Stephanie Johnson

Stephanie Johnson became passionate about advocating for children back in 1995 when she tried her very first case as an attorney for a child client, and she has never looked back. After going to law school at the University of Florida out of a desire to help people experiencing homelessness, she began an impressive 25-year-long career as a public interest attorney for Legal Services of North Florida (LSNF), where she is now a managing attorney while living in Tallahassee, Florida. She knew and relished the fact that a career at LSNF meant being an advocate for clients in all kinds of cases and developing expertise on a myriad of legal issues. But she didn’t know that her very first case, fighting an unjust school expulsion, would lead to a career-long journey of advocacy for the most vulnerable youth in Florida.

That case opened Stephanie’s eyes to the multiple legal challenges facing children in Florida. She helped lead LSNF’s work leveraging funding to expand their representation of child clients, including opening a robust practice representing children in Florida’s foster care system. There, her belief that generalists are the best and most effective lawyers proved true. She has seen first-hand how her and her colleagues’ expertise in Medicaid, special education, child welfare, juvenile justice, and housing law, just to name a few, has meant a world of difference for the children she represents.  

This openness to holistic work from the start served Stephanie particularly well as she saw how her LGBTQ+ clients faced discrimination at every turn in the very systems that were supposed to be helping them. Stephanie led efforts locally to provide training to folks working in the system, including other children’s attorneys, and helped push for sexual orientation- and gender identity-inclusive nondiscrimination protections in Florida’s group home rules. Seeing the system move from ignorance, silence, and no legal protections, practice guidance, or training to more visibility and explicit rights has been inspiring to her. Still, despite this progress, Stephanie sees her clients’ not having their legal rights realized.

The experiences of a current client who is a transgender girl show how far the system still needs to go to affirm and support LGBTQ+ youth. Stephanie has been in court multiple times this year fighting for her client’s right to express her identity through clothes and grooming, to attend school with other girls at the residential treatment facility where she is placed, and to access necessary medical care. Her fight has included three separate court hearings just so the young woman can have a therapist with experience working with trans youth. This fight for something so basic has been part of a larger battle for respect and dignity. The treatment facility considered attending school with other girls only as a “reward” for good behavior. Stephanie called out that discrimination in court and argued that such discrimination violated Title IX’s prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex in educational settings.

These are all just the struggles of one client under the current system, and Stephanie is worried about the recent changes in Florida’s law and their impacts on all LGBTQ+ people. She is already beginning to see the effects for her clients and youth in area schools. In addition to combatting against harm at the direct representation level, Stephanie provides monthly Know Your Rights clinics so children, families, and teachers have accurate information about new Florida laws and policies.

Stephanie says these current attacks and ongoing challenges have been dispiriting and the climate in Florida is “very bad right now.” Her trans client has inspired her to keep up the fight, and Stephanie has been so impressed by her client’s ability to articulate why affirmation of her identity in all aspects is so important. Seeing her client’s tenacity, ability to use her voice, and general “I won’t stand for this” attitude has made Stephanie want to fight even harder for her. Her client’s presence in court has also made a huge difference, and she has impressed the judge, who now sees her as a real person. At the conclusion of a recent hearing, he came down off the bench to hug her client. Stephanie is also amazed by this generation of youth being so open about their identity and accepting of their peers, in direct contrast to the government’s attempt to silence them. Stephanie also stays inspired in her work through conversations with her own son. She knows she would want him to have a voice, to be respected as an individual, to express his opinion, and to have resources and options for his future.

Stephanie is a firm believer in a child’s right to counsel, and she sees how her client and so many others would have been pushed into the juvenile justice system or out of the system into homelessness had they not had a lawyer fighting for them and their express wishes. If she could make one change in the system, she would ensure every child who needed it had a competent, skilled lawyer helping them solve their problems with empathy. And she hopes that future children’s attorneys will see, and help the world see, that representing children is human rights and civil rights work and work of the utmost importance. 

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