COVID-19s Exacerbation of the Systemic Issues Facing Disabilities Advocacy

This is a clear and effective draft. You are trying to do three things in 1,000 words: (1) to summarize why, despite a clear and potentially effective statutory scheme for ensuring individualized and workable educational arrangements for disabled students, public education still routinely fails to achieve the goal of equal educational opportunity; (2) to describe how that failure has been and will be significantly aggravated by the larger failures throughout our systems of public education initiated by the COVID-19 epidemic; and (3) to speculate on how you can achieve your goal of practicing for the benefit of children whose legal entitlements to effective and equal public education are being denied, while also meeting the material needs that you and your family will expect your law license to procure. That's inevitably too much to achieve in a short essay, but you have come as close to it as possible, I believe. I don't see any way to improve it along those lines, so one approach is to declare it finished, and to move on to the second essay without more.

But what suffered in the careful balancing of space and attention was the third of your topics, which is actually the most important to the course of your legal education. You want to plan a practice around ADA educational equity issues that can positively affect the educations and thus the lives of students like those you taught, and can also be profitable enough to meet your material needs. You are well aware of the technical learning that you can do in law school to equip your license for that practice. The network you need to build to support that practice and make it profitable you can significantly begin constructing in the next two years, assuming that the epidemic is ending and that law school will resume performing the networking functions that have been pretty much down since March 2020. Because you understand the enormous effort, personal and monetary, that wealthy parents put into working the system on behalf of their own children, you know where the client base is that can help to make profitable a practice that must give a good deal of its work away, or invest heavily in long-term litigation that will not pay immediate returns to the lawyer investing her effort and time. So the one route to revision that might be valuable for you would be to produce a draft that takes the background presented here for granted, and that focuses specifically on firing up your imagination with respect to the possible architecture of your practice. You can't really plan that practice yet, although you are further along in that process than most people in the second term of law school, because you have come in with confident initial answers to some of the basic questions. Beginning to exercise your imagination in detail, is possible, and perhaps beneficial enough to justify a significant reworking of the essay, fine as it already is. That's for you to decide.