Sheff v. O'Neill Plaintiffs Honored by Connecticut Bar Association's Young Lawyers Section

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CBA Young Lawyers Section to Honor Sheff v. O’Neill Plaintiffs’ Counsel at Fifth Annual Diversity Award Dinner

NEW BRITAIN, CT (November 3, 2009)—The Connecticut Bar Association’s (CBA) Young Lawyers Section (YLS) will honor the plaintiffs’ counsel from the landmark case, Sheff v. O’Neill, at its Fifth Annual Diversity Award Dinner on Tuesday, November 10, 2009, at the Quinnipiack Club in New Haven.

The award will be given to Attorneys John Brittain, Matthew Colangelo, Wesley Horton, Dennis Parker, Martha Stone, Philip Tegeler and Holly Thomas in honor of their work on behalf of Sheff v. O’Neill.

Sheff v. O’Neill is a landmark civil rights lawsuit that seeks to prepare all children to live and prosper in an ever expanding, diversified and globally connected world. 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the year the case was filed. In June 2008, a settlement was reached wherein the State of Connecticut set forth plans to work towards racially integrating Hartford students regarding educational opportunities within five years. The plaintiffs in this case con¬tinue to advocate for the State of Connecticut to uphold the constitutional rights of children in Hartford schools.

Each year, the YLS honors a member of the legal community for their outstanding efforts on behalf of diversity. “YLS Diversity Directors Greg Daniels, Julia Lentini, and Tushar Shah’s assembly of the evening’s program is a fitting tribute to the courageous efforts of these attorneys, on the twentieth anniversary of the date on which they filed the initial lawsuit in the case,” YLS Chair Proloy K. Das explained.

Tickets for the Fifth Annual Diversity Award Dinner are $25 for CBA/YLS members, $40 for CBA members and $50 for non-members. For more information about the Fifth Annual Diversity Award Dinner and tickets to attend, please click here. Those interested in attending may also call the CBA Member Service Center at (860)223-4400.

About the Honorees:

Attorney John Brittain is a school desegregation specialist and one of the lawyers who filed the landmark Sheff v. O’Neill school desegregation case in 1989. Since March 2005, Attorney Brittain has served as the Chief Counsel and Senior Deputy Director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a 41-year-old civil rights legal organization in Washington, D.C.

Attorney Matthew Colangelo is the director of the Economic Justice Group for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund (LDF). In that capacity, Colangelo manages LDF's litigation in the areas of employment discrimination, housing discrimination, environmental racism and fair lending. Before joining LDF's staff as a Skadden Fellow in 2003, he served as a law clerk to then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Attorney Wesley Horton is one of the senior partners at Horton Shields and Knox PC located in Hartford, Connecticut. He has a diverse area of practice with special focus on appellate issues and representation of attorneys in professional disciplinary matters. He has been involved in hundreds of arguments and briefs as counsel over the past 32 years including two of the most notable education cases in Connecticut, Horton v. Meskill and Sheff v. O’Neill. Attorney Horton is currently the first counsel of record in Sheff v. O’Neill.

Since June 2006, Attorney Dennis Parker has served as the director of the American Civil Liberties Union Racial Justice Program, based in New York City. Prior to joining the ACLU, Parker was the Chief of the Civil Rights Bureau in the Office of New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer where he oversaw the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in housing, employment, voting, public accommodations and credit. He spent 14 years at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he supervised the litigation of scores of cases throughout the country in matters involving elementary and secondary education, affirmative action in higher education and equal educational opportunity. He has brought this same passion to his work on the Sheff v. O’Neill case.

Attorney Martha Stone is the founder and current executive director of the Center for Children's Advocacy in Connecticut. Prior to founding CCA in 1997, she served as Associate Director of Children's Rights, Inc., a national organization engaged in foster care litigation throughout the United States; and for 18 years previous to that, she was legal director of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union. Throughout her time in practice, she has worked on representing the interests of juveniles throughout our legal system from educational issues to issues in the juvenile justice population, including mental health services available to them. Attorney Stone was one of the first attorneys to work on the Sheff v. O’Neill case.

Attorney Philip Tegeler is the Executive Director of Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC), a civil rights policy organization based in Washington, DC. PRRAC’s mission is to promote research-based advocacy on structural inequality issues, with a specific focus on the causes and consequences of housing and school segregation. Before coming to PRRAC, Tegeler worked as an attorney with the Connecticut ACLU for almost 17 years, serving as Legal Director from 1997-2003. At the ACLU, he helped to prosecute the Sheff v. O’Neill educational equity case, several housing desegregation cases, and a variety of other institutional reform litigation. Prior to his work at the ACLU, Tegeler was on the clinical faculty at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

Attorney Holly Thomas is presently employed with the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, Inc., in New York City. She joined this group in September 2005 as a Liman Fellow. Her present areas of focus include juvenile life without parole sentencing, capital punishment and indigent defense. She has also worked extensively on the Legal Defense Fund’s Education Practice Group with a focus on school desegregation, voluntary integration and racial disparity issues in juvenile sentencing. Her role in Sheff v. O’Neill has been focused on enforcing the terms of the settlement agreement.

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