Juvenile Law Clinic Takes Team Approach To Helping Kids In Trouble

January 29, 1999

GAINESVILLE — Children in danger of falling through the cracks in Florida’s juvenile justice system now have a safety net in a unique advocacy program called Gator Teamchild at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Senior UF law students, under the supervision of licensed attorneys, collaborate with social workers to represent children in juvenile delinquency court on matters such as school expulsion and suspension, special education, public benefits and dependency.

Circuit Judge Martha Ann Lott has begun referring problematic cases to the clinic. This week, one of the cases in her 10-hour day of hearings was a teenage boy who has endured myriad problems in his short life, including felony delinquency charges when he ran away from his foster home in a desperate attempt to find his crack-addicted mother, whom he hadn’t seen in two years. Lott calls the boy, now 17, “a prime and terrible example of how a kid can get lost in the system.”

“Everything that could happen to make that kid’s life a nightmare has happened,” Lott said. “Because of how convoluted the cases were and because they’ve been going on for so long, it really took an independent lawyer to come up with some creative approaches to untangle this mess.”

Enter Claudia Wright, clinical lecturer and director of Gator Teamchild, a recently launched juvenile law clinic at the UF College of Law. The clinic, one of seven at the college serving clients in north Central Florida, pairs UF law students with graduate students from the Florida State University School of Social Work as advocates for delinquent children.

“Without the law school’s program, that child could not have any opportunity to save himself,” Lott said.

UF law students enrolled in the clinic are certified by the Florida Supreme Court to practice law under the supervision of licensed attorneys. The clinic, which has an advisory board of judges, lawyers and child advocates, accepts referrals from the public defender, guardian ad litem, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice and other agencies.

“When a public defender gets a case in delinquency court and they identify that the child has a lot of other legal problems that need to be addressed, they can’t do it because by statute they’re limited to only representing the kids on their delinquency charges,” said Wright, who worked in juvenile law for 20 years before coming to UF last year. “With Gator Teamchild, now they can refer those children to us.”

For Craig Goodmark, who was enrolled in the clinic last semester, Gator Teamchild was an opportunity to gain practical experience in an area of law he intends to practice and help a group he feels has been “underrepresented in the eyes of the law.”

“We work with runaways and kids who don’t have a voice in the system,” said Goodmark, one of 16 students enrolled in the clinic last semester. “And to be an advocate for somebody who doesn’t have a voice is probably one of the most rewarding things you can do with your law degree.”

Karen Keroack, Gainesville coordinator for the FSU social work program, said the students complement each other well in their team effort to help the children. “Each person can take on their role as an advocate for the client,” she said. “The social work students can link people with resources in the community that the law students might not know about.”

All of the cases Lott has referred to Gator Teamchild have been “genuinely unique,” she said. And that’s what is so important about the program. The state is prepared to address the “common cases,” she said, through programs developed to address them. But those programs have to follow their own parameters and cannot fit the circumstances of every child.

What Gator Teamchild has done, she said, “is allow those cases that don’t fit any governmental program to not just fall by the wayside, for those children not to be left out in the cold.”