On-Demand Webinar: State Complaints & School Discipline

Description

Presented by Tim Sindelar & Michele Scavongelli

This session is about protecting students from school exclusions. YAF/The EdLaw Project mission is to shut down the school to prison pipeline through expert education advocacy. Housed within CPCS to support the state’s most vulnerable children, youth and young adults. Special Education Students have “extra” protections in suspensions.

Timothy A. Sindelar, Esq.:
Timothy A. Sindelar is a senior attorney at the EdLaw Project. He was a solo practitioner in Newton, with a practice focused on the representation of children and adults with disabilities, including special education and other litigation concerning the rights of children to essential services such as education and health care. 

Before entering private practice, Mr. Sindelar spent over 20 years in public interest law, including eight years as a senior staff attorney at the Disability Law Center in Boston, where he divided his time between work in the special education and health. Mr. Sindelar also worked in legal services programs in Massachusetts, Nebraska, and West Virginia, as both an attorney and program director. 

Mr. Sindelar has also taught in the law schools of Northeastern University, Boston College, West Virginia University, and the University of Nebraska. Mr. Sindelar has represented hundreds of families in matters before the Bureau of Special Education Appeals and the state and federal courts on special education issues. He has also worked with parents’ groups on legislative and regulatory issues pertaining to special education and health issues and served on a number of advisory groups for the Massachusetts Departments of Education and Mental Retardation and the Disabled Persons Protection Commission. 

Tim has presented testimony to committees of the United States Senate and the Massachusetts General Court on education and health matters. Mr. Sindelar is a frequent speaker at trainings and conferences on special education and children’s health. 

Michele G. Scavongelli, Esq. 
Michele Scavongelli joined the EdLaw Project as an Equal Justice Works Fellow, sponsored by Bingham McCutchen, LLP in September 2012, and has continued as Senior Counsel until the present. 

Michele has successfully represented over two hundred families in the past eleven years in both school discipline and special education matters, prevailing at Administrative Law hearings, in Superior Court and in state complaints. She has built a pro bono panel for The EdLaw Project and has trained hundreds of delinquency, child welfare, firm, and in-house counsel, as well as parent and community groups in special education advocacy and school discipline rights. 

She is also the Executive Director of the Youth Advocacy Foundation (YAF), a 501(c)(3) organization attached to the state public defender office whose mission is to shut down the school-to-prison pipeline by ensuring that all court-involved kids have access to expert education advocacy. She is an adjunct professor at the Lynch School of Graduate Education of Boston College where she teaches “Education Law & Public Policy.” 

Michele graduated Northeastern University School of Law in 2012. During law school, Ms. Scavongelli was a recipient of a Rappaport Fellowship at the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate and a recipient of a Hennessey Fellowship at the Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee. She interned at the Lowell Juvenile Court as well as at the law firm of Kotin, Crabtree & Strong, LLP with a particular focus on special education law. 

Ms. Scavongelli also assisted victims of domestic violence at the Dorchester and Roxbury Municipal Courts and at Boston Medical Center and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. She has served as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) and as a Special Education Surrogate Parent. 

Prior to attending law school she spent 29 years as an executive in the life insurance industry. She is on the board of Bottom Line, an organization that is dedicated to helping disadvantaged students get in to college, graduate from college, and go far in life. She earned her S.B. in Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979.