Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County ("NLSLA") proposes a presentation on supporting rural communities in developing self-advocacy skills to defend student rights in schools. The presentation will educate participants on an innovative workshop model and support them in applying the strategy in their practices and service areas. The Antelope Valley and its school districts are and historically have been racially segregated and home to multiple, national news-worthy incidents of prejudice and racial violence. Located in a desert region of North Los Angeles County, about 70 miles north of the city of Los Angeles, the Antelope Valley's public schools serve a racially and socioeconomically diverse student population, numbering more than 75,000. Its students have been forced for years to contend with Antelope Valley school districts' ableist, racist, and highly punitive discipline and law enforcement policies, causing overwhelming and lasting harm to Antelope Valley's most vulnerable youth. Until NLSLA's Education Rights Practice started taking cases in the region, there were no permanent or comprehensive education legal services in the area, leaving countless students and families with little to no recourse in addressing the pervasive race- and disability-based discrimination, abuse, and educational neglect by the school system and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department with which it contracts. Even with NLSLA's dedicated team of education attorneys working tirelessly to advocate on behalf of students, the region's vastness, remoteness, and population size makes it impossible for our team to provide desperately needed legal services to all students who need it. In order to increase our team's capacity to advocate for students, come alongside communities and families, and creatively adapt to the challenges that come with legal representation in rural areas, NLSLA has, for the past year, developed and implemented a curriculum of skills-based advocacy workshops to parents, students, and community members in the Antelope Valley. Through partnerships with California Rural Legal Assistance, Cancel the Contract-Antelope Valley, and the Dolores Huerta Foundation, we have translated these workshops into Spanish and expanded their delivery in-person and virtually in other rural school districts across California. NLSLA attorneys have developed workshops in advocacy areas where families are most often left in the dark or deliberately misled as to their rights. Topics include defending students in expulsions, appealing suspensions, representing students in IEP meetings, challenging deficient facilities and school materials, and submitting discrimination complaints. The model of these 75-minute workshops is simple, and we will replicate it in our presentation (see question on format of the presentation for more information): --20 minutes of direct instruction, provided by PowerPoint; --5 minutes for facilitators (attorneys or community advocates trained by NLSLA attorneys) to explain the small group skills-based activity; --20-30 minutes of practicing the skill whole group or in small groups; and --10-15 minutes for questions. Families who attend the workshops, offered once a month in English and Spanish, also receive copies of the legal instructional materials used in the workshop, know your rights pamphlets, and template and sample letters or documents aligned with the skill in question so that the advocacy strategy can be carried out by families whenever needed in the future. Families also get digital copies of all materials to access at any time. The workshops have reached hundreds of new families in the first year alone. NLSLA and its partners believe that these workshops have innovated the way in which our education practice serves rural areas, and they hope to continue to expand capacity to share information that will empower families in remote regions to advocate for students and hold school districts accountable for their legal violations. We believe this is a model that is replicable and can help practices across the country effectively reach new service areas. Topics to be addressed in this presentation include: --How legal services providers can effectively build capacity in rural communities; --How the unique needs of rural communities can shape and direct legal advocacy and education efforts; --How to engage in cross-collaborative community education; and --How to scaffold translating legal advocacy into community self-advocacy.

• Review workshop curricular materials NLSLA created to adapt and use in their own practices or to use as a model in developing workshops in other substantive legal areas.
• Think critically about how to creatively adapt legal service models to the needs of rural communities.
• Consider the role of legal services attorneys in building capacity in communities to self-advocate and develop sustainable accountability structures by involving clients in strategy and advocacy decisions.
• Be introduced to a framework that encourages participants to consider innovative community partnerships to enhance the impact of legal interventions.