Sarah Birnbaum has been an advocate for NYC families for more than twenty years. She got into this work the way most parents do: by living it first, with two kids of her own who needed more than the system wanted to give them.
Recently, near the end of a long conversation about her work, I asked her for a story — a moment that captures what keeps her doing this. She told me two.
The first one is easy to believe, because she's seen it happen: a family comes home from a parent-teacher conference, goes through the pile of paperwork they were handed, and finds a Post-it note tucked into the middle of it. There’s nothing on it but the name and phone number of a special education law firm.
Nobody at the school could come out and say the words "free and appropriate public education" and admit they weren't providing one. But somebody, quietly, left the family a way to find out.
The next story Sarah told floored me.
"A friend of mine from college learned this in a military history class," she said. It was about an American bomber crew in World War II who got shot down over Germany. A shell had torn through the plane’s fuel tank but didn’t explode. “He was able to land safely, and nobody could figure out why.”
They dug the bullets out of the fuselage, and every one of them was empty — no gunpowder, nothing. Inside one of the dud shells, they found a note in a language nobody in the unit could understand.
They finally found someone who could translate it. It said: "This is all that we can do for you now."
The bullets had been made in a slave labor factory. The prisoners forced to build them had sabotaged as many as they could. This story traces back to a real account — Elmer Bendiner, a navigator on a B-17 that survived a 1943 raid over Kassel, wrote it in his 1980 memoir The Fall of Fortresses.
Every so often, someone inside a system that isn't built to help you finds a small way to help you anyway. A school employee who can't say the words "your child's rights are being violated" out loud, so they leave a phone number instead.
Birnbaum doesn't run into that kind of quiet defiance from the Department of Education often. But when she does, it's enough to keep her going.
Most of what she does is not about waiting for someone on the inside to slip you a note. It's translating an impenetrable neuropsychological evaluation into something a parent can actually use. It's telling a family, plainly, when it's time to call a lawyer — and when it isn't. It's the free thirty-minute consultation she still gives to anyone who calls, twenty years in.
“I cannot effect systemic change,” she said. “I cannot take this giant grinding bureaucracy and make it work better... But what I can do is help individual families one by one.”
Every advocate needs a story that explains why the work is worth it on the days it doesn't feel that way. This is one of the quiet ones.
Phyllis Lilienthal photo via Pexels