Bill Crane has just posted an excellent article on the website for Mass Advocates for Children (“MAC”), analyzing and commenting on the ramifications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Endrew F. decision on the required standard for services and placements under IDEA.   

Bill has been one of the most thoughtful and compassionate advocates we have known in the field of special education and disability law, and we want to take this opportunity to wish him well as he turns another page in his life at the end of this month.  Bill left his position as a BSEA Hearing Officer three years ago and has since then volunteered his services on a part-time basis at MAC.  He has also taken the opportunity to become trained and to work as a hospital chaplain, where he is applying his Buddhist practice in support of patients, many of whom are in the last stages of their lives.  Bill has set the gold standard in every position he has served in our field, bringing sharp insight together with deep compassion to his analyses and orders as a Hearing Officer, and most recently offering sterling guidance to practitioners with his blog entries and his frequent contributions to the online and in-person conversations of special education attorneys and advocates about the sticky and complex legal and procedural questions that constantly challenge them in their work.  As a Hearing Officer, Bill unfailingly treated even the most obstreperous and unreasonable of parties and their representatives and witnesses with the utmost of gentleness and respect, and he has continued to relate with everyone he meets in that same manner and spirit. That is not just an approach that he has adopted to make difficult conversations easier to navigate: it is the core of who he is.  We wish him all the very best in his new paths.  He will be sorely missed.

Robert Crabtree is a partner in the Special Education & Disability Rights practice group at Kotin, Crabtree & Strong, LLP in Boston, Massachusetts.