Soon after Dennis Kass started teaching history at a small Little Village high school four years ago, he put his law degree to use dispensing free legal advice to students and their families after school. That modest beginning has evolved into the Chicago Law and Education Foundation, a free clinic that operates monthly at eight other city high schools.
Kass, 35, estimates that he handled about 100 legal cases last year and said the total number of people the foundation has helped ? through the distribution of brochures and answering questions at open houses ? is in the thousands.
The foundation is based at Kass? own school, Infinity Math, Science and Technology High School, one of four high schools that are part of the Little Village Lawndale High School campus. The location is intentional. Kass said public schools are an ideal place to provide legal services to low-income families.
Jon Schmidt, the Chicago Public Schools service-learning manager, was not aware of the program before being contacted by a reporter, but he praised the concept.
?I think establishing a free clinic in a high school is a terrific idea, especially if it relates to what kids are learning in the classroom,? he said.
Kass described the foundation?s legal work as ?triage,? and used his fingers to list the issues that have come to his attention: ?My uncle got arrested, the landlord says we have to move, my mom?s boyfriend beat her up, domestic abuse, orders of protection, immigration, homelessness. Sometimes I have to say there?s nothing I can do,? he said. ?Sadly, anything I do is better than what they had.?
Many people he has worked with did not realize that their problems had legal remedies, Kass said. ?They associate legal problems with being arrested. Half of what we do is telling people what their rights are.?
Madilyn Soch, an art teacher at Little Village Lawndale, said five students from her homeroom have received counseling from Kass this school year. ?After these kids have seen Dennis, you can see their relief ? physically,? she said. ?The work he?s doing transforms lives.?
Cadmiel Avenda?o, a 2010 Little Village Lawndale graduate, agrees. Now a chemical engineering student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Avendano said his parents had saved enough to buy a house in 2006 but didn?t realize their mortgage had a variable interest rate. When they fell behind on their payments and the bank threatened foreclosure in 2010, Kass referred them to an agency that helped with the paperwork for a loan modification.
?My parents never would have known it was possible to do that,? he said. ?They got a lower interest rate and we were able to stay in our home. If it hadn?t been for the clinic, they would have lost their house and I wouldn?t be in college.?
The foundation runs on a shoestring. The 2011 operating budget was about $3,000, nearly all of it paid for by the Crossroads Fund, a Chicago foundation that provides small grants to local community organizations. The foundation does not receive any money from CPS, according to Kass and Infinity principal Patricia Brekke. Kass relies on four volunteer attorneys and law student Cora Moy, who maintains the bilingual website, to keep the foundation running.
Kass? short-term goal is to raise $50,000 to hire a lawyer to direct the organization, allowing him more time to teach, run the clinic at Little Village Lawndale, and serve as the faculty advisor for Model U.N. Kass also works with students on social policy research. Last year, working with two seniors, he presented a paper on discrimination in online rental housing at the American Sociological Association conference.
Kass, who grew up on the Northwest Side, said his interest in social justice stems from an injury to his pitching arm when he was 7 years old. ?I had to move to second base,? he said. ?I learned everything I could about the greatest second baseman of all time, Jackie Robinson.?
The story of the man who broke through baseball?s color barrier was more influential, Kass said, than the scenario playing out in his neighborhood, where teenagers armed with pipes would taunt and chase black children who attended the local elementary school.
Kass said he didn?t like high school and only applied to college because he was required to. That changed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Kass said he came to appreciate academic life, partly through the encouragement of a professor who took a special interest in working class students. He received a master?s degree in education at the University of Michigan and a law degree from DePaul, both of which he puts to use as a teacher and lawyer.
?The kids love Dennis as a teacher, even though he pushes them,? said Soch, the art teacher. ?He has the same expectations for all of them, and that earns their respect. He knows what it?s like to deal with gangs, what it?s like to live in an urban environment, so the kids connect to him on that level, too.?
Much of the clinic?s work is referrals. The foundation has partnerships with the DePaul Immigration/Asylum Clinic, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, and First Defense Legal Aid.
?There are organizations and lawyers willing to provide aid to the poor,? Kass said, ?but they don?t have access to each other. This is a way of bringing legal services to where poor people are ? in the schools.?
Source: http://www.chicagonewscoop.org/a-teachers-extra-credit-offer-free-legal-advice/
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