LACCM's new look

by Kristen Lombardi

For 15 years, Legal Assistance Corporation of Central Massachusetts (LACCM) was the legal-aid office Worcester's poor turned to for help. But, because of federal cutbacks and restrictions, a sister organization has moved on the Legal Services' scene, Massachusetts Justice Project (MJP), a federally-funded agency that offers advice, guidance, and phone referrals. LACCM continues to receive state and private grants for the more traditional legal work for which it has come to be known.

Take the work LACCM attorney Jean Murray did with school-discipline laws. In the wake of the Education Reform Act of 1993, Murray discovered a "disturbing trend" -- more minority students were being expelled under new guidelines that gave expulsion power to school principals -- not school committees.

In Worcester, the school department had expelled about 100 students from 1989-'93, averaging 25 a year. Once Ed Reform became law, however, the city's rate nearly doubled. The state Department of Education reported 55 students, mostly minorities, were kicked out of Worcester schools in 1993-'94 alone.

"Worcester wasn't worse than others, but it wasn't better either," says Murray, who represented students at expulsion hearings.

Murray found most hearings indicted students without giving them an opportunity to speak, or allowing witnesses to testify. For instance, she represented one Hispanic boy who walked past a skirmish and picked up a discarded knife from the scene. The boy returned home, giving the knife to an adult. But he was later expelled for carrying a weapon.

"There was not a lot of due process at the hearing," explains Murray. "It was like the cartoon situation, `You're guilty until I say you're not.'"

Murray then got involved in a legislative lobbying effort to amend Ed Reform. A task force has drafted amendments -- granting an expelled student the right to an appeal -- and they have been incorporated into a bill now moving through the state legislature, Murray says.

Through traditional legal work, Murray was able to change problems in the system. "Low-income people don't have a seat at the table. When you make laws without the perspective of the poor, you make laws that don't work, no matter how well-intentioned they are," she says. In this regard, Murray adds, the work of legal-aid lawyers is invaluable.

Since January, LACCM has faced staff and budget cutbacks after its federal money was directed to MJP. With a current $1.63 million budget, LACCM, which handles cases referred to it by MJP, now focuses on what may be considered more urgent cases involving the county's 73,000 poor, including divorces for battered women, child-custody disputes involving abused children, and elders who lose their benefits. Because of limited resources, LACCM has had to reject eviction cases, uncontested divorces, and family adoptions. Major legal work, like Murray's Ed Reform lobbying efforts, has also been pushed aside.

LACCM now stretches dollars and manpower by providing education, outreach, and client clinics -- programs the agency considers more effective in spending its smaller budget. Terry Lacava, a LACCM paralegal for eight years, directs programs that give overviews of imminent changes resulting from welfare reform, for instance. Right now, she says, sessions have been directed at area service providers, such as health care and neighborhood centers.

"Hopefully, educating providers will trigger a domino effect, so that providers will pass on information to clients," says Lacava, who spends 10 to 20 percent of her time on "community organizing." Instructing providers, she admits, is not the same as educating clients, but, she adds, "this is believed to be a more efficient way to do outreach."

Some LACCM insiders point to Lacava's advocacy as the agency's most successful accomplishment since the reorganization. After all, they say, LACCM lost money and staff, and that's had enough of an impact to prevent the organization from effectively addressing "systemic problems" either through class-action lawsuits or lobbying efforts -- which, of course, is the reason state legal-aid offices reorganized in the first place.

"The split has allowed us to focus on our original mission," says Ruth LeMay, a 20-year veteran. "But we haven't gotten our act together fully to do [systemic] work. We're still in the process of reorganizing, and I don't think we're in a position to take on a major case yet."

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