatever other disclaimer that you might give. And provide families with a written services agreement stating the role of the parent advocate. That's the best thing, making sure that not only is it clear to both sides, but that both sides have acknowledged it via writing. Go to the next one. CHERYL: Yeah, and I would just add to that, Malhar, and I know we're getting short on time, that it also helps you define exactly the extent to which you'll help a family. So for example, I will come to one IEP meeting to help you participate effectively, but not, you know, 15 IEPs. I'm not your advocate who represents you in forever and ever. I'm not establishing that relationship with you. You know, here's the limited scope of my participation in this process. MALHAR: Go to the next slide please. So this is kind of a little bit of a wrap-up. We're gonna do another wrap-up later, but this is just kind of a bright line rules of what is and is not legal advice. So what, clearly legal advice is saying something like, "I advise you to file a request for an independent evaluation," versus saying, "In this situation as a parent, you have a right to request an independent evaluation." And you can connect that as it says in the bullet points to your experience. I think Cheryl does this often where she says, you know, "In my experience, independent evaluations can provide really good context and a second opinion about what it is that your child's, your child's baseline levels are of academic performance." I think, I know Cheryl as a parent advocate and a parent of a student with an IEB herself has done that countless number of times, so can speak from that. So if you can connect it to your own experience, that is always really great. Again, similarly saying, "I think that under the law your child's behavior was a manifestation of their disability," as opposed to, "Can you talk a little bit more about how this behavior might have manifested and your, and you told me that you might think that it's connected to their disability." Again, role playing, I think in an IEP meeting can be good. I just, the role, at least for people who are going into IEP meetings or other similar situations like mediations, is to give parents the script that they need for the future. And then going back to again the drafting of contracts and forms, cannot draft a complaint for a parent. You can transcribe what they have given to you. Similarly, cannot speak for the parent. You can model, you can ask questions and get the parent to speak on behalf of themselves. Is there anything that you wanted to add to this, Cheryl? CHERYL: Just a couple of things. I think another good example might be that often the first thing an attorney may do when they take a case or when they're considering whether to take a particular parent or client's case, is write to the school district and ask for any and all records, right? So I'm not going to write to the school district and ask for any and all records, but I would explain to the parent that it's can be really helpful because we lose things, we don't always get copies of things, to request letter, all of the child's educational records. And by the way, here's a sample letter that you could use if you wanna do that. So again, I'm not the person writing to the school district asking for the records. There are occasionally times because of language barriers and so on where we might have a release of information that's very limited, where the parent says, "I'm okay with DREDF, you know, getting, reviewing records from the school district or getting my child's documents," or something like that. But we always make sure that there is a release of information in that kind of situation. And another very common way that, you know, we can help is to say, you know, if you wanna share your letter of concern, I can send you some sample letters of concern where other parents have written something, you know, just so you have some idea. There's some good stuff out there. And then they'll always, it seems like they will always send me back that letter and say, "How does this look?" And I don't wanna say, I'll just say, "It seems like you did a great job of expressing what you were concerned about." Not, this is a great letter, but make sure you put this ED code in there. That kind of thing. MALHAR: Thank you, next slide please. So again, just a reminder, if it's an ambiguous situation, you actually don't know what you're allowed or not allowed to do, the State Bar Ethics Hotline is always a great resource. You often have to call them and then leave a callback number and they'll call you back and they'll point you to areas of the law that can be of guidance to you. Next slide, please. And so again, just to wrap up, your role as a non-attorney is to support and not advocate on behalf of, your presence changes the temperature in the room. Oftentimes, a lot of people will defer to you, will treat the parent with more respect, will treat the clients with more respect because you are there. That's a really sad reality, but it's a reality. And I think that's an important thing to know. And you're there to teach the parent to fish, to figure out what it will look like in the future when you're not there. And at the end of the day, one thing that's really nice, and I often actually will for a lot of our clients have, will have a parent advocate go to an IEP meeting on behalf of a client or actually in the role of the parent advocate instead of attending myself because I, my presence there makes everything really adversarial. Whereas parent advocates can really help develop collaboration and relationships. And that is the most important 'cause I will not be representing the parent for the rest of their child's K through 12 educational life. CHERYL: Yeah, and if I could add just a couple things there. I think when you, whether the parent thinks you're representing them or not, you also need to be aware that this school district may think that you're representing the parent. And I've had situations where I've attended an IEP meeting and tried to follow all the guidelines we've talked about today and still had a special ed director, you know, follow up and say, "What do you and your client want to do about X, Y, and Z?" So it's just really important to remember that how you're perceived isn't just about the family. And also that if the school perceives that you're representing the parent, they will often, I've had families where, you know, an advocate shows up for the IEP meeting or just someone who's come to support the parent. The school's not sure whether they're fulfilling the role of an attorney or not. They'll say, "Oh, we can't go on with this meeting because you brought an attorney, or you're represented." And then the parent may have been waiting for this meeting for weeks. And it becomes, you know, this very sort of tense standoff about whether or not the district needs to invite their own attorney and so on. So there's a lot of repercussions that we don't always know about that can impact our families in a negative way. MALHAR: Next slide please. So questions, I already see that there's one question that I'll address right away. And that question is from Luke Robbins. The question states in lieu of telling somebody I, in, sorry, in lieu of telling someone I am advocating for, to fill out and send a sample letter, could I say something like, "Consider filling out and sending a sample letter," or, "One option is filling out and sending a sample letter"? Would that cross a line into unauthorized practice of law? I don't, I think that's a really good example of avoiding the unauthorized practice of law. It's presenting the options. I think the option one, the one that uses the word option is a really good way of doing it. This is what your options are and this is what you could do in a situation. And, sorry, I'm just looking at the next question, I apologize. But it's a really good way to convey and to convey what their options are and go from there. And I think connecting it to your experience can often be good in that situation. CHERYL: Yeah, and I would just add to that that one strategy I find helpful and know my fellow advocates find helpful is to say to the parent, you know, when they start to say, "Well, I dunno how to write these letters and you know, you said it so eloquently, could you just say it?" That I say, "Would it be helpful to you if I sent you a sample letter?" And then they, you know, that would give you a model or you could see some examples. So therefore, you know, you're putting it back on the parent. Like, what resources do you need to be able to participate effectively? And we tell parents, you know, as Malhar said, you may be going to the IEP meeting once or talking to the parent once, the parent, the teacher, you know, teach the parent to fish. Like as a parent, not only are you advocating for your child throughout their school career, but I, you are also teaching your child to advocate for themselves as they get older because we wanna pass on these skills. So empowering families, which is what we see our role as, so that they know how to be an effective advocate on their own behalf and how to pass onto their child those advocacy skills as well. That's got a tremendous impact that I just don't think should be underestimated. MALHAR: The next question is can non-attorney staff relay advice from their supervising attorneys directly to clients? Yes, I have asked non-attorneys who are working with us to relay information that I have from them. But I keep it quite simple. For example, we've often advised clients to sign IEPs with exception to say, for example, "I disagree with, I agree to implement the IEP, but I do not agree that it is a FAPE." My advice would be that when it starts to get more complex than something like that simple, to directly communicate it with the clients, the, because it, there are often follow-up questions that happen. And then conveying the ambiguities can be really complex, but often the non-attorney in many ways in this situation has to be acting essentially as akin to a translator. So imagine the parent speaks a different language that you as the attorney don't speak. Even if the parties are communicating the same language, the non-attorney has to be in some ways kind of the conduit for that information. I wanna make sure that there's no loss in translation there. And also that the non-attorney advocate isn't putting their own spin on that, on that legal advice. There's a question in the chat, what about parents, victims who cannot read and write? Cheryl, do you wanna talk a little bit more about your experience there? CHERYL: This is a very, well, first of all, you know, we haven't really talked about, but it is another one of those pressures on us. I think both as attorneys and advocates that many of our families, you know, the parent may have a disability and it can range, you know, include literacy. It can, I know for example, we have families who maybe come from Guatemala who speak Mam and not, they don't speak Spanish or English. And so, you know, that can be a situation where we are very carefully trying to transcribe or help them write a letter, for example, in or taking a document and putting it into more basic language for them. What we try to do is find a model letter, right? Not that we're doing it ourselves for them, but there are times, you know, when we have reached out to our legal team, which is a wonderful thing about working here at DREDF, is that we have that resource to say, you know, "This parent really wants to file a complaint. However, they are not literate in either English or Spanish." Or, you know, "Guess what? Our Department of Education doesn't have this form available in their language and so on. Is it okay to fill out the complaint?" I would say with them, not for them, right? So that, you know, I might say, here's what the question means, this is what they're asking, what's your answer? And try to, you know, be transcribing, but also, you know, I think seeking advice about that and making sure that you're not crossing that line is one of those things that can be really, really important. MALHAR: The next question that we have is any advice on having non-attorneys prepare declarations or discovery responses? What's a good way to let them do more than transcribe what the client says without crossing the line into unauthorized practice of law? So this is a situation where paralegals are in fact allowed to draft declarations and discovery responses. They don't just have to transcribe so long as the attorney is supervising and then is editing and finalizing it. This is okay, but that last part is really the important part. The attorney has to supervise, edit and finalize. The paralegal can't just draft it and it have it be submitted in that way. Make sure there is a final review over it, but it, that is an okay practice for a paralegal. Are there any other questions that folks have? CHERYL: You know, I just wanna, since there aren't any questions right now, we have a couple minutes, one thing that we didn't talk about and I, and we don't need to go into any depth about is that another consideration when you're supporting families is that sometimes parents are at odds with each other about what should happen. And they'll say, you know, "Can you call my, you know, ex-wife and tell her that she's wrong about, that my child should be evaluated," or whatever. And I think most of us know, of course not, we can't call and tell them, but that sometimes, you know, one parent or another may have a different relationship with the school district than the other. And that it can feel very adversarial and in that situation, I think it's really important to remember too that not only are we not special education or education attorneys, but we're also not family court attorneys and that we, you know, say to people, if you're having disagreements in terms of what you should or shouldn't do, and you both have educational rights, you know, decision making rights for the child, it's very, very important to know that I can't tell you or I can't tell the other person what they should or shouldn't do. And it's not uncommon for us to be asked that question. I just wanted to be sure to stick that in there. MALHAR: Thank you, Cheryl. Anybody else have anything that they wanna talk about? If not, we can wrap this up a little sooner than we expected. And Cheryl, maybe actually before we conclude, if you could just talk a little bit about how you use your experience as a parent to essentially interact with parents going forward and how you just bring that experience in. CHERYL: Yeah, I mean, I think that's at the heart of what all of us here in the PTI are doing is first of all trying to say, you know, we get it. We know that this is hard and overwhelming and frustrating and that, you know, reminding people that there is no mandate to provide anyone with a, you know, limousine of an education in public education, right? So what does, you know, what is appropriate and so on? But also to empower the family by using our own experiences. So, you know, I, when I started this process, I didn't know anything. I remember school district, and this is a true story, saying to me about one of my children, "Well, you know, they're just way too smart for an IEP," and you know, learning later that, you know, the appropriate. And at the time I thought, yeah, you know, I didn't understand disability awareness, I didn't understand ableism. There's a lot of things. It was a steep learning curve. And the appropriate response looking back would've been to say, you know, "It sounds like you're saying that a child, you know, that you have a certain stereotype about what a child with a disability is and you know, my child's an individual and here's what's unique about him and I wanna make sure that the assessment is strengths based." And so I will tell parents like, you know, it sounds like one of the things that you really felt in the IEP meeting and that really disempowered you is that knowledge that you feel like they not didn't hear you, but they really spent their whole time talking about what your child couldn't do or was bad at doing and so on. And so, you know, being able to say, you know, could we start by talking about using a strengths-based, person-centered perspective? Or I might say something like, you know, one thing I realized as my, one of my children got older who struggled in, you know, with social skills and self-advocacy was that was an important area to ask for help for him with in the special education process. So when you're saying to me, you know, I'm worried about what's gonna happen to my child as they get older, you know, you might, did you know that there's a transition process in the law and that there's certain things that are supposed to happen and that, you know, you might wanna ask about, you know, how to empower and write goals for your students so that they learn these important skills. And I think it's, you know, that empathy piece, that active listening piece, the support group piece is really important. And also saying to parents, and this is probably one of my, you know, favorite sayings is, you know, sounds like there are about a dozen things that aren't going right and I've been there. And nothing, no IEP is perfect and no matter how good the IEP sounds on paper, the reality of it being implemented is another whole challenge and so on. But it sounds like what you're really trying to advocate for here is for your child to be seen as a unique individual, you know? And I thought, I realized that with my own child that you, he was in fact both gifted and disabled and both of those things were critical to who he was. But more importantly, he wasn't any one of those labels. So I learned very early on to write my own parent letter. I would say things like, and we have templates to do this, you know, everybody else is writing a letter about your child and maybe you wanna write your own letter. This helped me a lot to, even if, whether I shared it or not, just to go through the process of saying, "Here's who my child is, here's what's incredible about them, here's what's unique about them as an individual. Here's what, when I ask them what's working for you about school? What do you like and what don't you like? Here's what they said and here's the places where I think my child's really struggling." So that I empowered myself to be recognized as the expert on my own child that I am. And you know, that piece of what we do in our work is really, really important. And I actually learned this from an attorney. I once went to an IEP meeting for a very young child who was being expelled, I think in the kindergarten or something. It was early in my career. And an attorney had come from a local organization. I didn't know they were coming, by the way. That's another good question to ask the parent when you're talking to them. By the way, are you represented? You know, are you working with an attorney? 'Cause that happens fairly frequently. But at any rate, she was there and as she was talking, she, as the school district was talking and presenting reports, I remember that she, and you know, lawyers, I think, you know, I don't know if you take drama classes, Malhar, but certainly, you know, there's an element of like being effective dramatically, stood up and said, "You know, could we stop talking about everything this child does wrong and how hard, what a problem they are? Because if I was just reading these documents, I would basically feel like I was reading the documents about someone, you know, who has nothing to offer, and can we just stop right now and talk about this child's strengths? Because that's what we're supposed to do. Figure out what their strengths are so they can, we can help them use their strengths to overcome their challenges." And I've never forgotten that and I tell that to parents all the time because that, after all, is the job. MALHAR: Cheryl, I have a question for you. You know, Cheryl was really integral toward our lawsuit against the Berkeley Unified School District, which is, has now settled, but the lawsuit essentially challenged the school district's practices of not assessing students who are suspected to have, suspected of having learning disabilities and not providing the proper literacy instruction. So Cheryl, could you just talk a little bit more about like what that, what your role was like on that case and kind of how you helped develop those facts that got to the ultimate great settlement that we got there? CHERYL: Yeah, sure. And one of my colleagues, now retired, who I miss dearly started this off because a family, a mom reached out to us in the parent center and she said, "My child's in high school and can't read and really thought that he was on track for graduation and has straight A's and yet cannot read beyond the first grade level." And she was a young, you know, single mom and she didn't know anything about her rights or anything, but she said, "I just came from an IEP meeting where they told my son, oh, we've been modifying the curriculum for you for a long time, but those classes won't count toward college." So that was the, you know, the first one. And then we started to talk here in the parent center about this issue of what was going on with how many calls we were getting from families either being told, "Oh, your child has to be at least two years behind in reading before they can be evaluated." Or, "Your child needs, oh, your child isn't special ed." So again, deploying disability discrimination in a certain way, you know, they're not one of those kids. And the parents will say, "Oh, okay." And then realize, but wait, they still can't read. And so we really tried to gather up the information and the attorney, the legal team helped us come up with some kind of consistent questions to ask if a family did reach out, just so we could find, you know, really kind of understand what was happening and what wasn't happening. We reached out to other organizations, think about Decoding Dyslexia California and other places where we referred parents to learn more about dyslexia and what it was and, you know, what an appropriate kind of support or intervention would look like. And, you know, then we started really looking out for these clients and realizing that it wasn't just a one-off situation, that it was a systemic issue that really needed to be addressed. And where the district really had a policy at the time and people inside the district were, you know, teachers call us sometimes, you know, there's a lot of people advocating for children within the educational system, but they're often worried about how visible they should be. But were saying, you know, "I was told, you know, we can't use the term dyslexia and we can just say the child has a specific learning disability, but then, you know, the problem is then what interventions are appropriate? The kind of disability they have never gets discussed." So then we started developing, you know, resource documents, referrals and so on, but also went to the legal team with the facts that they needed to be able to really take on this systemic issue. And I think, you know, it was really wonderful to see some of the systems change and the practices change in the district itself. MALHAR: Thank you, I think that that's a really good example of a case where we really had to rely on non-attorneys to be developing a lot of these facts and it definitely straddled that line. We made sure that we were, at every single point in time the non-attorneys were not engaging in the practice of law. Claudia, you wanna talk a little bit about, more about this State Bar paralegal program? CLAUDIA: Sure, this is Claudia, also with DREDF. I'm Claudia Center, Legal Director., she/her/hers. And so I just wanna sort of situate our discussion today. So I wanted to situate today's discussion. This is Claudia, she/her/hers, Legal Director with DREDF. I wanted to situate this discussion into a couple of things we know. First of all, we know that peer support and peer advocacy is incredibly effective. It's really effective with parents, it's effective in mental health, it's effective in substance use disorder community, in people who have criminal legal interactions, all kinds of situations where people may have civil legal problems, we know that peer support is really important and we have the situation with, you know, these very strict rules about the unauthorized practice of law and you know, what non-lawyers can do around these issues. And so each state is kind of grappling with this issue and there are different models that are arising in each state. And there was a, I forget if it was called a task force or a commission, but designated by the State Board of California a few years ago to develop a paralegal program where paralegals could do many more legal tasks in particular areas of training. And the idea was that they would be licensed as being able to do these additional legal tasks and have a certain level of supervision. And really, California is quite, in my opinion, quite conservative on this issue. And the proposal ended up being rejected and the legislature said, don't, don't look at it anymore. We don't wanna go down this path. And so, and we have a good comment from Amy Tannenbaum, that there is a new initiative to explore implementing Alaska's community justice worker model in California. And I'm glad you mentioned that. We do have a slide in this deck from the community justice worker website and it's a really exciting model. And you know, as a legal services provider, I'm really interested in seeing what we can do to push the boundaries on this. But I also believe that the State Bar continues to be quite conservative. Thank you. MALHAR: Thank you so much, Claudia. There's a comment from one of the panelists. It is easy for a knowledgeable, it is easy for a knowledgeable, academically educated person, sorry, not from a panelist, from Heidi Gonzalez to the panelist, it is easy for a knowledgeable, academically educated person to say, let's write our own letter. But for immigrants monolingual in their language of birth other than English, it is a nightmare and a feeling of being lost. And I think that's exactly right. I think that's where a lot of the non-attorney advocates can be just tremendous presences for those folks to ensure that they just at least have someone there while they're writing down the letter. And I think it's a, I think this is a situation where a non-attorney advocate can help without providing legal advice by pointing out the relevant things that are in the law. So for example, if it's a, let's say it's a letter on behalf of a student to the California Department of Education about why the student should have been assessed but had not been assessed, right? A parent advocate can say, well, under the law, the school district is required to look out for some telltale signs of a disability and some of these telltale signs can include X, Y, and Z. And you as a parent told me that you as a parent told me that you saw some of those signs and that you communicated that to the school, correct? And that's an example of something that can prompt the parent to write it down themselves without telling them that they need to be writing that down or that they should be writing that down or interpreting it. CLAUDIA: This is Claudia, just one more point. When Cheryl mentioned the strengths-based approach, that can really happen when either lawyers or non-lawyers help people fill out applications for disability benefits, particularly under our Social Security system, to be approved for those benefits, you really need to encourage people to write down, you know, basically everything that happens to the person in their lived experience during their worst day of their condition, whatever it is, or conditions. But when it's a peer who's helping the person, someone who either has a disability or maybe has a disabled person in their family, they can say, you know, I know this is not you. Like, I know this is you on your worst day. This is not you every single day. And try to be, have like the knowledge to give the support around having that type of product that is so negative as that has to be done for the representation, representation or project, whatever it is. Thank you. CHERYL: Yeah, Claudia, I just wanna add to that. You know, I think it's important to realize whatever your role is, that often when we're supporting families in these situations, there's a real element of just trauma in the engagement itself, right? There's, people are, can be traumatized by feeling like they weren't heard. But also because, you know for example, in our Native American communities, I sat in an IEP where the special education administrator said something like, "Well, if you would discipline this five-year-old, you know, grandchild of yours that you're raising at home more, we wouldn't have to do it at school." And you could just see that was like being punched in the gut to the grandmother. And so, you know, that's another reason why we're pretty committed here at DREDF. You know, we have two bilingual equity education advocates, you know, creating as much diversity among, there's only four of us, but we do our best, and sharing our experiences in that regard as well, because I think people often leave these meetings feeling like, you know, I'll never go to another one or it's really hard. So we wanna basically have the net result be that families are more willing and more empowered to engage and not left basically traumatized by the whole system. MALHAR: So it looks like we're about at time, but I just wanted to say also that DREDF, the Parent Training and Information Center provides trainings for parents. And I do recommend that non-parents also, people who are just advocates, go, because I think it's a nice training just to know what, and remember what the IDA rights are that parents have and also they go through the different kinds of scripts and skills that parent advocates can use in IEP meetings. It's a really, really great training. I've gone to it now multiple times and I find it incredibly helpful. I send new attorneys that I supervise there to those trainings also. So I just highly recommend it. You can find those trainings on our website at www.dredf.org. Thank you so much for attending this training. CHERYL: Goodbye, everybody, have a good afternoon. Thank you, interpreters. MALHAR: Thank you.