Advocates for the rights of people with disabilities have joined the Montana Quality Education Association in a suit to stop a school voucher bill in the state.
Montana is the latest to enact a plan allowing parents to pay private school tuition with public money. Senate Bill 393 is much more narrowly focused than Educational Savings Accounts in other states. In Montana, the money is limited to reimbursing services for special-education students and those with disabilities.
Rylee Sommers-Flanagan, executive director of Helena-based Upper 7 Law which is overseeing the suit, said Montana's version of Educational Savings Accounts requires special-ed students to renounce their right to a free, quality education under the state constitution and forgo federal assistance.
"In exchange for renouncing that, they can gain access to anywhere between $5,000 and $8,000 annually," Sommers-Flanagan explained. "Which, as we all know, is not enough money to educate a child for a year under any circumstances, let alone a student who may have special needs and may have particularity expensive special needs depending on the circumstances."
School voucher measures are growing across the nation, 29 states now having some form of them. The suit to block the Montana bill was filed in state court in Helena.
In addition to the critics' standard argument which holds funding Educational Savings Accounts with state education money comes at the expense of public K-12 classrooms, Sommers-Flanagan added the accounts will not make enough money available to adequately fund special-needs students anyway.
"It's a lose-lose situation," Sommers-Flanagan contended. "It's incredibly harmful. It appears just to be a gambit to try to privatize public money and to send it to vendors and to folks who have no accountability and no responsibility to genuinely meet the needs of kids who have disabilities in Montana."
Supporters have said they can do a better job educating their own kids than the state can because they understand the students' strengths and weaknesses.
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Congress is considering a bill which would for the first time create a nationalized school voucher program, redirecting billions in federal funding from public schools toward private schools.
Kentucky educators said it would hurt counties across the Commonwealth, where 90% of kids, around 650,000, attend a public school.
Last November, Kentuckians weighed in on a ballot measure, Amendment 2, which would have allowed the legislature to spend taxpayer money on private institutions.
Eddie Campbell, president of the Kentucky Education Association, said the measure was soundly defeated.
"It lost," Campbell recounted. "It was voted down in every single county, every single community across the Commonwealth."
The Educational Choice for Children Act would funnel $10 billion per year to states in tax credits for school vouchers. According to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, expanding vouchers will affect the state's poorest rural areas the hardest.
Campbell added many Kentucky school districts receive 20% to 30% of their money from federal sources, noting the legislation also proposes slashing programs relying on federal dollars.
"All of those cuts means that those dollars have to be either made up or programs or staffing will have to be adjusted to fill the gap from those cuts," Campbell pointed out.
He stressed communities need support providing meals, transportation and universal pre-K to students.
"Making sure that our tax dollars are going or staying invested in our public schools and our local public schools that serve those students every single day without, without question," Campbell urged.
Last week Gov. Andy Beshear signed an executive order creating the Team Kentucky pre-K for All Advisory Committee, made up of more than two dozen lawmakers, parents and community leaders from across the Commonwealth.
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By Marilyn Odendahl for The Indiana Citizen.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Indiana Citizen-Free Press Indiana-Public News Service Collaboration.
From the start of his career as an engineer and now as an environmental health and safety manager, Lindley Jarrett of Lafayette has become fascinated at the critical role the law plays in fostering sustainable industrial development, safeguarding human health and promoting environmental protection.
He pursued his interest by enrolling in what is now Purdue Global Law School and juggled a young family with a demanding career while grinding through his legal studies. However, when he successfully completed his coursework in 2013, his law degree gathered dust.
Because it is solely an online institute, Purdue Global Law School is not accredited by the American Bar Association, so Jarrett could not obtain a license to practice law in the Hoosier state since Indiana allowed only graduates of ABA-accredited law schools to sit for the state’s bar exam. That changed in 2024, when the Indiana Supreme Court amended the attorney admission rules to give non-ABA-accredited law school graduates the opportunity to take the test.
On May 20, Jarrett was able to blow the dust off his Juris Doctor degree and start making plans to practice law, when he and four other Purdue Global graduates raised their right hands and took the oath of Indiana attorneys. The five had made Indiana legal history by being the first Purdue Global graduates to receive a waiver and pass that bar exam administered in February.
After the admission ceremony, Jarrett was beaming.
“This is a dream finally come true,” Jarrett said. “I’ve worked very hard and just to celebrate this moment, to see it actually happen, I just can’t describe it. It’s a wonderful feeling.”
Purdue Global Law School traces its roots to 1998, when Concord University School of Law went live online. The completely virtual educational institution eventually merged with Kaplan University, and then, through another acquisition, became part of the Boilermaker family. In 2023, the name was changed from Concord Law School at Purdue University Global to Purdue Global Law School.
Dean Martin Pritikin, an expert in online education and champion of distance learning, has shepherded the online law school from its earliest days. He helped design the school so working adults could study for a J.D. while also managing a job and family responsibilities and he developed the curriculum to match that of any brick-and-mortar law school with classes in contracts, torts, civil procedure, and legal writing, along with the range of courses focused on criminal, constitutional, family and business law.
“It’s a very conscious effort to offer the same things that you can get at a traditional school with externship and extracurriculars and student organizations, because that is our mission,” Pritikin said. “Our mission is to prove that you can go online for a third of the cost and do it just as well, if not better, as in-person law schools.”
Getting access to the bar exam
Pritikin led the effort to get Indiana to open the law licensure test to Purdue Global law graduates. In 2022, the Indiana Supreme Court formed the Purdue University Global Concord Law School Working Group to examine Pritikin’s proposal to amend the admission rules and allow graduates of non-ABA accredited, Indiana-based law schools approved by another accrediting agency to sit for the state’s bar exam.
Purdue Global University is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission, according to the school’s website. Purdue Global Law School is accredited by the Committee of Bar Examiners of the State Bar of California.
The working group could not reach a consensus, instead submitting a final report that listed the pros and cons of such a rule change. In February 2024, about a year after the report was finished, the Supreme Court amended the Admission and Discipline Rule 13 to enable graduates of law schools not approved by the ABA to apply for a waiver to take the Indiana bar.
Purdue Global’s push for access to the bar exam stirred opposition within the legal community. The Indiana State Bar Association recommended against allowing the online law school’s graduates to sit for the test and initially opposed the rule change. In particular, the ISBA was concerned that the state could not ensure that individuals taking the law licensure exam had received a high-quality legal education if the door was opened to non-ABA-accredited law schools.
The 100% passage rate of Purdue Global Law School’s graduates on the February exam impacted more than Jarrett and his classmates. It raised the pass rate of the first-time bar exam takers by four percentage points from 59% to 63%.
“The Indiana Supreme Court, they stuck their necks out a little bit to change their rules and not everybody was happy about it,” Pritikin said. “Thankfully, this vindicated them that it was the right move. People will say, “Oh, well, it was only five.’ But it’s a difficult bar. It doesn’t matter. It’s a 100% passage rate.”
Joud Elias, a Purdue Global law graduate who also conquered the February bar, is not concerned that anyone will question his abilities as a lawyer because he studied at an online law school. He said the perfect passing rate of the Purdue Global five is a “testament to what we have done,” plus his personal bar score places him among the elite of all those across the country who took a bar exam in February.
“A lot of people fail that bar, basically, and not a lot of people are able to pass it on the first time,” Elias said. “I was able to not only pass it from the first time but also able to score at the top 6%, which is not something that everybody can do.”
Addressing the access-to-justice problem
Like Jarrett, Elias, an engineer at General Motors in Michigan, became interested in the law through his job. He saw he could parlay his engineering skills into building a practice as a patent attorney. Already he is using his legal knowledge working on government contracts for his employer and is preparing to take the federal patent bar exam.
“No law school is easy, working throughout the day, studying throughout the night,” Elias said. “Purdue allowed me to do it (study for a J.D.) because most of the classes are online. You don’t have to do in-person. … Plus, if you are not able to attend the class, you can still see the recorded video of it and still be able to interact and submit your assignments.”
That convenience was a key to Pritikin’s pitch to the Indiana Supreme Court. Hoosiers who do not live close to one of the state’s three ABA-accredited law schools – Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis and Notre Dame Law School in South Bend – can still study for a law degree without having to move or regularly drive exceptionally long distances.
Pritikin asserts Purdue Global law graduates could help address Indiana’s access-to-justice problem particularly in rural communities.
Indiana has been struggling with a lawyer shortage, causing many county prosecutor and public defender offices to strain to fill positions as well as forcing many private firms to scramble to recruit and retain attorneys. According to a 2020 study by the American Bar Association, Indiana has among the worst legal representation ratios with just 2.3 lawyers per 1,000 residents, compared to the national average of 4 attorneys per 1,000 people.
The Indiana Supreme Court has created the Commission on Indiana’s Legal Future to explore options for addressing the state’s attorney shortage and present recommendations to bolster the ranks of lawyers. Releasing an interim report in July 2024, the commission is scheduled to submit the final report, detailing its findings and suggestions, on July 1.
Pritikin noted 22% of Indiana’s population lives in a county that has been designated by the ABA as a “legal desert,” because so few lawyers are available to provide legal help or representation. Only 8% of the state’s population of attorneys lives in those counties, but, he said, Purdue Global has been growing its roster of Indiana students since the new licensure opportunity was created, enrolling 11 in August 2024, 20 in January of this year and 31 in May, so now 17% of its current students are living and studying in one of those “legal deserts.”
“Different states have tried a lot of different things to get more lawyers into rural and underserved areas,” Pritikin said. “The main reason why I’m the dean of an online law school is because I firmly believe that the best way to get more lawyers in underserved areas is to make it easier for people who already live in those areas to stay there while they go to law school, so they can stay there after they graduate and serve people there.”
Purdue Global Law School graduate Abigail Strehle, a nurse practitioner in Greenwood, let her two children miss a day of school, so they could attend the bar admission ceremony. Although she does not live in a remote community, she still chose to study for her law degree online, because she did not want to disrupt her life any more than necessary.
“I wasn’t going to sacrifice for years with them,” Strehle said of her family. “I still have bills to pay. I couldn’t quit my job. I needed to find a way that I could do both.”
Strehle finished her law degree in August 2023 and then, because California opened its bar exam to Purdue Global graduates a few years ago, she traveled to the West Coast, passed that exam and got a law license. When the opportunity came to sit for the Indiana bar exam, she successfully petitioned for a waiver and took that test in February.
Just as Jarrett and Elias are fusing their previous education and skills with their new law degrees, degrees, Strehle is combining her medical knowledge and legal training to develop a disability law practice. With the Indiana law license, she said, she will be able to more fully serve her clients by being able to help them craft a will or get a guardianship.
However, before she started building her legal career, Strehle took time to enjoy the admission ceremony with her family.
“I found out I passed the Indiana bar on, I think, a Wednesday. We got an email in the afternoon,” Strehle said. “So when I opened it, I was able to text and call some people, but the first person that I told in person was my son, who’s in seventh grade. He came home from school and I told him and he just threw his arms around me and (said), ‘I’m so proud of you.’”
Marilyn Odendahl wrote this article for The Indiana Citizen.
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