Your Opinion: Trend among schools districts to hire lawyers

Dear Editor:

Since coming out of retirement I have written several letters to the editor regarding education.

In a recent letter I made the remark that I considered education to be one of the cultural legs in our society. Since I retired a number of school districts in Mid-Missouri have hired lawyers to be the HR directors of the school district.

That is something new but I do not know if it improves things. The Columbia school district hired an outside attorney to head up the school district's bargaining team to face the school teacher bargaining team at the table. I will have to check the Missouri School Board Association training manual to see if this is something else they tell school boards to do. Back in my day the school administrators who are trained in school law and school finance were paid the big bucks to do the job that lawyers are paid to do in many of our school districts.

Several weeks ago I gave assistance to a teacher who filed a grievance in a school district in the south central part of the state and the school district hired an attorney out of Springfield to travel to the school district to conduct the grievance procedure. The school district got the answer they paid for in the grievance.

I understand the Jefferson City School District has hired a law firm out of Kansas City to have one of their attorneys to conduct an investigation into some of the school community concerns that have recently been in the news.

I called one of my colleagues in Kansas City and asked if they were familiar with this lawyer out of this law firm and they said yes. She shows up in a number of school districts to handle mostly issues around compliance with special education issues.

I remarked that things have changed since I retired. I guess school districts are hiring lawyers to do the job that administrators who were paid the big bucks to do. No my colleague said we still have the administrators who are paid the big bucks. They just farm out some of their work to law firms. That is interesting indeed.

Perhaps school patrons should check the public record and find out how many thousands of dollars of legal fees the taxpayers are paying each year for the last several years the school board is spending.