Year of Woman as Kim, Scanlon face off in new 5th District
Longtime education advocate Mary Gay Scanlon has her eyes on D.C.
She was just a little girl, but the memory lingers with Mary Gay Scanlon and the legacy can perhaps be seen in her life’s path.
Her father, Daniel Scanlon, worked for former President John F. Kennedy and one Christmas, he took the family to the White House Christmas Party, where he introduced the president to his daughter.
“What struck me was that my father was so respectful,” she said.
Then, later, Scanlon recalled her father taking the family to Kennedy’s graveside sometime after the funeral for the assassinated president was over and the crowds had subsided.
With the president’s death, the family returned to their northern New York roots, where Scanlon’s mom, Carol Florence Yehle, taught as a community college professor and her dad worked on Robert Kennedy’s senatorial, then presidential, campaigns.
“I think public service was always part of the lifestyle,” the 58-year-old Swarthmore resident said. “That level of engagement was something I grew up with.”
So, after receiving her undergraduate degree from Colgate University, she went to the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
There she did volunteer law at Bob Edgar’s People’s Emergency Center, a place for students to help women and children with legal issues that they were having, as most of the shelters at the time were for men.
Scanlon then was a clerk for Superior Court Judge J. Sydney Hoffman.
And, she also did work for the Support Center for Child Advocates, where she represented an 11-year-old girl who had been removed from her home after it was found that her stepfather was abusing her.
The girl went through different foster homes, different social workers, went through the process of prosecuting one of her relatives.
Scanlon said with all these different people coming and going, the girl needed something stable, something or someone she could trust.
“At a certain point,” Scanlon said, “it became about just showing up and being there.”
Today, the girl is now a grandmother living in southwestern Philadelphia – and in the primary campaign for the 5th U.S. Congressional District, she and her grandchildren circulated petitions for Scanlon.
“That’s the big lesson in this campaign,” Scanlon said, “how everything comes back around.”
It was for her work at the Support Center that Scanlon received the Philadelphia Bar Association’s 1994 Fidelity Award, followed by others to come such as Penn’s Howard Lesnick Pro Bono Award and the upcoming American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award.
From there, Scanlon went to work with the Education Law Center, where she advocated on behalf of parents and families in issues involving public schools.
One of her well-known cases was Duane B. v. Chester Upland School District. The case began in 2000 and focused on the district, as well as the state and the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and its responsibility to care for students with special needs.
Scanlon, who became lead counsel on the case, said the team was successful in driving out some of the corruption and the patronage pit.
And, she highlighted that it was the only lawsuit in which the Pennsylvania Department of Education was sanctioned and fined after being found in contempt of court.
Over the years, some criticism has followed the case, which took years winding through the legal system before gaining closure.
In a March 2016 letter to the Daily Times editor, Upland resident Theresa Jackson wrote, “Instead of helping children with the filing of the Duane B. lawsuit, it seemed to become an opportunity to create positions to promote personal self-interests. The total money spent on legal fees could have paid for every child in the district to go to college.”
Scanlon said Chester-Upland is a complex dynamic.
“The Chester-Upland School District has faced extraordinary challenges over the years,” she said. “It’s very difficult to use the courts to reform the schools, especially when you have a state that has a broken funding system … Ultimately, (the district) probably needed some more fixes.”
Scanlon herself served as a member and president of the Wallingford Swarthmore School Board.
She spoke to her dedication to education.
“Our future depends on how we treat our kids, whether it’s health care or housing or education,” she said. “A lot of what troubles our country can be addressed by education.”
Today Scanlon is Pro
“Our future depends on how we treat our kids, whether it’s health care or housing or education. A lot of what troubles our country can be addressed by education.” — Mary Gay Scanlon, the Democratic candidate for the newly created 5th Congressional District
Bono Counsel for Ballard Spahr and chairs the firm’s Pro Bono Committee, where she oversees 550 lawyers in 12 offices throughout the country.
“My job,” she explained, “is convincing commercial lawyers to do work that is not in their ordinary course of work. After 2016, my world got very busy. These radical policy positions really impacted the low-income people and the civil rights that I’ve been working on for 30 years.”
One thing she’s been involved currently is organizing the representation of the separation of illegal immigrant children and parents at the border.
She said in some cases, the mother, the father and the child can be in three different states.
She’s organized training for those representing clients in Texas, in Georgia and even for the Berks County facility.
“We’ve seen even American citizens get deported,” she said. “It’s access to justice and what can go wrong if you don’t have someone looking out for you.”
Scanlon spoke of the actions her firm took when the travel ban was first instituted in January 2017.
At JFK International Airport, they had a team of attorneys in the waiting area, drafting habeas corpus petitions.
Scanlon, who was operating from a hotel room, texting and organizing people and passing down information when court orders came down, said there was one student from Iran who was trying to return to the United States through JFK after winter break.
Scanlon said the student’s phone was removed, she was not allowed to talk to anyone and she was placed on a plane to Ukraine.
As her plane was taxiing, people were calling border patrol, the air traffic control tower – even 911 – and no one could do anything.
Scanlon said somehow they were able to get to her on the plane through another cell phone and she was instructed to have a sudden and loud medical emergency, which she did and the plane returned.
“It’s been a year and a half,” Scanlon said, “where we’ve had to resort to some unique acts.”
And that’s why when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court redrew the congressional districts, Scanlon saw another way to serve.
The state high court threw out the districts drawn up after the 2010 census - including the bizarre shape of the 7th District here in Delaware County - as a textbook example of gerrymandering. The court then drew up its own maps, thus creating the newly formed 5th District, which will see all of Delaware County now included in one district, along with a slice of Montgomery County along the Main Line, and a portion of Southwest and South Philadelphia.
“As things continued and as the gerrymandering case came down in Pennsylvania, there was an opportunity to make a difference in elected office,” she said. “The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense – I’d be doing the same work just in a different way.”
She said she felt compelled as she saw many of the things she had been working on from education to housing rights to voting rights being eroded.
“So many of these things are under a fresh kind of attack under this administration,” Scanlon said. “The legislature hasn’t been holding up its end of the bargain.”