Medical-Legal Partnerships Help Kids Succeed
Children with mental health problems are often treated like troublemakers at school. Without the budgetary resources to train teachers and staff about mental illness, schools frequently punish or suspend children with mental health problems – never stopping to consider whether their problematic behaviors are symptoms of mental illness rather than simple acting out. Thankfully, more and more legal services providers are creating medical-legal partnerships dedicated to representing children with mental health problems who need assistance to obtain appropriate educational services.
Lucas Caldwell-McMillan, an attorney at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, manages one such medical-legal partnership, the St. Louis Children’s Health Advocacy Project. Caldwell-McMillan recounts the collaborative effort that was necessary to obtain the appropriate medical and educational services for two St. Louis kindergarten students in the current issue of Clearinghouse Review. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires school districts to follow a carefully delineated set of procedures when students exhibit symptoms of mental illness or their parents request special education evaluations. Caldwell-McMillan’s clients were repeatedly suspended because of behavioral problems. The school district refused to provide the students with special education evaluations even though their parents requested the evaluations and the students were receiving mental health services outside of their schools. Through the efforts of Caldwell-McMillan and his colleagues—both at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri and Grace Hill Murphy-O’Fallon Health Center, where the students were diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other mental health disorders—the school district agreed to conduct special education evaluations for both boys as well as intensive behavior management and tutoring services.
The St. Louis Children’s Health Advocacy Project is not alone in its approach. Legal Services of Greater Miami also participates in a Children’s Health Advocacy Project with South Miami Children’s Clinic. Kevin Probst, an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Miami Children’s Health Advocacy Project, is currently representing an honor roll student with a history of panic attacks and anxiety whose grades declined after she was bullied at school. The school did not protect the student from the bully; instead, the school removed the student from a magnet program due to her declining grades—causing the student’s mental health to deteriorate even further. After unsuccessfully representing the student before her school district, Probst is now filing a due process complaint for her.
The St. Louis Children’s Health Advocacy Project and the Miami Children’s Health Advocacy Project are both part of a network of medical-legal partnerships coordinated by the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership. The Partnership’s roots reach back to 1993 and the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children at Boston Medical Center, which worked to prevent low-income sick children from becoming sicker because of inadequate nutrition, utility shut-offs, and mold. Today, the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership provides support for medical-legal partnerships across the country. The story of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership’s founding emphasizes that children have always been an important part of the medical-legal partnership movement.
The July-August issue of Clearinghouse Review will feature Medical-Legal Partnership: Evolution or Revolution?, written by authors who are intimately familiar with medical-legal partnerships and the National Center for Medical Legal Partnership: Pamela Tames, Colleen Cotter, Suzette Melendez, Steve Scudder and Jeffrey Colvin. This comprehensive look at the past, present, and future of medical-legal partnerships confirms that they can provide cost-effective assistance for clients of any age.
Students who are parents, expectant parents, or survivors of domestic or sexual violence face unique challenges as they try to stay in school, stay safe while in school, and successfully complete their education. Failing to complete school can have life-long consequences, with high school dropouts reporting lower employment levels, lower lifetime earnings, and overall poorer health. Teen pregnancy and parenting and domestic and sexual violence are factors that contribute to the dropout and push-out crisis, but have thus far received insufficient attention from policymakers in Illinois. 
In the next several weeks kids throughout the state will head back to school. As summer vacation comes to a close, annual vaccinations and check-ups are often on the back-to-school to-do list of Illinois families. But for the estimated 148,000 uninsured children in Illinois, accessing these services can be a challenge. Fortunately, in Illinois this is a problem we can solve. In Illinois every uninsured child qualifies for Illinois’ public health insurance program: All Kids. For kids whose families cannot afford or do not have the choice of employer-sponsored coverage, All Kids is there to catch them so their families have one less thing to worry about during these difficult economic times.