By Adam Pagnucco.
Recently, the school board reviewed MCPS’s legal fees in FY24. And here’s the headline: if the current trend continues, MCPS could eventually pay out more legal fees this year than any other year in at least a decade.
Each month, the school board gets a report on legal fees that tracks monthly payments and contains comparative year-to-date data with the prior fiscal year. MCPS’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30. Legal fees are reported in special education and non-special education categories.
The April 11 report covers six months of FY24: July 2023 through December 2023. So far, here is how legal fees compare to the same period in FY23.
Special Education
FY23: $162,734
FY24: $210,527
Non-Special Education
FY23: $299,337
FY24: $1,101,418
Total
FY23: $462,071
FY24: $1,311,945
So far, legal fees are up by 184% compared to the first six months of the last fiscal year.
How do this year’s fees rank historically? I was able to use prior legal fee reports to construct annual totals since FY12. These are shown in the table below.
Bear in mind that each year shows a full twelve months except for FY24, which shows only six months. If FY24 legal spending continues at the current rate, it would total $2,623,890 for the year, which would be the highest level in at least a decade.
The primary drivers of these fees are payments to two firms. Jackson Lewis, which wrote a report about the Joel Beidleman scandal, has so far collected $303,833. Wilmer Hale, which has defended MCPS against a lawsuit by parents wanting to opt out of curriculum materials, has so far collected $317,674. Without those two firms, MCPS’s legal spending would be unremarkable in FY24.
This data does not appear to cover the cost of legal settlements with plaintiffs. Last September, the Washington Post reported that MCPS agreed to pay $9.7 million to the families of four Damascus High School football players who were sexually assaulted. If that money was paid, it does not appear in this data. Also, MCPS’s $1.3 million payment to former Superintendent Monifa McKnight and any payments it may have made to Beidleman may never appear in these reports. McKnight’s payment was not agreed to until February 28, which comes after the December cutoff of the latest legal fee report.
It’s helpful for MCPS to report how much it pays to outside law firms. But until it also systematically reports its settlement payments to plaintiffs and departing employees, we will never get a full accounting of all of the school district’s legal spending.