Associate Counsel, Achievement First Public Charter Schools

Tegan Delaine and I am counsel for Achievement First public charter schools, so really my responsibility is compliance, making sure that we're following, the laws around special education, around labor and employment, around contract negotiations and safety. all of those things sort of fall into my wheelhouse. my primary focus and the one that takes up most of my time honestly, is special education because there are a lot of protections, rightfully so for students with disabilities, you've got sort of layers of laws, you've got federal, you've got state, and then you have local regulations. In New York they're all three. In Connecticut it's local regulations, excuse me, state laws and federal law and then in Rhode Island it's all three again and so our responsibilities vary, just based on our relationships with our districts, and in Rhode Island we're our own school districts, so everything falls on us and so it's sort of an extra layer of responsibility but that's really my job when we get sued, (laughs) I represent, put that work in lawsuits. most of the time the lawsuits are wrongful termination lawsuits so that's where the labor employment piece comes in and yeah, I'm responsible for negotiating our contracts with outside vendors. It's really important for me to go through the suits and what the claims are and sort of outline, what we may, what right off the bat we can either admit or deny. So because you have to file an answer and sometimes the answer has counterclaims, sometimes it makes admissions and sometimes it has denial so it's really important to go through each paragraph and determine how we're going to answer or I don't know how we're going to answer, what information I need in order to file an answer because the timeline is relatively short , most usually about two weeks unless we ask for more time, which courts always give because when you get a 50-page lawsuit, it's hard to respond to that in two weeks, but that's usually the next step and it's basically each paragraph where I'm not sure of the answer is a mini-investigation. It's going to talk to, the teachers that might've been involved in the incident or the school leaders that might have information, so it's really sort of breaking down what the student is saying and determining what, if anything, I need to do to gather more information to file the answer.