As Education Law Center marks our 50th anniversary, we are highlighting ELC milestones and successes over the decades.
This year – 2025 – marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Education Law Center serving students and families across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
The field of education law was less developed back then.
1975 was also the year that one of the nation’s most important education laws was passed.
A congressional investigation in 1972 had found that of 8 million children with special education needs nationwide, 3.9 million were being served, 2.5 million were receiving substandard education, and 1.75 million were not in school.
Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, passed by Congress and signed into law in 1975, mandated that all public schools in the United States provide “free and appropriate education” for all children, spurring major improvements in accessibility and education quality for children with disabilities. The landmark law was recast as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) when it was reauthorized and retitled in 1980.
At its opening in 1975, the Philadelphia office had a staff of just three but harbored the same big ambitions in education advocacy as its parent, the New Jersey-based Education Law Center, Inc., in Newark, N.J., founded two years earlier.
Legal services attorney Janet Stotland took the helm as managing attorney of the new office in 1976 and launched a telephone helpline as a means of maintaining direct contact with the public, while also pursuing litigation for systemic reforms.
“Our mission statement was to improve public schools in Pennsylvania and make them more equitable and more effective,” Stotland recalled.
“We had to build a new organization here in Philadelphia pretty much from scratch. … In those early years, we were really trying to find our footing and identify the range of strategies we would deploy.”
Two early cases that we brought —Frederick L. v. Thomas (1977) and Armstrong v. Kline (1979)—demonstrated the office’s expertise in special-education litigation, ensuring that the new federal law was implemented.
Our Armstrong case established the mandate for extended school-year programming when needed to ensure a free, appropriate public education, challenging the notion that a 180-day school year was always sufficient. The case set a national standard that impacted ensuing federal regulations.
Stotland said that in pursuing these cases, “we were instantly backed up by a vast array of community groups.” These early partnerships with a growing disability rights movement led to an approach that ELC has stuck with for 50 years: combining legal and advocacy strategies to bring about meaningful change.