The Settlement Class

Twenty-eight years of federal service. Twelve years on the Civil Rights Division Disability Rights Section corridor. One Joint Complaint from fourteen Atlanta families. Forty-seven schools, four thousand seven hundred students with disabilities, six and a half years from assignment to discharge. Imara Halberstam-Vandermeer carries the Halsen County School District pattern or practice matter all the way to a clean eighty-seven page consent decree.

Imara Halberstam-Vandermeer is a Senior Trial Attorney in the DOJ Civil Rights Division Disability Rights Section, and the kind of federal lawyer who has been refining the pattern or practice analytical framework for nearly two decades. She has tried institutional matters under three administrations. She has never carried a school district pattern or practice matter the full distance, from assignment through six and a half years of monitoring to discharge without retained jurisdiction. The Section Chief wants her to do it now.

The matter is United States versus Halsen County School District. A forty-seven school suburban Atlanta district serving approximately forty-seven thousand students. Approximately four thousand seven hundred students with IEPs or Section 504 Plans. A Joint Complaint filed by fourteen families through the Atlanta office of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, an institutional advocate of record with twenty-two years on the COPAA letterhead.

The defense is King and Spalding LLP Atlanta. The court is the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division. The judge is the Honorable Adelheid Vandermeer-Halsen. The investigation runs four months. The complaint files in February of Year Two. The eighty-seven page consent decree enters in May of Year Two after a three day fairness hearing. The cure metrics converge across twenty quarters. The Order of Discharge enters in May of Year Five.

The Settlement Class is a federal procedural about institutional record keeping, the unglamorous work of disability rights enforcement, the way three cure metrics move across twenty quarters, and what it costs and what it returns when a senior career federal lawyer carries a school district pattern or practice matter to a clean discharge. Justice Files Book 7. Standalone readable.