Michele Scavongelli joined the EdLaw Project as an Equal Justice Works Fellow, sponsored by Bingham McCutchen, LLP in September 2012, and has continued as Senior Counsel until the present. Michele has successfully represented over two hundred families in the past thirteen years in both school discipline and special education matters, prevailing at Administrative Law hearings, in Superior and Federal Court, and in state complaints.  She has built a pro bono panel for The EdLaw Project and has trained hundreds of delinquency, child welfare, firm, and in-house counsel, as well as parent and community groups in special education advocacy and school discipline rights.  Through a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) she has created a statewide special education mentoring network to support youth-serving attorneys. She is also the Executive Director of the Youth Advocacy Foundation (YAF), a 501(c)(3) organization attached to the state public defender office whose mission is to shut down the school-to-prison pipeline by ensuring that all court-involved kids have access to expert education advocacy. She is an adjunct professor at the Lynch School of Graduate Education of Boston College where she teaches “Education Law & Public Policy.”

 

Michele graduated Northeastern University School of Law in 2012. During law school, Ms. Scavongelli was a recipient of a Rappaport Fellowship at the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate and a recipient of a Hennessey Fellowship at the Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee. She interned at the Lowell Juvenile Court as well as at the law firm of Kotin, Crabtree & Strong, LLP with a particular focus on special education law. Ms. Scavongelli also assisted victims of domestic violence at the Dorchester and Roxbury Municipal Courts and at Boston Medical Center and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. She has served as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) and as a Special Education Surrogate Parent. Prior to attending law school, she spent 29 years as an executive in the life insurance industry. She earned her S.B. in Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. She is a proud mother of seven and grandmother of eight!