Revoking legal services: Republicans want to keep lawyers from the poor.

• Author: Stycos, Steven

Two days before Christmas 1994, Helga Bidawid got the bad news. Facing an Illinois State Board of Education order to mix special-education students with regular students, Chicago Public Schools administrators had decided to close the Jacqueline Vaughn Occupational High School and transfer its 140 low-income, mentally retarded students to Taft High School.

Bidawid, president of the local school council, was outraged. Her son John, a nineteen-year-old with Down's syndrome, was benefiting from the special programs at Vaughn--learning skills he needed to find a job and live an independent life. But Taft, she says, "had nothing remotely resembling the programs at Vaughn." Without special training, many of the mentally retarded white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students at Vaughn were likely to end up on welfare, she says.

Other Vaughn parents shared Bidawid's outrage. They met with the board of education. They met with aldermen. They held demonstrations. But they could not reverse the closing.

"We had to get at it with a legal angle," explains Bidawid. "They wouldn't listen to reason."

Parents called many law firms, Bidawid says, and finally the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, a legal-services agency, agreed to take the case. Staff attorney Shelley Davis filed a class-action suit to keep the school open.

And the parents won.

Cook County circuit court judge Erwin Berman agreed with parents that closing Vaughn would irreparably harm their children and issued an injunction against the closing.

Although not yet approved by the state, a plan to keep Vaughn open while main-streaming its students for some programs has been developed by school administrators and parents.

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Helga Bidawid says it's a great victory. But it probably won't happen again.

Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, Congressman George Gekas, Republican of Pennsylvania, the American Farm Bureau, the Christian Coalition, and other conservative groups have persuaded Congress to place a series of restrictions on federally funded legal-services agencies that would prevent them from ever again filing a lawsuit like Bidawid's.

Conservatives say the restrictions are necessary to keep legal services focused on the day-to-day legal needs of the poor--fighting unfair evictions, appealing denial of welfare benefits, and handling child-custody cases. But legal-services lawyers, who already spend most of their time on those mundane matters, say the new restrictions would simply ensure that poor people cannot effectively sue the government, the rich, and the influential. Those who would lose the most, they say, are America's least powerful residents--migrant farmworkers, battered women, low-wage factory workers, welfare recipients, and disabled people like John Bidawid.

Poor people charged with crimes would still be represented for free by public defenders throughout the country. But because of the restrictions and Congressional funding cuts, poor people with other legal problems would find it more difficult to get free legal help from the country's 323 legal-service agencies.

Since President Richard Nixon signed the bill creating legal services in 1974, Congress has appropriated several hundred million dollars a year to the Legal Services Corporation. The Corporation in turn makes...