When a state-appointed, unelected emergency manager changed the water source for the city of Flint, Michigan, in 2014 to the highly corrosive Flint River in an ill-conceived attempt to save money, lead from the city’s aging pipes began leaching into the water supply. The contamination persisted for at least 18 months before the government acknowledged the crisis.

Even as local leaders continually assured residents that the water was safe to drink, General Motors removed its plant from the Flint water supply because the tainted water was corroding engine parts. It was also corroding Flint’s lead-based plumbing, and lead, a potent neurotoxin, funneled into homes and schools.

As a result, Flint became a national symbol of the catastrophic consequences that ensue when gross governmental inaction, social disinvestment and the erosion of local democracy coalesce.

The American tragedy that unfolded in Flint is both a cautionary tale and a call to action. Global law firm White & Case, along with the Education Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, responded to that call by bringing a lawsuit, filed Oct. 18, 2016, in the U.S. district court in Detroit seeking to ensure that the children of Flint—the subset of the population most vulnerable to lead’s effects—are provided with well-resourced, high-functioning schools equipped to meet their needs.

Exposure to lead, especially during formative years, may have profound, decades-long effects on learning, behavior and memory. It can lead to brain injuries functionally similar to those caused by traumatic car accidents or oxygen deprivation. Lead’s impact is both irreversible and intergenerational.

As the pediatrician who sounded the alarm about the lead crisis, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, explained, “If you were going to put something in a population to keep them down for generations to come, it would be lead.”

No medical intervention can completely counter the effects of lead exposure. Education is the antidote to the public health crisis that the children of Flint have endured. Education offers the primary avenue through which the cognitive and behavioral effects of lead exposure can be mitigated. More fundamentally, in Flint, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the United States for a city of its size, well-resourced and high-functioning schools are essential tools for self-empowerment, upward mobility, and ascendancy out of poverty.

The lawsuit filed in 2016 recognizes that Flint’s public schools must be at the frontlines of the effort to respond to an unprecedented crisis and to provide the children of Flint with the educational opportunities that they are entitled to by law.

Even before the lead crisis, Flint’s public education system was failing its students. Graduation rates were low, suspension rates were high, and the district faced a crippling deficit. Now, after at least 18 months of lead exposure, the educational emergency facing Flint’s children is more intractable and severe.

The pending litigation has three main components: It seeks to identify all children in Flint with disabilities, including those potentially caused or exacerbated by lead exposure; to provide such children with appropriate educational programs and services to address their disabilities; and to stop the cycle in which children with undetected or unaddressed disabilities are punished and blamed for behavioral manifestations of those very same disabilities, and consequently removed from the classroom setting, compounding their cumulative educational deficits.

The experience of one of our representative plaintiffs puts this cycle into sharp relief. He was suspended from school more than 30 times and charged with more than 50 infractions when he was only 6 years old, all because he did not receive the interventions he needed. Instead, he was punished for escalating behaviors. As a result, his academic progress lagged, and he was effectively pushed out of the public school system into an online virtual school, where he is isolated from the benefits of social and educational engagement with classmates.

The proper and timely identification of disabilities is the subject of the partial settlement reached after we brought a motion for a preliminary injunction to obtain immediate emergency relief. The preliminary injunction sought testing for all 30,000 children in Flint to ascertain, as a threshold matter, the scope and magnitude of their educational needs.

As a result of the settlement, a two-tiered, streamlined triage process will be implemented in Flint under Hanna-Attisha’s leadership. The first tier consists of universal, survey-based screening whereby children with suspected disabilities will be identified in a timely manner. Those flagged for further testing (along with those whose parents or guardians elect such testing regardless of survey outcomes) will be escalated to the second tier for a battery of in-depth evaluations at the new Neurodevelopmental Center of Excellence.

These evaluations will include neuropsychological examinations—the most advanced, state-of-the-art testing uniquely calibrated to detect lead’s effects. Introducing such testing in Flint represents the cutting edge of education law, and marks the intersection where education, medicine and public health meet.

Under the settlement, Flint schools will use the test results in the design of special education programs and services. Flint schools, Genesee County and the state of Michigan have also committed to engage in public outreach to maximize enrollment in the screening program. They will concurrently provide training and professional development to teachers, administrators and school staff to enable them to recognize suspected disabilities, including those potentially linked to lead, and to refer children for necessary testing.

Michigan has committed more than $4 million to fund this initiative.

We believe this is the most comprehensive program in the nation to identify children with disabilities, a precondition to ensuring that those disabilities are properly addressed. The parents and children of Flint have been waiting for such a program since the ill-fated decision to switch their water source, and have bravely allowed us to tell their stories to achieve this result.

Without the precedent-setting reforms this lawsuit secured, Flint’s children would be denied meaningful access to essential educational resources, and their opportunities to contribute to society through productive civic engagement, and to thrive personally, could be permanently foreclosed. This is consequently one of the most important education and civil rights cases in the country. The vindication of the rights of the children of Flint accomplished through the settlement of the first phase of the case stands as a landmark victory.

Lindsay Heck is an associate at White & Case. She is in the commercial litigation practice group. Her practice focuses on complex business disputes, representing large corporations in a variety of industries, including securities, pharmaceuticals, technology and health care. Heck has also been active in representing a variety of pro bono clients, including the parents of thousands of schoolchildren in high-poverty, underfunded school districts.