AppalReD Legal Aid is a private non-profit law firm providing free legal assistance in civil matters to low-income and vulnerable persons in 37 counties in the Appalachian Mountains and rolling hills of eastern and south-central Kentucky, a region where more than 240,000 people live in poverty. AppalReD Legal Aid focuses on helping to ensure that clients have access to the basic necessities of life—food, housing, income, safety, and security. AppalReD Legal Aid provides legal assistance in a wide range of poverty law areas including public benefits, housing, consumer, family law, utilities, and expungement. AppalReD Legal Aid is primarily a direct service organization but also seeks to use what it learns through its casework to change the conditions that disadvantage Appalachian Kentucky.
AppalReD Legal Aid began in 1970 as part of a two-state program operated out of Charleston, WV with a grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). The OEO Legal Services Program enabled local communities to offer free legal assistance to the poor as part of the War on Poverty. Since 1974, AppalReD Legal Aid has received federal funding from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), but federal funding levels have fluctuated over the years. When funding was at its highest level, AppalReD Legal Aid had a network of 11 field offices with 48 attorneys and a total staff of over 100. Today, AppalReD Legal Aid operates 6 offices with 50 employees including 26 attorneys. AppalReD Legal Aid has diversified its funding and now receives state funding and grants such as those to assist domestic violence victims, senior citizens, and people facing foreclosure. AppalReD Legal Aid also operates a Low Income Taxpayer Clinic funded by the IRS.
Currently, AppalReD Legal Aid does not help as many families with education law cases in our region as we should. By "education law," we mean cases in which a student is being denied an adequate education (often due to special needs), cases involving school discipline, cases regarding student financial aid, and other cases relating to educational rights. AppalReD only handles a few education law cases per year (for example, 3 in 2019 and 4 in 2020). While those numbers are comparable to what the other three legal aid organizations in Kentucky cover, they are lower than what similar organizations in neighboring states like West Virginia and Ohio report, and lower than what we believe the actual need in our region is. A separate nonprofit law firm that specialized in education law cases, Children's Law Center, used to serve our region, but they recently decided to focus geographically in the area that they are based (in central and northern Kentucky) and, as a result, will not be providing services in our 37 counties.
We have internally discussed the need to expand our education law work and reached out to similar organizations in Kentucky and other states. We have preliminarily determined that we are not able to meaningfully meet the need without additional funding or at least a plan on how to build the capacity that is needed. The organizations that do education-law work successfully (for example, Legal Aid of West Virginia) have dedicated funding streams that allow them to hire non-attorney staff to provide hands-on assistance to families as they navigate the process of working with school systems to address the student needs. At this time, we have not identified funding for such staff and our existing staff do not have the time to do the outreach needed to help families understand and exercise their legal rights.
We want to do more to help these families because education has a unique power to break the cycle of generational poverty. Especially with the interruptions to education caused by the pandemic and historic flooding in Eastern Kentucky, many of the most disadvantaged families are facing major barriers to obtaining a quality education. Because few families in our region think of their children's educational problems as legal issues, they rarely call our intake line or otherwise reach out. We want to do more to help these families so that their children can fulfill their potential and help contribute to a better future for Appalachian Kentucky.
Deliverable(s): We would like a Fels student to prepare a funding plan that would help us identify potential sources of funding and provide ideas for how we could expand our education-law work over a 3- to 5-year period.
Project Timeline: There are no particularly special time considerations, but to the degree that we should seek funding through the Kentucky state budget, the legislature passes a budget during the early part of each even calendar year, so the next budget cycle would be 2024. Other than that, sooner is better because we want to meet existing needs as soon as we can.
