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.

An amended federal civil rights complaint was filed on Aug. 27 against the Pennridge School District in Bucks County. Below is a press release.

(Content warning: The amended complaint linked here contains descriptions of racial epithets and racial and sexual violence, including violence targeting Black students and LGBTQ+ students.)

August 27, 2024 – Nine months after filing a federal civil rights complaint on behalf of parents and students in the Pennridge School District, families and legal advocates today filed an amended complaint alleging that this Bucks County school district continues to perpetuate a “hostile environment” for students of color and LGBTQ+ students.

The amended complaint was filed on behalf of the Bucks County NAACP, the PairUP Society, and affected families by the Education Law Center-PA and the Advocacy for Racial and Civil Justice Clinic of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

The amended complaint, filed with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education, lays out a pattern of ongoing racist bullying at Pennridge – including targeting Black students with racial slurs – and the district’s refusal to protect students from known and pervasive racial harassment. The complaint further describes anti-LGBTQ+ policies at Pennridge, including the removal of LGBTQ+ materials from libraries and the implementation of a new bathroom policy designed to limit the bathrooms transgender students can use. The intense harassment of LGBTQ+ students and students of color has led some students to transfer to online schooling or other districts to avoid the district’s hostile conditions, while others have suffered emotionally and psychologically, requiring intervention and care.

After years of efforts to bring problems in the schools to light, parents, students, and legal advocates drew wider attention to conditions in Pennridge through an initial federal civil rights complaint filed in November 2023. The complaint asked the school district to directly address race- and sex-based harassment to ensure that it did not recur and to adopt policies that affirmatively foster the inclusion of marginalized students.

 “Students across the area are preparing to go back-to-school, but marginalized students in Pennridge do not truly have equal access to education.” said Cara McClellan, Director of the Advocacy for Racial and Civil Justice Clinic. “Pennridge has a legal and moral obligation to address race- and sex-based harassment to ensure an inclusive environment for all students.”

In May of 2024, the Office of Civil Rights released guidance clarifying that a school district violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act if, based on the totality of the circumstances, it “creates, encourages, accepts, tolerates, exacerbates, or leaves unchecked,” an environment that “limits or denies a person’s ability to  participate in or benefit from a school’s education program or activity” based on race, color, or national origin. Title IX provides similar protections based on sex, and the duties of school districts were clarified and expanded by new Title IX regulations that became effective on August 1.   

“The district must be held accountable for creating and sustaining a hostile environment that is literally pushing Black and Brown and LBGTQ+ students out of school or undermining their ability to learn, depriving them of their legal right to education,” said Maura McInerney, legal director of Education Law Center.  

“No child should have to choose between their safety and their education,” said Adrienne King, a Pennridge parent and founder of the PairUP Society, a nonprofit that supports underrepresented students facing bullying in schools. “Pennridge has a duty to foster an inclusive learning environment to protect students of all identities so that they are not prevented from learning simply because of who they are.”