As we close out 2023, we thank our partners and supporters who helped make our work and our accomplishments possible.

While we have lots to do in 2024 and beyond to truly achieve educational justice, let’s take this opportunity to remember and celebrate together 10 of the past year’s many victories, big and small, for the Education Law Center and the communities we serve.

• We won a historic Commonwealth Court decision declaring the state’s funding system unconstitutional, establishing that education is a fundamental right, and directing state officials to ensure that all children have access to a comprehensive, effective, contemporary public education. 

• We reached a settlement agreement with the Chester County Intermediate Unit in our class action lawsuit against Glen Mills Schools, establishing a $3 million fund that allows former students to obtain cash payments, compensatory education, or both, to address the educational deprivation they experienced. 

• Through our Black Girls Education Justice Initiative and our report, “We Need Supportive Spaces That Celebrate Us: Black Girls Speak Out About Public Schools,” we brought wide public awareness to the educational barriers and anti-Black racism that Black girls experience in public schools, and we highlighted student experts’ recommendations for overdue change.

• Through administrative complaints, we secured entitlement to COVID compensatory education services (CCS) for over 24,000 students with disabilities in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia who were deprived of their educational rights during COVID school closures.

• ELC and our advocacy partners challenged the criminalization of Black students for behaviors that are developmentally appropriate and persuaded Pittsburgh Public Schools to implement a temporary moratorium on summary citations, a moratorium that has since been extended.

• With our advocacy partners, we blocked a school voucher plan that would have provided state funding for scholarships to private and religious schools, funding schools that practice discrimination and are not required to follow key civil rights laws – while taking away resources sorely needed in the state’s currently underfunded public schools.

• We successfully advocated for the education rights of students who are English learners, including ensuring the enrollment of immigrant students who encountered language-based barriers when they tried to enroll in school and were first illegally turned away. 

• We worked with families across Pennsylvania to successfully re-enroll students experiencing homelessness who were wrongfully disenrolled from their district – students like “Myles,” who was disenrolled illegally from a school he had a right to attend after his family lost their housing. 

• As schools increasingly discipline students without any due process by forcing them into inferior virtual placements rather than allowing them to learn in person, we successfully challenged the disciplinary transfer of “Gerald,” a student with a disability in foster care wrongfully placed in a virtual program, enabling him to return to in-person school and graduate in June.