Advocating for Equitable Childhood Education with Catherine Michael, Managing Partner at Connell Michael Kerr, LLP

About this episode:

Catherine Michael, licensed attorney specializing in education law, joins the She Built It Experience to discuss her experience advocating for children. She represents students and their families in a variety of education and personal injury matters. Catherine has been featured hundreds of times in both the national and local media. Her nearly two decade career in education has focused on ensuring that the needs of children in schools are met.

Topics Discussed:

• How Catherine’s experience in a hospital system inspired her to advocate for children’s educational needs

• How her law firm works with families to help them navigate their child’s rights

• Catherine’s thoughts on the importance of investing in your team and making them feel appreciated

• Why she believes practicing self care can help you better care for others

About Catherine:

Catherine M. Michael is an attorney practicing throughout the state of Indiana, Texas, and Michigan. She represents students and their families in a variety of education and personal injury matters including Special Education Due Process, Section 504 matters, expulsion, disciplinary issues, personal injury of children including injury, sexual abuse, molestation, and rape cases both in and out of school environments, private school issues and discipline as well as other civil rights and disability claims experienced by students.

Catherine has been featured hundreds of times in both the national and local media. She is a frequent guest on syndicated radio and television shows for her education law expertise. Her nearly two decade career in education has focused on ensuring that the needs of children in schools are met.

Read a raw, unedited transcript of this episode:

Thank you for joining us today, Catherine. 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 and 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.

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 anywhere from infancy up to age 18. And one of the biggest problems we were having was with school systems. For instance, a child would be immunocompromised 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 the school districts were going to go out of their way to help these families. I knew they had legal obligations 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, actually putting children in harm's way. I saw how difficult it was when we had a chronically ill child, even if the physician have written an order and that child had around me around the clock nursing care paid for by their insurance to even get that nurse in through the school doors. 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, 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 twenty nine 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 whatever stage they were at. Right. And you think about those kindergarten teachers, even who are coming into the classrooms in one of our biggest resources is those teachers, but they're having to work with a child who hasn't learned their ABCs and yet 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 can 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, teachers who realized the 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 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, you know, the fort anymore. And I think we're especially seeing that today with, teachers an unprecedented level now leaving the classroom because they don't have the support they need. They don't know how to provide it 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 Colonel Michael Kern, 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, and some of listeners probably know it very well. Others, it's the first time they're 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 goals, 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 that 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 us, they're depressed, they're anxious, they're having behavioral issues. The parents don't know what to do. In 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. We get those cases in, and 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 or make it up services, and we can only go back two years. But those make up 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 populations, there are some estimates that as much as 48 percent of prison populations in the U.S. are individuals with specific learning disabilities, especially in reading. And so being able to be a stopgap and give these 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. And those are eligibility based cases. 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 or 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 their regular peers. 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. They seem like they're ignoring you. They start to seem oppositional and defiant. We get them tested and they're processing. Speed is down in the bottom one first percentile and we'll often see as well. They may have a listening comprehension disability. And so that, you know, when I was first getting into this, it was again that shock of all of these kids who are in the system, somehow families who were very, very involved, but they don't know anything about these disabilities. They just think they have a 12 year old boy who just. Don't listen to him. And that child is getting punished again and 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 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 specialist 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 100000 parents files in a educational due process, there are no damages in those cases. There's nothing punitive a school's going to get, you know, get charged with other than having to pay that parent's attorney's fees. You can see where the system has gotten so that parents are really 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 interventions, 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 Bell, Morton Gillingham and someone trained to work with that child. I will see a child gains six or seven grade levels within a year [25.1s] because all of a sudden someone's working with them with the right, more multi-sensory techniques so that they're actually learning it. And I mean, 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. 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 eight year old twins and my daughter the other night said to me, 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.

Yes. And a lot of us can see this in our everyday lives. For instance, if I'm at 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 to see you start to learn how we all have 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 COVID. What are your thoughts on virtual learning?

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. The once virtual education was put into place, they thought, I don't have to drive forty five 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 have who are immunocompromised, right, whether they are getting chemotherapy or they have an immune system related disorder or having virtual learning. Moving ahead has now given those children more access. In the past, we were doing it very, very informally. Sometimes a teacher would drop things off, they'd email the work. Now some schools actually have a camera, they have virtual classrooms. A child from home can interact directly with a teacher in that classroom because of some. What we've seen in Covert, which is really phenomenal 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 make up learning. They haven't gone to these families and said, we're going to do some more in-person 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. And 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 2020 to summer 2020 three 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 eight year old twins that my son did not go to one day of in-person 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 his desk, looking at his iPad. It's so interesting to see the effects. But you are right. Now they call their friends on the iPad, and there's this other element of socialization in addition to in person that 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

Yeah, we're becoming acclimated to them. I am seeing so many reading program apps, reading software, math software that teachers started using during COVID. That is an excellent supplemental. Now they've added it, now it's become part of the curriculum. Some of these changes are fantastic. You see, you know, on snow days this past winter and many of the schools that have 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 in-person, our kids have a virtual bingo night coming up and I wasn't going to sign up for it, but they were very excited to do it virtually. Yes. so there's that balance of in-person and continuing to do things on a virtual space. For years, I would do these coffee groups. I would just invite some of my existing clients out to have coffee. 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 when COVID 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?

So 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 Monday. We go over what everybody's doing. That week, I am a huge believer of a team approach to a parents case. So I'll be working on a parent's case with a paralegal, 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, 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? And, 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 going 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 wanted to see schools. And when I say schools, that's a school corporation investing in their teachers.I think as aleader, 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, you know, the same is true with you going back to them. It creates a really phenomenal structure. One of my paralegals, Pat Howey, She's been working with me for almost 20 years now. Lori Olinger. 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 somebody, 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, and 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 good working relationship only help your clients.

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 and 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. They're both in college. So one way I lift my joy is helping them experience the world. I have a dog. It's 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. We only have so many minutes and so many days, how do we really even in the hard days, 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 is having a really difficult day?

That's so true and 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? Because I got to at some point not burn myself out because then I'm 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. But 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, Catherine.