{"id":2884,"date":"2022-10-19T09:24:25","date_gmt":"2022-10-19T13:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.montgomerymag.com\/?p=2884"},"modified":"2022-10-19T09:25:48","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T13:25:48","slug":"frances-shefter-a-fighter-for-families","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montgomerymag.com\/frances-shefter-a-fighter-for-families\/","title":{"rendered":"Frances Shefter: A Fighter for Families"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_2886\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2886\" style=\"width: 480px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2886\" src=\"https:\/\/www.montgomerymag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Frances-Shefter-scaled-e1666185825776.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"600\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-2886\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Frances Shefter. Photo by Brad Balfour<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><strong>By Jarrad Saffren<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Growing up, Frances Shefter sympathized with special education students. She thought they weren\u2019t getting the help they needed. Shefter felt this way about the education system in general. She thought she was a slow reader who could have benefitted from a little more attention from educators.<\/p>\n<p>That feeling drove Shefter to become a special education teacher and coordinator herself.<\/p>\n<p>But once she was in the system, she saw that students still were not getting the close instruction that they needed.<\/p>\n<p>So at 31, she took the LSAT, applied to law school and got accepted. For a year and a half after law school, Shefter worked for a family law firm and hated it. Then she became an independent contractor doing document review work. It was not until 2011 that Shefter, then 41, figured out what she really wanted to do.<\/p>\n<p>She applied for and received an appointment to a Superior Court of the District of Columbia panel that assigned attorneys to represent parents who needed help getting services for their kids.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI was teaching families how to advocate for themselves,\u201d Shefter said. \u201cAnd I was getting children their rightful education.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By 2012, she had dropped the document review work to open her own firm, Shefter Law, representing families in rooms, and sometimes court rooms, with school administrators.\u201cIt\u2019s amazing,\u201d she said. \u201cHaving parents see, \u2018This is who my child truly is,\u2019 because they are getting the accommodations they need.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Jarrad Saffren Growing up, Frances Shefter sympathized with special education students. She thought they weren\u2019t getting the help they needed. Shefter felt this way about the education system in general. She thought she was a slow reader who could have benefitted from a little more attention from educators. That feeling drove Shefter to become [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":2886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Frances Shefter: A Fighter for Families - Montgomery Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.montgomerymag.com\/frances-shefter-a-fighter-for-families\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Frances Shefter: A Fighter for Families - Montgomery Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Jarrad Saffren Growing up, Frances Shefter sympathized with special education students. 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