Janet Stotland oral history, 2016

Director from 1976 to 2010 of Education Law Center in Pennsylvania. Previously managing atty of West Phila. office of Phila. Legal Svcs.

Oral history details

Storyteller: Janet Stotland
Interviewer: Houseman, Alan
Date of interview: Apr 26, 2016
Where relates to: Pennsylvania
Topics: Disability: Child, Education, Poverty law, Public housing, and Special needs education
Law type: Civil
Collection: NEJL
Length: 0:38:33

Full text of transcript

Download PDF: Transcript

Consortium for the National Equal Justice Library
Oral History Collection
Interview with Janet Stotland
Conducted by Alan Houseman
April 26, 2016

Alan Houseman:
This is an oral history of Janet Stotland. The interviewer is Alan Houseman. Today’s date is April 26, 2016 and we’re at the Community Legal Services offices in Philadelphia for this oral history. Janet, tell us a little bit about where you grew up, your background, where you went to college and law school.

Janet Stotland:
I’m a Philadelphian, as my parents before me. Born, bred and educated here. I went to University of Pennsylvania undergraduate and Penn law school. I graduated in 1969, when there were some women attorneys, but fewer than now. then I got a Reginald Heber Smith fellowship. As you know, it was a fellowship which for many years was available to help new graduates who were entering the legal services community. When I graduated law school in 1969, I came here. I actually was at the Law Center West, but I was with Community Legal Services. I remained with CLS for the next seven years before I left to go to another public interest law organization called the Education Law Center, where I was director, or co-director for the next 35 years.

Alan Houseman:
Great. What influences, either people or factors, led you to get a Reginald Heber Smith fellowship to go to CLS?

Janet Stotland:
Well, I was a child of the 60s, as I suspect many of those you’re interviewing for this cycle were. I was active in the civil rights movement. I was active in the antiwar movement. For those of us who had those experiences, and who saw law emerging as a major vehicle for change, you had a very strong desire to be of use, which I had and continue to have. Poverty law, which was the first stop on my legal services career, broadly speaking, seemed a very logical next step. So, it wasn’t that there was a particular substantive area of the law I was interested in. I was, as I say, interested in being of use to continue my work with regard to social justice.

Alan Houseman:
Describe some of your work at CLS. We will get to your main body of work, obviously.

Janet Stotland:
Well, hopefully some of the main body of my work was done during my first seven years here. Although, I largely tripped over whatever successes I had rather than planning them. I was just talking to one of my colleagues and said that one of the reasons I think we were successful to the extent we were in our early years, is we didn’t know what we couldn’t do. That was partly a function of the fact that I was so poorly prepared as a young lawyer, and had so little idea what I was doing, that it seemed that whenever I saw an injustice, there must be a legal solution to it. As I became more sophisticated as a lawyer, I actually probably saw fewer opportunities, although hopefully, managed to find a significant number of them as I moved through life.

Janet Stotland:
I started as a staff attorney in what was then Law Center West. Community Legal Services had only been started a few years before that, and had just started to open neighborhood offices. Law Center West in West Philadelphia where I lived, and where I continue to live, was the first of those offices. I went there to be a service provider in that area. One of the things that was happening in West Philadelphia and sadly continues to happen, is institutional expansion from the universities and from the hospitals who are major players in that community, pushing out low income residents in order to expand.

Janet Stotland:
This wasn’t a Philadelphia-only phenomenon but it was pretty pervasive. We got involved early on in what we called urban renewal law, which were efforts to stop the Redevelopment Authority and those institutions from eradicating the housing of those families. So one of the first lawsuits we brought was literally in my neighborhood to try and prevent Drexel University from tearing down a huge amount of low income housing that was in that community. That’s a classic example of work that I had no idea I couldn’t do it. So I did it, along with, of course, many of my other colleagues.

Janet Stotland:
Then I went on to head what was called the Public Housing Unit, which is to say, to create the Public Housing Unit. Where that came about was I took a brief time off from the office. When I came back, the managing attorney of Law Center West had become the executive director. He was a gentleman named Larry Levin, whom I’m sure you know. He said to me, “Well, we now have a new mayor. The new mayor has evicted 6,000 public housing tenants.” Because there had been a laissez faire policy about collecting rent under a more progressive administration. Now 6,000 public housing tenants had received notice that they had to be evicted. He said, “So would you please stop 6,000 evictions?”

Janet Stotland:
I thought about this for a while with some of my colleagues. What we concluded was, first of all, that we needed to create defenses. We brought a lawsuit called Brown vs the Philadelphia Housing Authority, with which of all things — again, on the theme of what we didn’t know, didn’t hurt us — we actually sought to enforce in federal court a HUD circular as the force of law. Those were the good old days, right? There was actually a Supreme Court decision that suggested that that was doable. We went to court. What we did is created, first of all, the due process rights. You couldn’t just throw people out. You had to have a right to abate rent arrearages. If your housing was substandard, you had had a right to offset that. In the course of all of this, we settled the lawsuit. Then we still had 6,000 evictions. We had all these people who needed representation.

Janet Stotland:
We created the first para-professional troop, a composed largely of everyone I knew, who was paid or unpaid, who came to sit in a tiny little space that Community Legal Services occupied at the time. Then what we did is we got everyone else who is in the program at the time to commit to certain days that they would be in municipal court. We just stacked all these evictions up. We interviewed them, created whatever defenses we could by way of the substandardness of their housing units. We represented every one of those people, got the debts reduced, and settlements for each of them. No one ultimately ended up evicted. We created this infrastructure for this going forward so that in the future when there were prospective evictions, there would always be the right to put forward, “My this didn’t work, or my that didn’t work, or my heating didn’t work” and therefore reduce the debt by that amount. That was an experience.

Janet Stotland:
Then the director came to me and said … Now, this is mind you two and a half years out of law school. He said, “We need somebody else to have to run Law Center West. We need another managing attorney.” I said, “I’m running this project.” He said, “It’s okay. Bring the project with you.” We went to 40th and Market Streets, which is where our office was. It was in a storefront where there was a boarded up front space, no other windows, and then it’s space that just went back for a length. There were a few offices upfront.

Janet Stotland:
Actually, some of my colleagues who were on a fellowship built the walls that constituted the remaining offices. The Public Housing Project went in the back. Law Center West went into the front. I ended up two years out of law school running both of them, ineptly but nevertheless that was what my title was. That was kind of life at Community Legal Services at that time and one of our major projects. Eventually the Public Housing Project got absorbed into the broader title of the Landlord and Tenant Housing unit. That was the origin of that piece of work.

Alan Houseman:
So, what led you to leave CLS and go to the Education Law Center? What was that?

Janet Stotland:
Well, there were a couple pieces to that. One was that the downside of this, perhaps amusing history of what life was like in those early years at Legal Services, with all the excitement it was very hard to learn to be a lawyer. Because you, first of all, had no mentors. You had colleagues who we were all struggling. Richard just said to me that he was told when he first came here about a year and a half after I came, when he had a hearing. He asked, “Who can I go to, to talk about this?” They said, “Well, Janet did one of those. She’s been here for a year. So why don’t you talk to her?” Which wasn’t really on the whole, the best way to maximize one’s legal skills. So that was a tension.

Janet Stotland:
The second thing was about education law. At the time, nobody knew what a public interest lawyer was, let alone what an education lawyer was. I probably, least of all. But it’s not rocket science that a quality education is certainly a huge help for emerging from poverty or preventing poverty. So the idea was trying to improve the public schools in Pennsylvania so that, as they say, “Zip code isn’t destiny.” Wherever you live, you have access to a good quality public education, modified to special needs if the learner has special needs. This idea was a very appealing thing to me. It was really an extension of poverty law. The work we did was around low income populations. Populations that needed extra kinds of supports. It seemed a useful way of being of use, again.

Alan Houseman:
Was the Education Law Center in existence when you went?

Janet Stotland:
Barely. There was one other attorney whom I hired. Actually the Education Law Center was founded in New Jersey and still continues to exist there as a sister organization doing very important work around school funding reform in New Jersey. We were created in Pennsylvania through a grant from the Ford Foundation, who was the major funder of both enterprises, to do school funding finance reform here in Pennsylvania. The Center was maybe six months old, with virtually no staff and a couple of desks and a half-time secretary. That’s what it was when I first arrived.

Janet Stotland:
Over the years we separated corporately from New Jersey and developed our own agenda which tended toward the removal of laws that prevented children with learning difficulties from attending school because Pennsylvania was really one of the lead states in the special education movement. That was really the origin. There were statutes on the books that said, “Children with retardation”, which is how it was referred to at the time, “were prohibited from attending the public schools.” In the early years, it was access. Then once there was access, support for success. This was even before the federal law, which is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, was law. But we had that history here in Pennsylvania, some really groundbreaking work that had been done by our colleagues from the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia. A gentleman named Tom Gilhool in particular was a leader in that.

Janet Stotland:
So we were the state where this experiment was bubbling up. That became, particularly for me, a large chunk of the work I did going forward at the Education Law Center, along with work for English language learners, children who are homeless, children who were in the child welfare system. All these populations had very special kinds of needs, and barriers to educational success.

Alan Houseman:
Describe some of the highlights. I don’t know what words to use. What you see as the most important work that you did at the Education Law Center?

Janet Stotland:
Well, of course litigation tends to get a lot of focus. But it’s hardly the most important work, I think. It’s most useful if it’s done in tandem with other strategies for reform, and other kinds of ways of doing it. So, I’ll maybe talk about two pieces of the work. Most of my work, as I say, involved children with disabilities. Another community that was very important to me was children in the child welfare system who confronted very special problems. One of the problems they confronted here in Pennsylvania was a statute concerned a child placed in the child welfare system in a foster home that’s in a different school district than where the child’s birth parents live. Residency and the right to go to school was linked to birth parents, which didn’t make much sense if you’re separated from them and put it in the child welfare system. The foster home’s school district can refuse to admit you to the schools. You had one agency of the state removing the children from an unsafe environment and trying to find the best place for the children that was being impeded in making the selection that they thought that was the best because the school district couldn’t get the kid in school in that district.

Janet Stotland:
We brought a lawsuit on behalf of a young lady named Nancy M, who represented a class of similarly situated youngsters who were being kept out of school because of this. This particular youngster had had a terrible time. She was a scolded baby. Very badly scarred. She had all kinds of emotional problems, and she had finally found a foster home. She’d had a number of unsuccessful foster placements, but finally had found of a home in which she was comfortable. But the school district wouldn’t admit her to school. We brought a lawsuit on her behalf.

Janet Stotland:
The judge at the time declared the statutes that we were challenging unconstitutional under the Equal Protection clause, and removed it from the school code. Then we began a saga. This is, I think, an interesting story, because at each stage that I thought I solved the problem, I discovered I was wrong. We remove one barrier and another barrier comes into play. Then I started to get calls from foster care agencies, placement agents saying, “Well, yes, it’s wonderful that you made that statute go away. But we have 500 school districts. They don’t really want these kids. Many of these kids are kids of color being placed in districts where they’re not popular. Each of these 500 school districts, or many of them, were like kingdoms unto themselves. Many of the children had emotional issues. They had not had an easy time. The principals and the superintendents weren’t thrilled about that. Each school district would set up, “Well, you have to come in for an interview. We can’t do that for a month.” Or, “You have to produce these documents.” Or, all of these impediments to enrollment, just to give you a sense. So we then did a study. We got the child welfare agencies to cooperate with us. We did a study of what’s going on and published a report, as an example of how one strategy doesn’t work. One of the recommendations of that report was, we needed to have a uniform system for enrollment, a limitation on the number of documents that could be required by districts, and a timeline for getting the kids into school. We had to reform all the regulations to accord with that, which we then accomplished.

Janet Stotland:
I could go on with the saga, but the point being that, at each stage we eliminated a barrier, created tools for opportunity, and didn’t make it go away necessarily. The latest one, just to close this out, one of the other problems that these kids encounter is that every time their living arrangement changes, they were being forced to change districts. With each district change there were losing progress that they had made the previous situations, even if they were promptly enrolled. If you were going to five foster homes in the three years you were in the child welfare system, and each time you had to change your school setting, even if you were promptly enrolled, this wasn’t much of an education you were getting in the course of all of this. So we then started to work for what became known as school stability.

Janet Stotland:
We’re hardly the only people who did this, but there now is a federal statute that says when a child from the child welfare system, is moved, the assumption is they stay in the same school district. Even if that school district would not normally be the place that they would go. They can only be moved if it is in the child’s best interest. Then the child must be immediately enrolled who all school records. Now this is still a population that is not doing well in terms of educational outcomes. But at each stage, we colleagues locally and colleagues nationally try to erode the obstacles and improve the opportunity. This is a saga for kids in foster care, and it is work that I think we have made a dent on, and I think have presented some opportunities for kids in care.

Alan Houseman:
Interesting. Is there another example of work that made a difference?

Janet Stotland:
Sure. Let me talk about kids with disabilities. Again, that’s been the bulk of my work. I’ve always said that, one of the nicest things that can happen to a public interest reform-minded lawyer, is to have a new statute because it’s so much fun to make sure that it’s interpreted in a way that benefits the intended beneficiary class. Most people know that there is a federal law that guarantees special services to kids with disabilities in the school system. It’s now called the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. Most people have heard about individualized education programs, and those kinds of supports.

Janet Stotland:
Well, when I got to the Education Law Center, as I mentioned, there was no such law. But shortly thereafter it was passed. It went into effect in I think it was July of 1977. One of the problems that was brought to my attention at that time was that it’s supposed to be a law that requires individualized programming that’s adjusted to the needs of each child with wide array of disabilities and wide array of levels of need for the system. The idea is that there isn’t any kind of rule that applies to everybody because everybody is different within this context. That’s why the team sits down and figures out an individualized education. This is the way the system’s supposed to work.

Janet Stotland:
What came to me were a number of clients and one in particular, Gary Armstrong. The case was called Armstrong vs Kline. He had a congenital degenerative disability. He died in his early teens eventually. He was losing function. One of the things that he and his teachers and others said to us is that his programming was limited to only the nine months. That was a normal school year. During the summer he would basically lose whatever progress he had made during the normal school year. He would just go in this endless cycle of no progress complicated by the fact that he was deteriorating intellectually and physically.

Janet Stotland:
Then I was approached by, actually, the nephew of my secretary here at CLS. Her nephew had a very severe emotional problem on what we would now call the autism spectrum. He also had this problem of when his programming was interrupted. Then I had a third youngster who had what we now call intellectual disabilities, at the time called retardation. I had these three youngsters, and the presenting problem is, why couldn’t they have education programs that extended beyond the 180 day school year? All this was supposed to be individualized. Isn’t the rule of 180 days as a maximum you can have, a kind of rule that you couldn’t apply to kids with disabilities? Well, this was in the early years of the law that was just getting itself off the ground. This was a pretty revolutionary proposition, right? There’s no research on this.

Janet Stotland:
So I and my friend, who was my paralegal who’d come with me from CLS, decided that the only way we could figure this out is to go around and talk to people who were educating these kids, and said, “Look, work on the proposition that nine months is what most kids get. Have you ever run into kids like these kids, for whom it just doesn’t seem to be working? They’re not progressing overall because of the program interruption?” They said, “Yes. We’ve had them occasionally.” I said, “Tell me what they look like. What are their characteristics? Tell me how they differ from other kids.” So we evolved out of this the concept of regression and limited recruitment, which later ended up embodied in federal law. But actually it was devised over martinis in a restaurant called Bananas as we talked over this. Because that’s what came out over and over again.

Janet Stotland:
Well there are some kids, either they lose a lot because of this, and also this other part. It takes so long to build. The building blocks are so slow, of learning. When you couple the loss with the limited ability to regain with any kind of expedition, instead of getting 180 days worth of progress, they were getting 30 days of progress, or no progress at all. So they weren’t even getting 180 days worth of progress. They were going in circles. We took this to federal court in this case called Armstrong vs Kline, which was a particularly big deal, not only because it was such a revolutionary prospect that that’s what this law could mean, but it was one of the very first cases to be litigated under this law. It also had to get over all the procedural hurdles.

Janet Stotland:
Well if you have to exhaust normally, what are the exceptions to exhaust? Is there immunity for school districts under these circumstances? So all of these things ended up having to, in the first instance, be litigated in the context of this case. We won at the District Court. It was affirmed at the Circuit Court. It later ended up embodied in federal regulations, Regression and Recoupment, our labels for these things. Then the procedural victories. We had a pretty good circuit here, and we still do, at the Third Circuit. We actually made good law ahead of some of the more regressive circuits that later carried on nationally. That’s an example of work we did under what was then called the Education for the Handicapped Act.

Janet Stotland:
We then litigated a million other things. What are the remedies you can get if you didn’t get what you were supposed to get? When the law was expanded to little kids, preschoolers, and then infants and toddlers with disabilities, how was that supposed to work? The least restrictive environment mandate of that law, which means that children with disabilities are supposed to be educated with children who don’t have disabilities to the maximum extent, and not separated off, or shunted off into separate programs. It’s what with least restrictive and requirements. We litigated that. For older kids, we litigated that. For younger kids. In the District Courts and in the Circuit Courts, my colleagues and I had really a pretty high level of success. That ended up being a lot of the body of work that I personally did. My office did work around, as I mentioned, kids who are English language learners. The school to prison pipeline, funding reform. We have a very regressive funding system for public education here in Pennsylvania. Those are just some of the areas in which my colleagues and I have worked over the years.

Alan Houseman:
How would you envision civil legal aid work in the education context? If you were designing a program of education in the civil legal aid context, and obviously, it’d be a model of work you’ve done, how would you design it? Maybe it’s what you’ve done?

Janet Stotland:
Well, I have built one, and they have come. First of all, I think that education law has been relegated off to the side in many of the programs that I have worked with. I have made pitches to the state legal aid community to see it as an important area. I do appreciate the many urgent needs that legal services clients have. I can understand why it feels in some way less urgent than an eviction and losing your kid in a custody battle. But the legal aid community should see it as also essential. Not as a substitute for other work, but also essential. I did a presentation once, in which I showed the overlay of poverty, and poor school outcomes in the different communities. One feeds the other in an endless cycle.

Janet Stotland:
Also, it is important to understand how, and this is something that I think the Philly legal services community is really good at, we all have the same client. One of the ways in which it literally manifests itself is, when we annually do our public interest CLE in December, we’ve devised that the first session is a family who has a variety of problems from immigration to public benefits, to education or whatever. We tell the story. We call it the Nickleby family. Then we have someone from each of the projects say, “Well, here’s how the school discipline problem is. Here’s what the public benefits problem is.” Because our clients, the families that we serve, have all of these problems more or less in different arrays.

Janet Stotland:
So if you see them as parceled out and separate, because we tend to be fragmented in the way we deliver services with our different places, we lose. We don’t serve as well as we can. So education to me is a very critical piece of all that. Most of the clients that legal services serves also has some school problem. There’s a kid with a disability. There’s a language issue. There’s a foster care issue. There’s a juvenile justice issue. All these folks have education issues that are ancillary.

Janet Stotland:
When I came to ELC, I took the CLS model of having a direct service component associated with a reform component. Because I think you can’t have one without the other. If you’re not listening to people, and what it is that they’re experiencing, always, on an ongoing basis, then what are you going to do? Make up what people need if it doesn’t come with integrity out of the stories of the families and the struggles that they’re encountering? I think any program, and CLS is built for this, to integrate and to see, again, I think, that out of that direct service and out of their form, that this body of law isn’t something aside, but is part of what these families are struggling with and therefore needs to be one of the areas in which they get help from the legal services community. Because there are not education law centers in very many places. So here, they could send people to us. But in most legal services programs, that’s not an option unless the legal services program is to some degree, addressing those issues.

Janet Stotland:
I would say, the model here at CLS is terrific. They do wonderful work. I don’t think there’s anybody who does reform work who doesn’t do direct service work. Or anyone who does direct service work, who doesn’t do reform work. In the early years, they were put in different boxes, but that’s a phony distinction. I think that it’s really, for the community legal service, it’s owning this area of the law, seeing it as poverty law that is essential to families, and has the additional bang for the buck.

Janet Stotland:
I had a client who was homeless, who had been thrown out of her home by her father and his new wife, somewhere around age 15. All she wanted was to go to school. She was couch-sleeping, right. She was going from any place she could find. I actually would not have normally been answering the phone, but she got me, and she started to cry, which meant she got me. So, she said, they won’t let me into school because there’s no adult who will sign me up. Well there was no adults in her life. There happens to be a federal law protecting kids who are homeless, in the education context, called the McKinney-Vento Act.

Janet Stotland:
I called the school up and said, “She’s an unaccompanied youth. She’s entitled to go to school. She’s entitled to do all of this. She doesn’t have to present any documents. Let her in school.” They let her in school. She got into a special program. She graduated. She’s now in her mid 20s. We’re still connected along with another colleague of mine. She got an associate’s degree. In every place she ran into problems. I remember a conversation I had with someone when she was trying to qualify for support to go to a community college. They were requiring her to document this. Finally I said to the school, “How many kids have you run into for whom all they want is to get an education? They’re willing to do anything in the world. They’re willing to wait. They sleep on couches. They want it. How about if we make life easier for her, instead of harder for her?”

Janet Stotland:
The woman paused and said, “I wish my kid wanted to go to school as much as she did.” I said, “Okay, make it go away.” The student now has her associate degree. She’s now in a four year college. At December, she’ll graduate with a BA. She’s now in Minnesota. It’s a kind of outcome that is life changing. I’m not saying it’s the only area of law which is life changing. But it’s very nourishing in that way. The success stories feel really good. I find it distressing, as they say. I don’t think it’s a new model that we need. I think it’s an ownership that we need. That this is just as legitimate an area of both reform and direct services, the traditional legal services areas.

Alan Houseman:
I have one other question. This is a little more abstract, like the last one. That was terrific by the way. How important do you think it is, for both the special ed law, the Individuals with –

Janet Stotland:
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act?

Alan Houseman:
Right, and other education laws that have come down that are trying to benefit low income people, how important you think lawyers are to making sure those are in fact enforced?

Janet Stotland:
That’s an interesting question. I would say two things, which seem perhaps paradoxical. Lawyers are important, and lawyers are a pain in the neck. Both of these things are true. The strength of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and its procedural safeguard system, which is very complex, and its rules which are many, many, many, is that it gives special protections and rights and so forth. The downside is that the older I get, the more I realize that less is more. In a way, in the effort to give every possible right and protection, lawyers created a system that’s so complex, that ordinary people can’t navigate it. I would say that it requires lawyers to navigate it, which includes a mega-education effort, because there are never enough lawyers to fill the needs. It means enabling parents to make their way with some degree of confidence through this complex system, which is complicated even if it doesn’t run into trouble. Then gets more complicated as you need to use the procedural safeguard system. But we also need to understand that systems that we create for ordinary people should be self implementing.

Janet Stotland:
Just to take one piece of that, years ago before it became mandated nationally, we set up here in Pennsylvania a mediation system for special ed disputes. Which means, you didn’t have to go through the formal thing that was so complicated and scary. With the full support and advocacy from the community, we barred lawyers on both sides from participating. I can say that the private bar who represents these folks were not pleased with me, because the fee generating opportunities went down to zero. But my clients, the advocacy groups, fought tooth and nail to keep it lawyer-free because lawyers often make things more contentious than they need to be. These kids need to live in these systems. When you’re talking about school, you need not to burn bridges if you don’t need to. You need to get along with the teacher, and the superintendent, and support people to fight for their rights, but in ways that don’t leave a burned barn behind them, because their kids are there. The poor kids can’t buy themselves out. They have to be in that system for the remaining years.

Janet Stotland:
I think lawyers are tremendously important to implement it, but they need to implement it in a way that empowers individuals to do it themselves rather than requiring at every step legal advocacy. Because that solution will never lead to outcomes for the bulk of the folks that we work with.

Alan Houseman:
One final thing, you’ve won a number of awards, accolades. Talk about one or two that mean the most to you.

Janet Stotland:
Well, I’m sure you’ve asked this of everyone, and everyone says to you, “I didn’t earn any awards. My colleagues earned the awards and they gave it to me because I was the director.” That is absolutely true. But I would say that the one that meant a lot to me was that I was the second recipient of the Andrew Hamilton Award. Louis Rulli was the first recipient of Andrew Hamilton Award. It is given as a life achievement award by the Philadelphia public interest community to one of its own. So that one was important to me because it was my community, first of all acknowledging the work of my whole shop. But, in acknowledging me, they were people who knew me. They were people who we had grown up together. And, so the fact that they expressed through that award, their respect from my work, was something that had a lot of content to me. I got an honorary doctor of law degree from Lehigh University. I got an honorary fellowship at my law school, the University of Pennsylvania law school. But those were people who didn’t really know me. The Andrew Hamilton Award was given by my community. That meant a lot to me.

Alan Houseman:
That’s great. Well. Thank you.

Janet Stotland:
My pleasure.

Alan Houseman:
This has been terrific. Thank you-

Janet Stotland:
It’s been so nice to meet you after all these years.


END