Colorado Lawyers Committee Focuses on Education
| Jurisdiction | Colorado,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 12 No. 1991 Pg. 2499 |
| Pages | 2499 |
| Publication year | 1991 |
1991, December, Pg. 2499. Colorado Lawyers Committee Focuses on Education
The Colorado Lawyers Committee is a non-profit organization whose members include twenty-eight major Colorado law firms. For over ten years, the member firms have been committed to providing free legal services and assistance on poverty, civil rights and children's issues to individuals and groups throughout Colorado.
As part of its commitment to children, to minorities and to the poor, the Colorado Lawyers Committee ("CLC") has been attempting in recent months to learn more about education-related needs of Colorado's children and to identify ways in which lawyers may be able to help meet those needs. The CLC's efforts in this area are being carried on through its education task force, chaired by Hugh McClearn, and through its newly established loaned attorney program. In this program, member firms are asked to "loan" one of their attorneys to the CLC for from four to six months to work full-time on a specific CLC project. This year, Rothgerber, Appel, Powers & Johnson has loaned an attorney (this author) to work with the CLC for four months on education issues.
As a result of the efforts of the education task force and the loaned attorney, the CLC is presently working on a broad range of education-related matters. The three areas described in this article are representative of the diversity of this undertaking.
Education of homeless children is a new area of activity for CLC lawyers. Families with children are the fastest growing category of homeless persons in Colorado. In 1988, it was estimated that there were 1,500 children who experienced homelessness in Colorado during the year, and that 500 or more Colorado children were homeless on any given night.(fn1) Homelessness hits school-age children especially hard. Barriers such as residency requirements, delays in transfer of school records and lack of transportation may keep homeless children out of school; and those who do enroll in school find themselves facing new and unfamiliar curricula while at the same time dealing with the instability and emotional trauma of homelessness.
Federal and state laws have been passed to help remove these barriers and facilitate the enrollment...
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