Fearless Children's Lawyer of the Month | June 2022
Amir Whitaker is a children’s rights and education lawyer because children need good lawyers. As he put it, “Children are our most vulnerable population. They legally can’t advocate for themselves many times.”
While movies like Lean on Me focused on a Hollywood version of school pushout, Amir experienced school pushout and discriminatory discipline patterns 12 miles away from the well-known East Side High at West Side High in New Jersey.
Amir’s parents were incarcerated when he was in 10th grade, and that same year Amir’s brother was pushed out of their high school. His grandmother, their main advocate given these changes, tried fighting to get his brother back in the school. At a time when the school should have been fighting for Amir’s brother, they fought against him. Despite all his grandmother’s advocacy, the school just kept saying no and they successfully pushed his brother out of school.
Amir had always been a student who needed challenging course work to keep him engaged. When that didn’t happen in his 11th grade year, his attendance started to wane. Also that year, he was arrested off-campus for something unrelated to school. But when the school found out, the school used the resulting attendance issue due to his arrest as a reason to remove him from their campus instead of building a safe and welcoming space for him to be successful. As an education advocate, he now understands the intersections of how school discipline issues and lack of challenging coursework impact Black students who are prematurely pushed to the side.
Amir attended an alternative program because the school made it clear that he was not going to be welcomed in his traditional school. However, Amir continued to advocate for himself and his courses. He finally had a counselor, Ms. Thompson, who was willing to look at his schedule. She realized that Amir was repeating coursework that he had completed one to two years earlier. Eventually Amir was able to successfully reenter the school system. Being his own best advocate led Amir to have the opportunity to be the education equity attorney that he is today.
However, Amir’s rationale for being an education equity attorney is also based on his understanding that his outcome was not a typical one. Amir continues to fight because he knows that advocacy can be the difference between graduating school and not.
Once Amir left high school, he continued his foundational learning regarding the education system and became an educator. He taught prior to law school and continues to teach even now. Once in law school, Amir interned with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on education cases. And after he graduated, he returned to SPLC and was responsible for bringing education cases in 20 different counties in Florida.
Amir worked on a case in Polk County, Florida, where the county gave students as little as 4–5 hours of education a week after incarcerating youth. The county would also pepper spray youth in those jails, including students with mental health disabilities. He helped to bring successful litigation in Polk County that helped students with disabilities receive better education and services in jails, which in turn helped youth overall.
Amir worked on education rights advocacy first at the SPLC Alabama and then at the University of California, Los Angeles with their Civil Rights Project where he was a researcher who crafted important reports regarding school discipline, school police, and the school-to-prison pipeline.
Currently Amir is a Senior Policy Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California where he focuses on litigation, policy advocacy, and legislative efforts in the education space.
Amir believes there has been an undervaluing of education as a civil rights issue, and that drives him to continue to do this work. He knows that schools can feel it’s easier to call a cop. Additionally, education advocacy can be a fight within legal environments where there is already competition for resources to help individuals. Across the board, he believes there needs to be more attention on children’s rights issues, but there must be a focus on keeping kids in school and creating a safe and welcome environment while the children are there. And for that, education rights attorneys need more resources to continue to do the work.
Amir also stresses the impact of being a Black education rights attorney. He explained that, like superheroes who have traumatic events in their backstories that push them to be successful, Black folks who are doing this work often have a history of trauma and yet they are often the ones expected to save the day. Instead, they should receive more resources and time to recover.
Amir believes there is a difference between being just a lawyer and being an advocate—advocates will fight regardless of the circumstance to be successful. And Amir has demonstrated this zeal his entire life.
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