Jesse Hahnel's Skadden Fellowship project is to advance the educational rights of foster youth in group homes, work for which Jesse is particularly qualified.  At Harvard College, where he earned a BA in mathematics, he was active in organizations focusing on economic and educational fairness.  His commitment to educational justice stems from his years teaching, first at a middle school in inner-city Washington DC, then at L.D. Brandeis High School in New York City. After teaching, Jesse joined the KIPP Foundation as the Senior Analyst.  At KIPP, he worked directly with principals and teachers at 45 charter schools, each providing a high quality college-preparatory education to students in some of the nation’s neediest communities.

Jesse spent his first year of law school at Harvard, but after working with Professor William Koski at Stanford’s Youth and Education Law Project, Jesse transferred to Stanford to better facilitate their collaboration; together with Professor Koski, he is the co-author of The Past, Present, and Possible Futures of “Education Finance Reform” Litigation, published by the American Education Finance Association. 

At NCYL, Jesse will be working on behalf of foster youth who desperately need a quality education. but rarely get it.  They are in group homes because they have been abused, neglected, or abandoned by their parents. They have no extended family to take care of them, and no foster family to take them in.  High-quality education is essential to their life success.

Jesse intends to improve educational outcomes for group home youth through individual representation and local and statewide policy changes.  He will also train agencies and youth advocates about the laws impacting educational outcomes for group home youth; facilitate representation of youth by pro bono attorneys and local advocates; and pursue impact litigation and legislative advocacy as appropriate.

Zahra Hayat earned her undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in her native Pakistan.  As part of her course work in Human Rights Law, she undertook a study of Pakistan’s Juvenile Justice system, documenting the conditions of the juvenile ward at one of Pakistan’s largest prisons.  She found that all 273 juveniles imprisoned there belonged to economically disadvantaged families, and that only four of them had been convicted.  Many had been incarcerated longer than the sentences they would have received if they were convicted.  That experience, coupled with a broader interest in law as an academic discipline, motivated Zahra to apply to study Jurisprudence at Oxford, where she was a Rhodes scholar.  

While at Oxford, Zahra joined Oxford Pro Bono Publica, a collaborative faculty-student initiative drawing upon participants’ legal expertise to advise human rights groups worldwide.  She also spent a summer clerking at two leading London law firms and, as a result, received a number of offers of employment at British firms.  She chose instead to seek a career in public interest law, and after a year in Pakistan working on the country’s blasphemy laws, she attended Yale Law School because of its strong clinical program, receiving an LL.M degree.

Zahra’s project at NCYL focuses on serving foster children with unmet mental health needs.  Foster children in California have an enforceable right to mental health services under Medicaid, the cooperative federal-state program that funds medical assistance to low-income individuals.  However, California falls short of its health care obligations to foster children under the Medicaid Act.  

Zahra will focus particularly on the plight of children with serious mental illnesses who are placed in foster homes across county lines.  Twenty percent of California’s foster children are in foster care outside their “home” county (defined as the county in which they entered care).  The current system in California requires “home” counties to provide mental health services to foster children.  Consequently, the county in which the child actually resides will not provide those services.  To compound the problem, children who have been moved to another county are typically those with the most serious behavioral and emotional challenges, yet they experience the greatest obstacles in getting mental health care.

NCYL intends to address this problem with public information, public policy work, and litigation.  Zahra will play a key role, conducting essential research, and participating in all phases of the advocacy.