Category: Media release

RALEIGH · Sept. 26, 2017 – Legal Aid of North Carolina will join the Wake County Bar Association to honor local attorneys for their public service at the first-ever joint Pro Bono Appreciation Event on Wednesday in Raleigh. The event will honor Wake County lawyers who provided pro bono legal services over the past 12 months or performed other forms of public service as government attorneys. The event will be held from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at Sitti restaurant, 137 S. Wilmington St.

“As lawyers, service is our true calling,” said Ashleigh Parker Dunston, an assistant attorney general in the N.C. Department of Justice, who chairs the bar association’s Public Service Committee. “In Wake County, we are lucky to have so many attorneys who are dedicated to answering that call so generously. We’re excited to thank them for their service, and hope to inspire more to follow their lead. We want to make this an annual event.”

Stephanie D’Atri, an attorney with Hatch, Little & Bunn, L.L.P., in Raleigh, is the vice-chair of the bar association’s Public Service Committee and a former Legal Aid lawyer. “Performing pro bono legal services and public interest work for underprivileged members of our community is our social obligation, our professional responsibility, and, simply, the right thing to do,” D’Atri said. “Intrinsic value may alone guide a lawyer’s desire to perform this critical work, but we hope that taking a moment to recognize and honor lawyers who remain committed to these ideals will add value to what they do and encourage others to follow.”

As one of the main beneficiaries of the generosity of Wake County lawyers, Legal Aid of North Carolina is privileged to join the bar to celebrate its members’ invaluable service. By participating in Legal Aid’s many pro bono programs, Wake County attorneys make a real difference in the lives of our clients.

The numbers speak for themselves. In 2016, 283 pro bono attorneys performed 2,377 hours of pro bono service for Legal Aid clients. The value of this service transcends dollars and cents, but the monetary value is impressive nonetheless: Those 2,377 hours are worth roughly $600,000 on private market, and they provided $1,100,000 in tangible, quantifiable monetary benefit to our clients. That value came in the form of everything from home equity saved from illegal foreclosure to Medicare benefits saved from wrongful termination.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of pro bono service to us,” said Victor Boone, managing attorney of Legal Aid’s Raleigh office. “The need for our help is so great, and we will never have all the resources necessary to meet that need. The generous contributions of time and talent from attorneys in Wake County help us serve thousands more clients in need than we would otherwise. Our pro bono volunteers are critical partners in our efforts to provide equal justice for all.”

Wake County lawyers supplement their service to Legal Aid clients by giving generously during the annual Wake Bar Awards, a fundraiser-slash-variety-show that lets lawyers cut loose while raising tens of thousands of dollars for our organization. Tickets are still available for this year’s event, “Rogue Justice,” which will be held Nov. 2 at the N.C. Museum of History.

Supporting Legal Aid is only one way that Wake County attorneys give back to their community. The bar association holds a variety of public service events throughout the year. Notable ones include:

Annual Day of Service. Every year, Wake County lawyers take over a nonprofit for a day to provide free legal help, childcare and lunch to those in need. This year’s event will take place on Oct. 7 at the Raleigh Rescue Mission, a shelter and provider of other services to Raleigh’s homeless population.
Lunch with a Lawyer. Launched 23 years ago by Raleigh attorney Paul Suhr, Lunch with a Lawyer is the Wake County Bar’s longest-running public service project. The project is a partnership with the City of Raleigh’s Summer Youth Employment project that connects lawyers with Wake County students who want to learn more about becoming an attorney.
Lawyers Read. The Lawyers Read program gives the gift of literacy to struggling elementary school students in Wake County schools. Lawyers visit a school once a week to read with first and second graders who would benefit from extra one-on-one time with a caring mentor.
Annual Clothing Drive. A partnership with Note in the Pocket, a Raleigh nonprofit that provides clothing to poor children in Wake County, this annual effort collects closets full of clothes for children in need, and puts lawyers to work sorting and delivering them for the organization.

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Legal Aid of North Carolina is a statewide, nonprofit law firm that provides free legal services in civil matters to low-income people in order to ensure equal access to justice and to remove legal barriers to economic opportunity. Learn more at LegalAidNC.org or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The Wake County Bar Association is a voluntary organization for legal professionals whose mission is to enhance members’ opportunities and well-being through professional, educational and social activities, as well as serve the public. Learn more at WakeCountyBar.org.

Media Contacts

Sean Driscoll, Director of Public Relations, Legal Aid of North Carolina, 919-856-2132, seand@legalaidnc.org
Ashleigh Parker Dunston, Public Service Committee Chair, Wake County Bar Association, 919-716-6438

Category: Media release

← Back to Education

RALEIGH · July 25, 2018 – Attorneys with Advocates for Children’s Services, a project of Legal Aid of North Carolina, yesterday filed the latest in a series of formal complaints with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction alleging that the Wake County Public School System still routinely violates the rights of its students who have mental health disabilities. The complaint identifies seven students whose rights have been grossly violated by the school system. However, these seven – by illustrating the system’s patterns and practices – represent hundreds of others treated the same way.

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires the school system to educate all students with disabilities – including students with mental health disabilities – in an appropriate manner and in the least restrictive environment.

The system routinely violates these legal requirements by:

Suspending students without holding required manifestation determination reviews: a meeting of the student’s special education team to determine if the student’s behavior is related to their disability, in which case the school is legally prohibited from suspending the student;
Failing to provide educational services to suspended students with disabilities beginning on the 11th cumulative day of suspension;
Failing to provide transportation to alternative placements across the county, leaving students with mental health disabilities stranded at home receiving no instruction at all; and
Relying on overly restrictive placements for students with mental health disabilities instead of using counseling, social work, or other supports in schools, and instead of using appropriate, research-based behavior assessments and interventions.

Other rights violations include holding Individualized Education Program team meetings without the student’s teachers present, failing to update the IEPs of students in discipline-related alternative placements, and failing to appropriately monitor the progress of students in alternative placements.

These violations have led to – and will continue to lead to – dire educational consequences for students with mental health disabilities, if not fixed on the systemic level. Consequences faced by students in the complaint include: grade repetition, academic failure, over 40 days missed to suspension, placement in restrictive alternative programs, being required to receive all instruction at home, and drop out.

As one complainant parent stated, “I don’t think they did my son properly. My child wasn’t getting the education he needed, fell behind when WCPSS didn’t provide transportation for weeks to an alternative program, and thought he had no choice but to drop out. For him, school was hard enough. Wake County Schools didn’t need to make it harder.”

The school system often responds to these violations by offering compensatory tutoring services. However, Cari Carson, a Skadden Fellow attorney with Advocates for Children’s Services, says that “valuable, compensatory services are often hard for a family to access. The tutoring may only occur during the parent’s work day, or may be offered only after a student has already failed a semester. Frequently, the school system doesn’t offer the compensatory tutoring until the student’s family involves a lawyer of their own. What happens to all of those families who don’t have a lawyer? Moreover, individual compensatory services do nothing to remedy the widespread violations affecting the many students with mental health disabilities who are being denied an appropriate education. This is a systemic problem that will only be solved with a systemic solution.”

This is Advocates for Children’s Services’ fourth complaint since 2009 alleging that the Wake County school system systemically violates the rights of students with mental health disabilities. The Department of Public Instruction has found the Wake County Public School System to be out of compliance with the law multiple times as a result of these complaints. However, the school system continues to deny appropriate educational services to many students with mental health disabilities.

“It’s time to turn the tide for students with mental health disabilities in Wake County schools,” Carson said.

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About

Legal Aid of North Carolina is a statewide, nonprofit law firm that provides free legal services in civil matters to low-income people in order to ensure equal access to justice and to remove legal barriers to economic opportunity. Legal Aid’s Advocates for Children’s Services project seeks to end North Carolina’s school-to-prison pipeline by defending the rights of low-income children in public schools.

Media Contacts

Sean Driscoll, Director of Public Relations, 919-856-2132, seand@legalaidnc.org

Category: Media release

← Back to Disaster Relief

WILSON · July 18, 2019—Thanks to Katashia Cooper, an attorney in Wilson with our Disaster Relief Project, scores of Hurricane Florence survivors will receive valuable relocation assistance packages to help them find new homes.

What ended up as a big win benefiting scores of tenants started as a small case involving one renter with a humble request: Can you help me get my security deposit back?

This tenant—Katashia’s client—is an elderly woman who, before Florence hit, was living in Cypress Village apartments, a public housing complex in Columbus County. Her daughter, who doubles as an in-home aide, lives with her.

Cypress Village was no match for Florence. “The entire complex was destroyed,” said Katashia. “Several units were completely flooded—mold, water damage—just unlivable conditions. They couldn’t return to their apartment.”

Immediately after the storm, FEMA put the tenants up in hotels as part of the agency’s Transitional Sheltering Assistance program. The program is supposed to provide short-term lodging assistance for survivors, but the Cypress Village tenants were stuck in their hotels for months.

The problem was that the owner of Cypress Village decided not to rebuild the complex. Since Florence left little other habitable low-income housing in the area, the former tenants had nowhere to go.

In March, nearly half a year after the storm hit, the former Cypress Village tenants were still in their hotels, but their FEMA assistance was running out. What to do?

Our client worked the phones, trying to get an explanation from the complex owner and property manager, but no one returned her calls. With nowhere else to turn, she came to us for help.

All she wanted was her security deposit back. She figured she was on her own when it came to finding new housing, and she just wanted as much money as possible to find a decent place.

“I coached her through writing a demand letter and sending it by certified mail to her property manager,” Katashia said. Thanks to Katashia’s guidance, the letter worked, and our client got her security deposit back.

Katashia wasn’t finished. “This was public housing. How can the owner just not rebuild?” Katashia said. Cypress Village was privately owned, but the owner participated in the Section 8 voucher program run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The program provides real benefits to landlords—guaranteed monthly rent payments courtesy of the federal government—but there are strings attached.

“I didn’t think that a Section 8 landlord could just choose not to rebuild,” said Katashia, so she contacted HUD. After some administrative back-and-forth, Katashia got the good news: HUD was putting together a relocation assistance team to help the tenants find new homes.

On May 29, the HUD team met with about 20 tenants at the office of the Columbus County Housing Authority and unveiled the details of the tenants’ relocations packages: housing vouchers the tenants could use for reduced rent payments in any rental property on the private market, money to cover the security deposit payment at their new home, moving expenses ($1,050 for a one-bedroom), a $100 transportation allowance, $100 to cover application fees for their new homes, and a $100 allowance for miscellaneous expenses.

Katashia’s client, who relocated to South Carolina in May, is thrilled at the outcome, but Katashia—ever persistent—is not quite done advocating for her client. “My client has been paying for storage since September, and she has some other expenses. She has kept meticulous receipts. I’m still in touch with the HUD team.”

Category: Media release

Update, November 4, 2019: Learn more about Yolanda in this feature article in The Wilson Times.

RALEIGH | October 16, 2019—The North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys honored Legal Aid NC attorney Yolanda Taylor with the Gwyneth B. Davis Public Service Award at the association’s annual conference October 11 in Greensboro.

Yolanda is the managing attorney of our Wilson office, which provides free civil legal services to low-income and vulnerable residents of Edgecombe, Greene, Lenoir, Nash, Wayne and Wilson counties.

She is also one of our firm’s leading community economic development attorneys, a role that earned her a 2019 Leaders in the Law Award from North Carolina Lawyers Weekly. Learn more about Yolanda’s efforts to fight gentrification and racial segregation in Rocky Mount.

Melissa Walker, Assistant Attorney General in the N.C. Department of Justice and a past president of the North Carolina Association of Women attorneys, nominated Yolanda for the award.

“Yolanda embodies the spirit of this award in all that she does,” Walker wrote in her nomination. “Yolanda works tirelessly on a daily basis to improve the lives and rights of women and to promote the participation of women in the legal profession. Her daily work as a community lawyer and advocate focusing on community economic development law is perfectly aligned with the resolutions of the NCAWA and directly impacts those NCAWA strives to support.”

Yolanda joined our firm in 2007 as a staff attorney in our Wilson office. In 2010, she moved to our Raleigh office, where she served as a staff attorney until 2014, when she became the head of our Wilson office. Before joining Legal Aid NC, she spent five years in private practice, first as a Senior Litigation Specialist in the Raleigh office of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, LLP, (now Womble Bond Dickinson), and then in her own law office. During her time in private practice, she began handling domestic violence cases on a contract basis for our Fayetteville and Wilson offices. Her enjoyment of the experience inspired her to join our firm as a full-time attorney.

Yolanda serves on the boards of the Rolesville Charter Academy, the Wilson Arts Council, and Raleigh’s African American Cultural Festival. She is a former board member of the North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys, serving as the chair of its Community Outreach Committee for five years.

Yolanda earned her Juris Doctor from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School at Western Michigan University in 2002. She received her bachelor’s in political science from North Carolina State University in 1995.

Ashley Campbell, an attorney with Ragsdale Liggett in Raleigh and a member of our board of directors, also received a Davis Award at Friday’s event.

The Gwyneth B. Davis Public Service Award honors women attorneys who promote the participation of women attorneys in the legal profession and the rights of women under law. Gwyneth B. Davis was a former president and board member of the North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys, the founder of the Forsyth County Women Attorneys Association, and a former attorney at Legal Services of Northwest North Carolina, the predecessor to our Winston-Salem office.

Other current Legal Aid NC attorneys who have received Davis Awards are Suzanne Chester (2015), the managing attorney of The Child’s Advocate, and Robin Ames (2005), an attorney in our Ahoskie office.

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About

Media Contact

Sean Driscoll, Director of Public Relations, 919-856-2132, seand@legalaidnc.org