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Visionary Voices
Interview with Janet Stotland
September 14, 2012

STOTLAND CARD A

Chapter One: Early Career

23:55:03 -23:55:29:00
Lisa: And we’re recording. My name is Lisa Sonneborn, I’m interviewing Janet Stotland on September 14th, 2012 at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Also present is our videographer Abiodun Ogunleye.

And Janet do I have your permission to being our interview?

Janet: Indeed you do.

23:55:29:00-23:55:49:00

Lisa: Janet I wanted to start, um, by asking you a little bit about your background and early career. Um, firstly can you tell me your full name and your current or most recent title?

23:55:49:00-23:56:00:00

Janet: Um, well my name is Janet Stotland and my most recent title is as Executive Director of or Co-Director of the Education Law Center. Currently I’m on leave from the Education Law Center.

23:56:00:00-23:56:15:19

Lisa: And when and where were you born?

Janet: Uh, I was actually born in Florida in, in, uh, January of 1945. My father was in the military but I spent almost my entire life after that first six months in Philadelphia.

23:56:15:19-23:56:22:04

Lisa: Why did you become an attorney? What was it that attracted you to the legal field?

23:56:22:06- 23:57:30:00

Janet: Well, I had always been concerned with and active around social justice issues, in the civil rights movement, in the anti-war movement but particularly in the civil rights movement and these were the issues that moved me and that I wanted to spend my life working on. In the ‘60s, which is when we’re talking my being in college and then eventually in law school, it was clear that law and lawyers committed to social justice issues could make a big difference. They couldn’t make all the difference, most of the difference was made by people on the ground putting their lives on the line but to the extent that people could turn if they were jailed, if they were discriminated against to lawyers who were breaking new ground on civil rights laws. Um, then it was possible to make a difference in that regard. It was really a golden age of the law. So it seemed as if, if I credentialed as a lawyer I could be useful too.

Lisa: Janet, when you were in law school the country was in the midst of tremendous change and I’m wondered who were the figures locally and/or nationally that most influenced you?

23:58:23:15-23:59:14:25

Janet: Well it was in great turmoil, the civil rights movement, really from the mid ‘50s up through the time I graduated from law school in 1969 and then beyond that but clearly the leading figure was Dr. King, Dr. Martin Luther King, and I don’t think there was anyone in the country with any sense of justice who wasn’t moved by him and the organizations that he founded and many other organizations that were fighting for, um, an end to segregation and eventually an end to the war but I would say that Dr. King was certainly the person of the greatest influence. And here we are at Temple near the Cecil B. Moore Avenue and Cecil B. Moore was a very important figure here in Philadelphia, um, in his very valiant efforts to desegregate Girard College. So he was also an influence.

Lisa: You were, as you’ve been describing, very aware, as most Americans were, of the civil rights movement. Um, were you aware in this early phase of your career or while you were in law school about the growing disability rights movement?

23:59:29:21- 00:00:33:07

Janet: Actually my time in law school, which was 1966 to ’69, was a little bit before the, sort of the disability rights movement really got underway, that wasn’t until a little bit later. But I would say that my involvement with the disabilities rights movement actually began from the time that I started at the Education Law Center, which was actually my second, the second job. I’ve had two jobs in my life, one with the Community Legal Services doing poverty law here in Philadelphia and then subsequently in 1976 when I came to the Education Law Center, the center was already active at the beginning, here in Pennsylvania, of the struggle to get children with intellectual disabilities and other disabilities into the public schools and get them the kind of programs they needed. So with my arrival at the Education Law Center I became more familiar with and then engaged in the disability advocacy movement.

Lisa: Okay. Janet, we’ll talk about your work with the Law Center probably for most of this interview, um, but I wanted to (step) back for just a minute and talk about Community Legal Services. You were there for seven years, I believe. Um, Community Legal Services was based in West Philly where you lived and I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about the type of work you did there and what it was like to live in the community you were serving.

00:00:55:09- 00:06:05:04

Janet: Well when I graduated from Penn Law School I received a fellowship which allowed me to work in any legal services program that wanted me. Since I was living in West Philadelphia, and still live in West Philadelphia, I wanted to work here in Philadelphia and I had a high priority, if at all possible, in working in the community in which I was living so that I was actually representing my neighbors and helping improve my neighbors lives and the community in which we lived. So I came as an extremely unskilled staff attorney into the West Philadelphia office and at this point Legal Services, which has been around now for a long time, was brand new. It was only two years old. So everybody was trying to figure out what this organization was and how it should function.

The West Philadelphia office, uh, neighborhood office, was the first of the neighborhood offices in Community Legal Services so it was, had been open maybe a year before. So it was a collective effort and work in progress but it was also very exciting because of its newness, because of the leadership it had which immediately insisted that I go out in my community to talk to groups, to work with individuals. And in the first years my work was, since it was a generalized civil law practice, which means that we handled any problems for low income, um, folks that were not criminal, that’s what civil means. And so we had everything, we had housing, we had divorce, we had, um, social security benefits, we had small estate problems, you name it, and of course, poor people had it like everybody else had it and they had us to go to. So this was very exciting. We were also right next to a very large State store so we had lots of visitors from the State store, um, but it was, it was, as I say, an adventure.

Uh, eventually I became involved in what we called urban renewal law and what that meant was we were right on the edge of the Penn campus and the Drexel campus, um, which, again, I still live in that neighborhood. Um, and one of the things that Penn had done, frankly, was tear down a lot of the local housing in order to expand in ways that were not so good and very bad for the low income communities whose houses were being taken. Um, Drexel was just starting to do the same thing at the point that I graduated from law school so one of my first big cases was against Drexel on behalf of my neighborhood and the groups in my neighborhood who were trying to persuade Drexel that there were better ways to expand its campus then to tear down the surrounding community. And eventually that case was settled to save a number of important buildings and streets in my neighborhood and I still think, when I ride past them as I do frequently, that, that my work and the work of many other people and many other individuals in that community saved that housing.

Um, one of the things that happened, that precipitated that litigation was that community groups and individuals sat on the bulldozers that were there to tear down the housing that Drexel was trying to clear in order to some extent to build buildings but in other respects to land bank land for future expansion, that happened many places in this country but that was happening in our neighborhood. So when they sat down on the bulldozers and the police were called to remove them that precipitated a whole series of legal maneuvers, which I then, and my colleagues at Community Legal Services and some of my friends from the Defendant Program were thrust in the middle of it. So that was my first big lawsuit and I’ve always said that our success was due to the fact that I knew nothing, that had I had any idea what the limitations of the law were and what I could really do or not do I wouldn’t have done half of the things that I and my colleagues did. But in our blissful ignorance we made arguments like well they can’t tear down these buildings because in order to do that they have to remove our folks and our folks can’t be removed without an injunction, which is an order to remove them, and that in the law injunctions come, are what are called equitable remedy, which there’s ancient, hundreds of years old doctrine that says you have to come to the court with what are called clean hands and our argument was that Drexel had been extremely naughty in all of its behavior to the community hence did not have clean hands and hence could not get an injunction. And it didn’t work altogether but it worked enough to save a considerable portion of the community.

Chapter Two: Education Law Center, Catherine D vs. Pittenger, Armstrong vs. Kline

Lisa: But you said you didn’t know anything but obviously somebody thought you knew something because the folks at the Education Law Center, um, I believe recruited you to work for them. And I wondered if you could tell me a little bit how, about how it was that you came to work at the Education Law Center and when it is that you started?

00:06:23:12-00:09:01:13

Janet: Well, I started in late 1976 and at that point I had arisen to be, if you want to call it risen, to be the Managing Attorney of the West Philadelphia office, which was in a time of vast expansion. So at that point I had approximately 45 staff members in my office, attorneys, paralegals, um, support staff and so it was a huge management job and I was, at that point, seven years out of law school and I had never had a trial, I had relatively little legal experience but I had all of this administrative and managerial responsibility because I was still the most, one of the most senior people in the program at this point. No one in their right mind would now put someone with my level experience in a job like that but it was what you did cause it was who, it was, they were the times. So I felt very strongly that, much as I loved my work and my colleagues, I needed a job in the social justice arena where I could be of use but where I could really grow as an attorney and do some of the legal work I had been trained to do as opposed to being sort of stuck in a management box primarily for the rest of my career.

So I was looking for work that seemed exciting and the job of the managing attorney for the Education Law Center, which was just opening in the Philadelphia area, I think it had been around for about 12 months, the principal office was in New Jersey was opening, there was an add and so I showed up to interview for it, still quite confused about whether I really wanted to leave but feeling that it was worth exploring and one of the curious stories is I went to that interview, then went back to my office to work 80 hours a week, forgot all about it and then I got a phone called from the Director who worked out of the New Jersey office saying I’ve been to the board, we’re prepared to offer you the job. I’d forgotten his name, I’d forgotten, I had heard nothing in this interval of time so I had basically forgotten about the whole thing. He said, so can you come? And so I had to, at that point, confront what I hadn’t actually emotionally confronted which is did I really want to leave, um, and was this my next job. And I was very fortunate, actually, that I made the decision to come cause it was a good choice and it has, it has been where I have been for the next 35 years of my career.

Lisa: Thank you. So Janet, when you joined the Education Law Center the education system for kids was already or for kids with disabilities in the process of reform, the Right to Education had passed, um, at least in Pennsylvania the right to education was fallowed a few years later by IDEA, um. Can you just tell us a little bit about the significance of those pieces of legislation and maybe what IDEA did that the Right to Education did not do?

00:09:35:01-00:12:01:06

Janet: Well, as you mentioned the extraordinarily important case of PARCvs. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on behalf of children with intellectual disabilities had been litigated and then eventually settled and the schools, the public schools of the Commonwealth, which had been closed in many respects to kids with individual, intellectual disabilities were open. A big deal!

One of the two cases in the country that were the foundation for the Federal Law which is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) which was passed in 1975 and went into effect in 1977. So in many ways the IDEA, then called the Education for the Handicapped Act, uh, codified and nationalized what PARC had accomplished here for Pennsylvania. But it’s interesting to note that PARC was on behalf of a class of children then called children with retardation, mental retardation, now called intellectual disabilities, but did not include in the class children with other kinds of disabilities who also needed special education services.

It was the Education Law Center in the very first year, even before I got there, that brought the case called Catherine D vs. Pittenger, which was then settled, in which expanded, um, the PARC remedy to all children with other disabilities who needed special ed. So my office was engaged in the struggle to get children with special needs into special education from the very get go. So when I arrived it was a very natural thing for me to pick up and to expand on that work. Um, the IDEA, as I say, was a new law. It was passed just before I got there but it went into effect just after I got to the Education Law Center so our first major case, my first major case at the Education Law Center, a case called Armstrong vs. Kline, was one of the first cases filed under the, under the IDEA, the Education for the Handicapped Act, um, and so they were very exciting times for lawyers in this area because we had all these new laws to work with and it was sort of on the shoulders of the attorneys at the Education Law Center and throughout the nation to make sure that the IDEA really fulfilled its promise for all kids with disabilities.

Lisa: Thank you. Then we can stop for one minute.

00:12:05:09140000-00:14:41:16

Lisa: Janet, you were just talking about the Catherine D. case, I wonder if there were any other foundational cases to the IDEA?

Janet: Well, here in Pennsylvania, again, um, because we needed to expand the PARC remedy to other, children with other kinds of disabilities there was an important case filed, not by me because it was before I got to the Education Law Center although my office was involved with it, and the Community Legal Services, on behalf of adolescent students with specific learning disabilities in the Philadelphia School District. And this, also, was a case filed on state law claims and with Constitutional claims because the IDEA didn’t yet exist so it couldn’t be under federal law. And Judge Newcomer, who ended up with a number of important early cases including Armstrong vs. Kline which I mentioned, was the presiding judge and he found that there were roughly three thousand children with specific learning disabilities in the Philadelphia School District of whom only about 13 hundred had been identified. There were programs for young kids with specific learning disabilities under grade five but for five, six and then for grade seven there were few if any programs to meet those children’s needs and the plaintiffs wanted to make sure that all of these children were identified, evaluated and given special services. Uh, the, it was admitted that were no programs for the older group and actually one of the complicating factors was that since PARC had resulted in court enforceable mandates a lot of the energy of the State in these early years was focusing on children with intellectual disabilities and the resources and attention were focused there. So the roll out of programs for children with other disabilities was sort of taking second place.