Lawyers needed to serve children.

"A tired but persistent child advocate attorney" is how Andrea L. Moore signed her letter to the president of The Florida Bar.

Her message was a plea to Florida's lawyers to consider yet another way to pitch in and help President Miles McGrane's children's initiative: become a surrogate parent for a foster child.

No, not a foster parent. This is not about food, clothing, and shelter. It's about making sure children's educational needs are being met. A surrogate parent is trained and appointed by each school board to represent children who may have emotional problems or physical or learning disabilities. The surrogate parent protects the child's due process rights in the special education decision-making process, under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

"I know all school districts in Florida are having trouble finding enough surrogates, leaving them vulnerable to legal action and/or to complaints to the Office of Civil Rights. I also know that many attorneys are active in the schools and with their own children," Moore wrote to McGrane.

"This would not be much of a stretch for those lawyer parents. And it would be a great service to the children."

Moore knows this firsthand, as both a parent, a family law lawyer, and a volunteer advocate for children, as well as serving as secretary to Florida's Children First!

In an interview, Moore said: "I've done a lot of pro bono work in this area. What I've learned is that too many kids in foster care had no one watching over their educational needs."

When she first started working in this area, Moore found that a significant number of foster children were not enrolled in school the first day, though Broward County has tackled that problem with great success. National data showed that foster children, on average, are two to three years behind in school.

"How are these kids going to survive foster care if they're not in school?" Moore asks.

Add in the problem of foster children moving around and changing schools.

"When children transfer schools, they lose four to six months of educational progress," Moore said, adding that often records are not transferred in a timely manner.

Statistics found on the ABA's Center of Children and the Law Web site--www.abanet.org/child/home.html--reveal that students with learning disabilities drop out of high school at twice the rate of nondisabled peers. Among children in the delinquency system tested for learning disabilities, 50 percent...