Introduction: the Law and Education
| Publication year | 2015 |
| Pages | 22 |
| Citation | Vol. 44 No. 10 Pg. 22 |
Special Issue: Education Law
Introduction: The Law and Education
By Ben Echeverria, Jennifer Wunsch, Jenna Zerylnick.
About the Authors
Ben Echeverria is a solo practitioner in Colorado Springs primarily specializing in education law. He has been in-house counsel with a major K-12 school district and later with a college and community college district. He was also an insurance defense attorney defending educational entities and had a private practice where he specialized in plaintiffs' civil litigation. Jennifer Wunsch is an attorney for the University of Colorado's Technology Transfer Office, where she serves as Research Counsel and Contract Specialist. Her work focuses on assisting researchers with intellectual property provisions, primarily within industry-sponsored research. Jenna Zerylnick is an associate attorney with the Denver law firm Lee + Kinder, LLC, where her practice focuses on workers' compensation defense, insurance defense, general liability, employment defense, and Medicare set-asides. She has a broad civil litigation background, including personal injury, probate, contract disputes, family law, and school law.
K-12 education in Colorado began, like in most Western Frontier states, in one-room schoolhouses. The Guy Hill School[1] is a good example. It opened in 1876, the same year Colorado became a state. Guy Hill School housed eight grades and served as a community center for dances and church services. One on-site teacher taught all eight grades under the same roof without the support of a principal or teacher's aide. This teacher was responsible not only for the education of the students, but also for classroom management and discipline of the students.
The Guy Hill School, which closed in 1951, [2] illustrates a model of K-12 education from which American society has drastically departed. There were no special education classes at the Guy Hill School, and corporal punishment was still a widely used method of discipline. Concepts such as mainstreaming, inclusion, and least-restrictive environment did not exist. Legislation such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top was more than 50 years away, and the call for gun-free school zones had not yet been realized. Due to the lack of rules and regulations during this time, most schools did not require the assistance of legal counsel.
Higher education...
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