Thursday, January 24, 2008
By MARCELLA BOMBARDIERI
The Boston Globe
NEW BEDFORD, Mass. - Carting a 77-part questionnaire on a clipboard, a 25-year-old lawyer named Hillary Rodham made her way through the poorest neighborhoods of this ailing industrial city, three-decker by three-decker. Knocking on every third door, sitting in cramped living rooms, she and a Portuguese translator asked startled, often wary parents whether they had any children who didn't go to school.
Every 10th house or so, she found such a child. They included the children of Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants who quit or flunked out because no one helped them learn English, a 10-year-old boy who had been classified as retarded despite passing his regular classes, and a little girl in a wheelchair who languished on her family's back porch because she had no way to get to school.
Clinton's brief experience in 1973 living in Cambridge and working for the Children's Defense Fund, including in New Bedford, was until recently a forgotten chapter of a famous life . . .
"I knew then that I wanted to spend my career being a voice for children," she told students in November at her alma mater, Wellesley College, "children particularly who had been left behind, children who drew the short straw in life."
And indeed, in 1973 Clinton had a hand in some of the most cutting-edge legal advocacy of the time, being done from the fund's stately Victorian headquarters on Cambridge Street in Harvard Square. Yet she did the work for less than nine months before taking a job in Washington, as aide to the congressional committee examining Richard Nixon's impeachment. From there she moved to Arkansas, where she joined a private law firm.
Clinton remained involved with children's issues throughout her career. She chaired the fund's board for years, pursued education reform as first lady of Arkansas, and fought in the White House for health insurance for low-income children.
On the campaign trail, Clinton focuses on the least-edgy aspect of what she did, cataloguing discrimination against children who were disabled. Much of what the fund did, though, was to advocate for victims who were less than picture-perfect: teenage mothers, minority youths who had been expelled for disciplinary infractions, and juvenile delinquents.
In her book, Clinton briefly describes traveling to South Carolina to interview 14- and 15-year-olds who were being housed with adult criminals. Several of her colleagues recalled finding boys who had been raped in jail. The organization took at least one case to court.
The project that brought Clinton to New Bedford eventually became a much-publicized report, "Children Out of School in America." With volunteers as well as its own staff, the fund spoke to 6,500 families across the country, concluding that 2 million school-age children were being excluded from public school because of segregation, special needs, or poverty.
"Children Out of School in America" helped make the case for the 1975 federal Education for All Handicapped Children law, a fact that Hillary and Bill Clinton trumpet in their campaign appearances . . .
http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/president/stories/clintonearly.html
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