SJP conducts legal training sessions for defense attorneys, judges, and government agencies. Through our training program, our attorneys work to:

1) increase the number of court-professionals trained on special education in the juvenile and criminal contexts;

2) increase access to special education legal counsel for indigent defendants ages 18-22; and

3) empower students to advocate for themselves.

Click to schedule a legal training!

SJP sustains our work and life-changing outcomes through coalitions. This work involves high-impact litigation, policy advocacy, and coalition building. SJP is a leader in the Thrive Under 25 coalition advocating for reforms for people who came into contact with the system when they were under 25-years-old. For more about Thrive, click here.

Collaborating and publishing relevant materials and guides, including on a reentry toolkit and working to disseminate a pro bono attorney guide. 

• Students in the Care of the District of Columbia Working Group Recommendations: Office of former DC Councilmember David Grosso

• Blueprint for Change: Education Success for Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

• DC Public Defender Service: The DC Reentry Navigator

• Understanding the Population of Court-Involved Students with Disabilities in the District of Columbia Final Report (Click for Final Report Here)

• DC Superior Court, Family Court Education Bench Card (Click for Bench Card Here)

• Juvenile Law Center, Credit Overdue Report

As SJP continues to demonstrate our impact in the nation’s capital, we also have an eye towards national impact. Success in DC can serve as a catalyst for national reform. SJP is not looking to replicate its legal office. Rather, scale involves training and technical assistance on how to integrate special education law into the juvenile and criminal contexts. SJP’s solution to the problem is easily scalable because the model 1) operates under federal disability law, 2) requires only a small core team to provide training and technical assistance, and 3) is low-cost with little overhead.

Thanks to a grant from the Kenan Charitable Trust, SJP worked with partners in Kentucky to train on how to integrate special education law into the court context at both the individual and systemic levels. SJP’s attorneys worked with local legal practitioners, nonprofit organizations, and governmental agency staff to translate some of the lessons learned in DC. In addition to providing more information on how special education attorneys could be integrated into local legal aid or public defender programs, SJP’s attorneys worked with stakeholders to help launch a court education work group that would focus on education for court-involved students with disabilities.

If you are interested in receiving more information on trainings for court practitioners (either locally or in other jurisdictions), please click here to complete our contact form.

Building an empowerment toolkit for “know your education rights” trainings, which we eventually hope to have formerly-incarcerated students lead.  More on SJP’s toolkit is available here.