THE ABA FAMILY LAW SECTION RUNS A MARRIAGE-SAVING PROGRAM

By Richard Crouch

The American Bar Association's Family Law Section established several years ago, and has now entirely reorganized, its "PARTNERS" program for educating high school students in the ways of forming and maintaining a happy marriage. The program is sponsored by individual ABA members who donate $400.00 per school to buy them the licensed course materials, and appear as guest speakers at the high school classes.

The pro-marriage "PARTNERS" program has undergone considerable change since it was first introduced in these pages. The Section's immediate past chairman, Lynne Gold-Bikin, speaking at the group's annual meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 12, explained how the program now goes about teaching techniques for creating and keeping a successful marriage.

The "PARTNERS" program does not do anything for newlyweds, nor for long-married persons interested in preventing divorce. Rather, it concentrates on teaching certain divorce-preventing concepts to high school students. Of course to get support it has to be peddled as an abuse-prevention program, so there is a lot of that. The lectures, homework and practical assignments sound pretty much like the material students have been required to take in "family life" classes as part of a general home-economics-like program for many years now. What makes the program different is that it is sponsored by, and to some degree taught by, divorce lawyers.

When the program first emerged it was linked with a satellite TV corporation in an ambitious scheme to bring these life-lessons electronically to schools all over the land. Since its beginnings, the anti-divorce scheme has received much favorable publicity in nationwide media. However, the commercial partnership did not work out, and the new program is something completely different.

The "PARTNERS" course is unfortunately named, as Ms. Gold-Bikin revealed when she recounted the receipt of a touching letter from an eligible young man in Africa who recited his eligibilities and his confidence that the program would quickly find him an American girl to be his lifetime partner, and arrange his permanent immigration here. However, the name is an acronym for a long phrase that everyone has forgotten, but which is surely found somewhere in the ABA's eight-page leaflet on the subject, available from the Family Law Section at 750 N. Lake Shore Dr., Chicago, Illinois 60611, telephone (312) 988-5603.

The course can now be obtained for an individual school (sorry, no school districts) by a law firm's donating $400.00 to "sponsor" the program for that school ("the ABA FLS Adopt-A-School Program"). The gifts are tax-deductible as charitable contributions. Someone, perhaps the same lawyer who donated the $400.00, gets to lecture during the course as a volunteer stand-in teacher.

Unfortunately, perhaps, the lawyers do not teach the part of the course on marital problems and how to avoid them, but instead they lecture on divorce law. The idea, though, is that this exposure is great public relations for the family law bar, which undeniably needs it, and for the individual divorce lawyers who participate.

Ms. Gold-Bikin pointed out that this is a very popular program with schools because they do not need to make that many excuses for it. Most of the costs are donated, and there is no "values" (as opposed to, say, relationship problem-solving skills), no sex and no religion in it.
One might well ask who gets the money. The Family Law Section of ABA gets $200.00 of the $400.00. A sum of $150.00 goes into a fund for creating more tapes, course books, translating them into various languages, etc. The idea is that an attorney goes in person to the school to teach the attorney sessions. The first unit involves five hours, much of it on tape, the second week is non-tape. The whole program contemplates at least five attorney visits to the school.

More information on volunteering to help with PARTNERS
Or see ABA's page on its "PARTNERS" Divorce-Prevention Program