Fight for Education Equity

Speaker 1: [Music] hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie you're here because you want to experience the life and business that you crave join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in Katherine Michael is co-managing partner of the law firm cmk she represents students and their families in a variety of education and personal injury matters she's been featured hundreds of times in both national and local media her nearly two decade career in education helps families have a voice and ensures that the needs of children in schools are met thank you for joining us today Katherine you represent students and their families in a variety of education and personal injury matters with the focus of making sure that the needs of children in school are met you have been featured hundreds of times in both local and National media sharing your knowledge and experience before we talk about your current practice in firm share with us more about your early career path I used to work in the hospital system and that was before law school and during law school and when you're in the hospital system especially when you're working in pediatric units you start to see children who are really struggling with a variety of different disabilities and that's really what got me inspired into this area was seeing the struggles of these families and the children and getting Educational Services from the schools so in the hospital I worked in Risk Management which is basically where you're looking and saying here's what type of check system we need to create for the Physicians here's what we need to be talking with patients about here's where we need to improve one of my focus areas was with kids from infancy up to age 18 one of the biggest problems we were having was with school systems for instance a child would be imuno compromised and they would need a Homebound Program and what I found and I did not expect to find was that schools were often very difficult to work with for these families and that honestly wasn't what I expected to find my mother had worked in teaching I assumed that school districts were going to go out of their way to help these families I knew they had legal o oblations to do so and what we found is hundreds of school districts not qualifying children for special Educational Services not putting health plans in place not providing homebound plans in place and really in some of these situations they putting children In Harm's Way I saw how difficult it was when we had a chronically ill child even if the physician had written an order and that child had Around the Clock nursing care paid for by their insurance to even get that nurse in through the school door and that's where I started to realize we have a problem and that problem isn't money and that's what a lot of people think it's that we have a school system that unfortunately they've gotten very used to saying no they've gotten very used to not understanding issues and not being called on them or having families just go outside of the school system finally to get the help they need it's so great that you are advocating for children with those needs my mother taught kindergarten for 29 years and she started out as one of the first in the state of Iowa and she taught special needs for several years before moving into the kindergarten classroom and she said working with those children helped her so much in teaching because she had to learn to meet kids in all different levels and to teach them from wherever stage they were at and you think about those kindergarten teachers even who are coming into the classrooms one of our biggest resources is those teachers but they're having to work with a child who hasn't learn their ABCs they had another one who started reading second grade books and trying to plan for everything and that is one thing that I saw early on as well is you would have interested teachers but they didn't know the law they didn't know what could be provided and administration wasn't about to help them and that was really frustrating and the first cases we actually started getting referred were coming from teachers um teachers who realized a child needed a residential placement teachers who realized that they could not provide these nursing services in school they had already gone to school administration they didn't know where to go and so it has been this sort of series of teachers starting to realize these families have rights and we need support in the classroom we need schools to actually be investing in us we need them to be investing in the families because we can't hold the fort anymore I think we're especially seeing that today with teachers at an unprecedented level now leaving the classroom because they don't have the support they need they don't know how to provide some of the services and they're really being asked to do more than they should share with us about your current firm my current firm is called Connell Michael Kerr and we actually have attorneys licensed in a variety of States myself I am licensed in Texas Indiana and Michigan and I'll give you a whole variety of examples so there's something called the individuals with disabilities Education Act some of your listeners probably know it very well others it's the first time hearing it but that is a law that provides protection for children with disabilities to qualify for that law you would have to have number one a disability and number two needs specialized instruction as a result and when we say specialized instruction that means if you have ADHD and you need some for instance organizational goal if you have a bipolar condition and you're going to need the school to accommodate that help you learn coping strategies you're going to qualify because we're not talking simply academic needs we're talking academic and functional needs that's what can qualify a child with a disability families come to us and I'll start with the simplest cases we handle and they say my child has dyslexia and we actually get hundreds of these cases unfortunately and I say unfortunately because those for me are some of the most frustrating cases we get children who are in 9th 10th 11th grade reading at a first and second grade level and by the time they get to they're depressed they're anxious they're having behavioral issues the parents don't know what to do many cases they've been diagnosed with ADHD for years the parents keep increasing the medication with the pediatrician and yet the child is not learning to read because it doesn't work that way and we get those cases in we file what's called an educational due process and that's something available to every parent in every state and it's still under that law the individuals with disabilities Education Act that's filed with the State Department of Education and in those cases basically we ask that Department of Education to appoint an independent hearing officer to make the decision does this child have a disability and a specific learning disability is a disability and two are they going to benefit from specialized instruction do they have an impairment in their ability either academically or functionally then that hearing officer can issue an order saying this child needs a specialized reading program this child needs compensatory services and compensatory are makeup services and we can only go back two years but those makeup services for the school's failure to provide those services so we deal with many of those cases where we're able to get kids a lot of reading intervention before they're headed off to college so they're actually going to have a chance when we look even at the prison population there are some estimates that as as much as 48% of prison populations in the US are individuals with specific learning disabilities especially in reading and so being able to be a stop Gap and give students the skills they need before they get out becomes really important so there are so many clients that we do that with on a regular basis those are eligibility based cases other cases that we work on are for instance a Down syndrome child who is in second grade who wants to be included in the regular second grade classroom which would be the law it's the requirement of the School District to do that it's called inclusion that doesn't mean they can't have pullouts for specialized reading instruction specialized Behavior specialized social skills but it means that they need to be at recess they need to be in the specials which are art and music they need that regular time especially in elementary and middle school level with the regular peers um and so we get a lot of those cases as well often I get kids who are in Middle School to high school who have started to have behaviors and when we start to look at why they're having those behaviors we start to do IQ testing we look at their processing speed often we find those behaviors are related to disabilities you may have a child who appears normal they're never following directions uh they seem like they're ignoring you they start to seem oppositionally defiant we get them tested and their processing speed is down in the bottom first percentile and we'll often see as well they may have a listening comprehension disability you know when I was first get into this it was again that shock of all of these kids who are in the system some have families who were very involved but they don't know anything about these disabilities they just think they have a 12-year-old boy who just won't listen to them and that child is getting punished again and again and they're getting punished for things they're doing because they don't have the ability to do it otherwise and they haven't learned and so actually being able to put all of those things in place has been just incredible so it's a really rewarding field in that respect what's not rewarding in it is that the only enforcers of any of these laws are parents which most parents feel that there's someone from the state looking in making sure that the schools are providing specialized reading instruction to children who need it math instruction any of those things and that's not how it works the sole enforcer of whether your child has an appropriate program is the parent and that I think is why we see so few programs that really meet a child's needs because if one out of every 100,000 parents files an educational due process there are no damages in those cases there's nothing punitive as school is going to get charged with other than having to pay that parents attorneys fees you can see why the system has gotten so that parents are really some sometimes they're seeing the corners cut on their child's education this is so interesting because I can see how the school would follow a curriculum but when you look at someone who's dyslexic there are people who are so successful but it's figuring out how to hone in on that success and how to help them do the things that they are good at and that they can do so I can see how someone from outside would come in and help build up those areas yeah and what's amazing is you can see a child who gets the right intervention who has dyslexia most of the time they're already building up a whole bunch of coping skills their auditory processing has already skyrocketed right they're remembering things they're memorizing things you bring in a system like Linda moodbell Orton Gillingham and someone trained to work with that child I will see a child gain six or seven grade levels within a year because all of a sudden someone's working with them with the right multisensory techniques so that they're actually learning it and I think about the independence we give someone by ensuring that they have reading skills by ensuring even they have appropriate math skills we are giving people survival skills they're going to be less likely to ever end up dependent on the system they're going to be less likely to get involved in anything criminal that it's really something that we need to be doing on a much wider scale and it's so interesting when you think about how kids learn I have 8-year-old Twins and my daughter the other night said to me I really remember when you say it to me and I thought oh she might be primarily an auditory learner it's interesting to think about the different ways that kids learn and take in the information a lot of us can see this in our everyday life for instance if I'm met a party and lots of people are introducing themselves to me I can't remember all of their names interestingly if they have their name tags on I'll remember it so see you start to learn on how we all have these different styles of learning and how important it is to actually put that into practice in a classroom I am sure you saw so much coming out of Co what are your thoughts on Virtual learning I think virtual learning has some huge pluses there are kids who have had anxiety disorders sensory overload who all of a sudden for the first time they're now making progress there are families out there who wouldn't have had access to this type of public school education that once virtual education was put into place they thought I don't have to drive 45 minutes through my rural community to this school I can actually put my child there and they can do it online and so there are some tremendous benefits we've had from getting teachers able to use these systems I started off talking about children who are immuno compromised right whether they are getting chemotherapy or they have an immune system related um disorder having virtual learning moving ahead has now given those children more access in the past we were doing it very informally sometimes a teacher would drop things off they'd email the work now some schools actually have a c or they have virtual classrooms a child from home can interact directly with a teacher in that classroom because of some of what we've seen in Co which is really phenomenal and fantastic from my view the downside has been that many schools all over the US truly dropped the ball when it came to Virtual learning there are hundreds of thousands of children with disabilities who went without any services at all during covid or who couldn't access their computer and the schools haven't really offered a lot of compensatory the makeup learning they haven't gone to these families and said we're going to do some more inperson things this summer to make up for last and so I'm definitely seeing kids who missed out some of them up to almost a year of instruction who it's going to be hard to catch up that is one really frustrating thing is that we haven't done more to say here are all the good summer programs we're going to offer summer 2022 summer 2023 to make up for what we missed it is really great that the virtual learning could be brought to certain families as a mom of 8-year-old twins my son did not go to one day of inperson first grade and it was interesting I saw him struggle with trying to sit for a really long time and watch the iPad and he was asked in second grade he was asked to draw a picture of his favorite day of first grade he drew a picture of himself sitting at at his desk looking at his iPad it's so interesting to see effect but you are right now they call their friends on the iPad and there's this other element of socialization that is kind of nice and then all of the apps that they are able to do just increases their learning so much faster we always had that before but there's a lot more after Co we're becoming acclimated to them I am seeing so many reading program app reading software math software that teachers started using during Co that is an excellent supplemental now they've added now it's become part of the curriculum some of these changes are are fantastic snow days this past winter and many of the schools that had gone back they basically said we're doing Zoom classrooms so that they didn't have to add days at the end of the year it's so true and even though we're back to iners our kids have a a virtual Bingo night coming up and I wasn't going to sign up for it but they're very excited to do it virtually yes so there's that little balance of iners and continuing to do things on a virtual space yeah for years I would do these coffee groups I would just invite some of my existing clients out to have coffee um sometimes we would all go have lunch and I would basically educate parents on the law hoping that they would go out and help other parents and Co happened I stopped that initially and what I did was I just started offering my morning coffee on Saturdays with my clients and they said can I invite people and soon I was having copies with 40 50 people online and I realized our reach really is expanding because it doesn't we're not looking at things as we have to be there in person and again it comes back to providing information on a wider scale and even providing information I think to kids on wider scales I completely agree as a co-managing partner managing your teams how do you approach Team Management to get the best outcome for your clients when we talk about managing teams it's really something that you learn as you go it really is a growth experience so with my teams we meet every single Monday we go over what everybody's doing that week I'm a huge believer of a team approach to a parents case so I'll be working on a parents case with a paralal a parent advocate and another attorney so that we can make sure we're covering everything if that parent doesn't really need legal assistance but needs somebody to support them go over documents help them organize it's how can we be a support in that direction if it's we need to actually litigate this through the Department of Education how are we going to make sure if somebody is on vacation that there's someone else who knows their case if there's an emergency you know unfortunately there often are we have a child who will get expelled or who's brought a weapon to school or something like that and making a parent feel that there's going to be somebody at the other end of that phone even if you're gone on vacation I have come to really enjoy managing people for me the number one thing is you have to like the people you're working with and they have to believe in what they're doing and when we talked about earlier the investment I want to see schools and when I say schools that's the school corporation investing in their teachers I think as a leader you absolutely have to invest in everyone who works with you and they have to invest back in you and that creates a Synergy right when they believe that they're doing good things they believe they're appreciated and you are the same as true with you going back to them it creates a really phenomenal structure one of my pargal Pat Hoy she's been working with me for almost 20 years now Lori elinger I have known for probably a little bit over a decade now and she came to work with us after we started our firm about three years ago Steve has been with us for 15 years so everyone with us has been a part of our team for years if not decades and I think again I am I'm somebody who really believes that once someone if they believe in what they're doing they're going to stay with you and stick with you and part of that is being as authentic as you can possibly be I'm not a believer in fear is what motivates I'm a Believer in being a really authentic person and having my team on the same page as me and having that team and goodw working relationship only helps your clients oh absolutely because they can be intuitive to what you would do in a case so they may come to me and say hey you need to get out of production or I think this parent is going to have some stress over this why don't you just give her a call because I'm not going to be able to keep all of that in my mind I'm going to rely on them to do that for me and that's where having a great team makes such a huge difference I asked this question at the end of every episode because I believe it's so important to bring joy into our daily life magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one way that you make sure to find and live your joy oh I love this question I try and live my joy through a variety of ways that coffee I was talking about on Saturday mornings for me that is joyful I enjoy it you know I'm a mom of two girls they're both in college now so one way I live my joy is helping them experience the world I have a dog it's going on dog walks I do a lot of horseback riding I used to own a massive horse farm try and look at life as we only have so many minutes and so many days you know even on the hard days is how do we add entertainment how do we make ourselves and others around us smile because that's important that I think is what we're called to do in life is to spread happiness and we're not going to do that by being cynical angry frustrated hateful disrespectful and we all have those days but it's how can we become the peacemakers and how can we spread just a little bit of joy and a smile even when somebody's having a really difficult day that's so true you are becoming The Peacemaker through what you do and you mentioned a horse farm I'm sure having that combination of nature versus what you do on a daily basis really helps bring joy to your life oh for sure and that's the thing I think we all have to remember is balance right it is very easy and I think especially for parents of children with special needs they can find themselves in these situations where they are under constant stress and it's really taking a step back and saying how do I care for me I've got to at some point not burn myself out because then just really not good for anyone and so we certainly try and help them in that way by providing resource groups and then sending them to a therapist if they need it which thankfully a lot of therapists are doing Zoom now so they can do that from home even if they have a child there especially for the parents I see finding that happiness Finding that Joy realizing that we are all called to something in this life and still taking Joy from it becomes really important absolutely thank you so much for joining us today Katherine thank you you have built an incredible business and you are doing such an amazing job serving your clients and the world please tell our listeners how and where they can find you yes on Facebook Katherine Michael education attorney our Law Firm website is cmk lawfirm.com my little coffee Group website coffeei catherine.com and Katherine is c a h I and we have seminars free resources trainings if you are new to Sheil it we'd love for you to join us we offer Community memberships masterminds Innovative virtual events and meaningful connections to entrepreneurs and corporate leaders please also check out our she built it shop curated products from women-owned businesses who put their heart and soul into their beautiful and Innovative products we offer Sheil tip business Consulting and the Sheil tip blog thank you to everyone around the world who joined today thank you to my editor Rich stalino please download And subscribe wherever you get your podcast and until next time together let's let nothing stop us from experiencing the life that We crave