Prudence Hutton

Prudence Hutton has been a lawyer for over 35 years licensed in California, Hawaii, & Nevada. After 20 years as a union negotiator and nationwide representation of plaintiffs in tort litigation, her practice has focused on special education matters for 12 years and co-counsels with Maureen Graves Esq. She lectures frequently at universities, parent organizations and non-profits including recently presented at COPAA on Reading Under IDEA: Defining Needs and Enforcing Rights. Her experiences a legal aid education law staff attorney developed her focus on training for parents and educators to build and improve early, effective and durable dispute resolution practices to foster positive educational outcomes and reduce expensive adversarial proceeding for students with disabilities and health issues. Typically solutions can be simple to avoid misunderstandings at the lowest possible level to preserve valuable school-student/family relationships, such as an apology, based on a model in medicine, which lead to developing a presentation for CADRE’s Symposium 2011 on “HOW APOLOGY CAN PROMOTE EXEMPLARY PRACTICES FOR REDUCING SPECIAL EDUCATION DISPUTES.” She has received ADR training at Pepperdine University Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution and Fresno Pacific University, including Dr. Ron Lassen’s course on “Restorative Discipline.”