CLE strives to make the right of all students to a quality education a reality.

Board and Staff

Board of Directors

  • Junious Williams, Esq., Board President; Senior Advisor, Collective Impact Forum; Principal, Junious Williams Consulting (Oakland, CA)
  • Taimarie Adams, Managing Director of Government Relations, Service Year Alliance (Washington, DC)
  • Norma Cantú, Professor of Law, University of Texas at Austin Law School (Austin, TX)
  • Scott Cotenoff, Partner, La Piana Consulting (New York, NY)
  • Gabrielle Lamarre, Title I Director and Federal Liaison, Office of Student and School Supports, Nevada Department of Education (Las Vegas, NV)
  • Stephanie Shanen, parent Advocacy (Boston, MA)
  • Rajan Sonik, Research Scientist, University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA)
  • Geraldine Moore, Statewide Parent Advocacy Network of New Jersey (Newark, NJ)
  • Chan Rampersad, Jr., youth advocacy (Boston, MA)

 

Co-Directors:

Kathleen Boundy – Co-Director (Boston)

Kathleen Boundy, co-director of CLE since 1990, has worked as an attorney for CLE for more than 35 years. She has an extensive background in federal education policy, analysis and advocacy, and has participated in the reauthorization of both the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Title I/No Child Left Behind Act. She has testified on multiple occasions before the U.S. Senate, HELP Committee, Subcommittee on Disability Policy, and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on exclusion of students with disabilities, poor, and racial minority students from educational opportunities. She was a member of the Validation Panel of the Joint Committee for Standards for Educational Evaluation, Kalamazoo, MI, 2000-2002. For 5 years, she directed CLE’s participation through the PACER Center in US Dept. ED’s FAPE Project with its focus on including students with disabilities in education reform promoting high academic standards and achievement for all students. Ms. Boundy has provided hundreds of presentations and workshops to parents of students with disabilities and their advocates, and authored numerous articles and publications analyzing the rights of these students, including to participate fully in state accountability systems, standards, and assessments under Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. As counsel/co-counsel she has also represented students in challenging high-stakes testing, the denial of special education and related services, including transition services, for incarcerated and detained youth, the disproportionate identification of racial minorities by disability category and placement, disciplinary exclusions of students with disabilities, failure to provide a student with a significant learning disability an education consistent with state standards; and she has served as counsel for amici curiae, members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, in multiple cases raising issues critical to the rights of low-income students with disabilities. Boundy is a graduate of Manhattanville College; Boston College Graduate School of Education (MAT); and Northeastern University School of Law.

 

Paul Weckstein – Co-Director (D.C.)

Paul Weckstein is co-director of the Center for Law and Education and works in its Washington office. CLE, which was originally established at Harvard University in 1969 as the national support center on education issues for legal services programs, works to advance the right of all students and families, and particularly those in low-income communities, to high-quality education. He has played a role in shaping past and current reforms of Title I, the Perkins and School-to-Work Opportunities Acts, and other federal education programs in order to boost program quality, equity, and family engagement. He has developed national projects to assist communities, advocates and attorneys, and schools with implementation of both Title I/academic reform and high-school/school-to-career reform. He has trained, published, and advocated extensively on a wide variety of issues, including high-school reform, standards-based reform, career and technical education, student testing and assessment, civil rights, student tracking and classification, student and parent involvement, special education, and students rights and school discipline. He began his education career at the Massachusetts Department of Education, where he worked with high school students on state and local student involvement and student rights projects. He graduated from Haverford College and holds both education and law degrees from Harvard University. He has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and  at both the Washington College of Law and School of Education at American University. He has also served the American Bar Association’s Commission on Youth at Risk and was the primary author of the resolutions and reports on the right to quality education adopted by the ABA.

Staff Members

Sky Kochenour, Legal Director

Sky Kochenour, CLE’s Legal Director, has worked at CLE in varying capacities since 2014. Mr. Kochenour has extensive experience advocating for the protection and expansion of student rights across a variety of forums, including authoring and filing comments to proposed regulatory changes from administrative agencies on the state and federal level, drafting legislation, and representing individual clients before the Bureau of Special Education Appeals and United States Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. Mr. Kochenour has also conducted numerous trainings concerning a wide-range of education-related issues for advocates and education attorneys throughout the state, most recently in support of the CLE-coordinated Right to a High-Quality Education for All project which covered, among other topic areas, the major federal education laws (Title I, Perkins Act, IDEA) and civil rights statutes (Title VI, Title IX, Section 504/ADA, Equal Educational Opportunities Act). Mr. Kochenour oversaw the development and implementation of CLE’s Access to Justice through Lay Advocacy project in Boston beginning in 2018. The Lay Advocacy project provides CLE-trained and supported lay advocates to students and families facing short-term suspensions for non-drug, non-violent, non-criminal-related offenses so that those students may remain in school to learn. Mr. Kochenour is currently working alongside CLE Attorney Zaria Walker to expand the project to two additional gateway cities in Massachusetts. Mr. Kochenour has a particular interest in career and technical education and he, along with CLE co-director Paul Weckstein, has worked with the Vocational Education Justice Coalition for the past several years to challenge discriminatory admissions policies used by career vocational/technical education schools and programs throughout Massachusetts that disproportionately and unjustifiably exclude students of color, students from economically disadvantaged families, students with disabilities and English learners. Mr. Kochenour is a graduate of Union College ‘11 and Boston University School of Law ‘15.

Zaria Walker, Bart Gordon Fellow 

Zaria Walker joined CLE in 2022 as the Bart Gordon Fellow. Through her work as the Bart Gordon Fellow her focus is on exclusionary discipline. Her primary role is to expand CLE’s Lay Advocacy Project. The Lay Advocacy Project trains advocates to assist students in short-term discipline hearings. Zaria is responsible for conducting outreach, training, and prepping lay advocates to ensure that students have assistance in short term disciplinary hearings. Additionally, Zaria has participated in Know Your Rights trainings and talked to community members about exclusionary discipline. She is a recent graduate from the University of Tennessee College of Law. While at the University of Tennessee she was a part of the Black Law Student Association, served as a student member of American Inns of Court, and was the Symposium Editor for the Journal for Race, Gender, and Social Justice.