Lucy Schwallie, Senior Attorney at Legal Aid of Southeast Central Ohio’s Athens office, says the litmus test for writing an amicus brief is, “are there people whose interests are not being represented by the plaintiff?” 

Schwallie, along with Education Taskforce representatives from all of Ohio’s Legal Aid programs, recently submitted a second amicus brief in support of over 200 Ohio school districts’ case against the EdChoice private school voucher program, updating their previous research and adding a section on the impact on rural schools to this version of the brief prepared for the 10th District Court of Appeals. 

“The school districts have an interest, which is serving children and having the money to serve children, but there are other interests at play,” Schwallie said. “Poor students, students with disabilities, rural students ... writing an amicus is a way to have the voice of those students and families be heard in that litigation.” 

When the school districts first filed their suit against the State in 2022, members of the Education Taskforce reached out to see how legal aid could help. Though amici briefs are rare at the trial court level, the districts were eager to have legal aid bolster a case they were concerned might not ever make it to appeal.  Advocates from each of Ohio’s legal aid programs researched the disparate impacts of the EdChoice programs and produced a brief that documented how the programs caused a general decrease in public school funding, spent public dollars on schools that have no obligation to serve students with disabilities, and exacerbated the racial segregation of Ohio’s K-12 student population. 

In June of 2025, Judge Jaiza Page of the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas issued a summary judgement in favor of the school districts, finding that the EdChoice programs violate Ohio’s Constitution by creating a second parallel school system rather than a scholarship program. 

As soon as the State appealed the case, the Education Taskforce got the band back together. Schwallie, who organized the research and drafting process, and advocates from several programs joined Kristen Hildebrandt of Disability Rights Ohio and Danielle Gadomski Littleton of The Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, who returned from the 2022 drafting crew. 

“We completely reworked the whole brief,” Schwallie said. Pairs of advocates teamed up to update the research in each section, while Schwallie, Rene Murphy from ABLE and Sarah Flohre from the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati developed the section on rural schools and students. Other advocates who contributed to the process included Sarah Wiley of Community Legal Aid, Caitlin DiCresce and Hannah Wagner of Legal Aid of Southeast and Central Ohio, and Tim Johnson of the Ohio Poverty Law Center. 

“The attorneys who represent the schools have been very grateful for our work,” Schwallie said. “They are limited in the number of pages they can submit and are glad we can add in the impact on a student with autism or a student in a rural county where there are no private schools.” 



The advocates expect oral arguments in the 10th District case to occur sometime in the next few months.