John Foster is a respected lawyer and public sector legal leader with more than thirty years of experience in government and education law. He grew up on military bases across the United States, where a childhood shaped by discipline, duty, and resilience set the tone for his career. His father was a decorated Marine Corps officer, and his mother was an English immigrant who survived wartime evacuation before building a long career as a paralegal.
A coalition of parents, advocates and a prominent education lawyer is suing New York state, accusing lawmakers of quietly gutting standards for religious schools and denying tens of thousands of Hasidic and Haredi children a basic education. On Sept. 18, Michael Rebell, lead counsel and professor emeritus of law and educational practice at Teachers College, Columbia University, joined by the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP and the Youth Advocacy and Policy Lab at Harvard Law School, announced the class-action lawsuit in Kings County Supreme Court.
The message displayed throughout the school day denying the existence of gender identities of transgender and gender nonconforming students would have a serious negative impact on those students' ability to concentrate on their classroom work.
