2 School Board incumbents duck and cover on Dem activist school bd. attorney

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2 School Board incumbents duck and cover on Dem activist school bd. attorney

Published: Tuesday, October 15th, 2024 @ 12:19 pm
By: John Steed ( More Entries )

The school board attorney hired by the nominally Republican Beaufort County Board of Education is the chairman of the leftwing Durham County Democratic Party, rather than a local attorney as has been the case in the past. At the candidate forum last night, the three school board candidates who appeared were asked about that.

The two incumbnets, T. W. Allen and Carolyn Walker ducked and covered. They claimed they saved money by hiring him but never addressed the fact that he is a partisan Democrat leader. The challenger at the event, Stacey Davis, who is running against liberal Democrat incumbent Mac Hodges, said she thought the School Board should hire someone local to look out for our own local interests. Walker is unopposed in November. Allen faces David Hudson, a conservative Republican running as an Unaffiliated due to a registration snafu. Neither Hudson nor Hodges attended the candidate forum.

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Van Zant said:

( October 16th, 2024 @ 3:40 pm )

Yeah, you get what you pay for (the public pays in this instance). Did the Board actually do any research on this hire?

Concerned Taxpayer said:

( October 16th, 2024 @ 10:16 am )

Saving money by hiring an attorney who is not really going to look out for your interests because he has a much better paying client who may have contrary interests is the economy of a fool. It is like saving money by turning the heat down in the schools to 60. With attorneys, you have to have one who will go to the mat for you, or you are wasting your money. There is an old saying that "you get what you pay for" when it comes to "bargains" like this.

Will Simmons said:

( October 15th, 2024 @ 10:06 pm )

Cheeseman has got to go.
#CutTheCheese

We need someone who can understand the fall of civilization occurring due to technology, not actively engaging in it.

In my opinion, no child under the age of 16 should have their own phone or computer. Lazy parents have created the brain rot generation that our schools are beginning to deal with. A lot of children cannot answer word problems simply because they have the attention span of a fly. If they are actually focused on something, it’s crap.

Steven P. Rader said:

( October 15th, 2024 @ 8:24 pm )

Yes, having our school board attorney being halfway across the state instead of local, and being chairman of one of the most leftwing Democrat county organizations in NC, are issues, and significant, but they are not the biggest concern with the present arramgement. That is the potential conflict of interest in having somebody whose most significant clients tie him closely to the liberal state education establishment also represent at the same time a more conservative local board.

Potential conflicts arise all the time between local government units and state government entities. Having served as General Counsel, or chief lawyer, for the largest department of NC state government in the Jim Martin administration myself, I am well aware of that potential. I am also aware that it can be very real with the school systems as well if you have a local board that will stand up to the Raleigh establishment. We had a school board attorney from a nearby county active in a political organization of which I was an officer back in the late 1970s and he told us that one of the biggest things he had to deal with was telling the state DPI that NO, they did not have the authority to tell his local board what to do on a variety of matters.

That conflict of interest is very relevant currently on curriculum. Legislative legal staff advised Rep. Kidwell that the county board of education had full authority to adopt whatever curriculum they wanted. This school board attorney, however, who is tied into the state education apparatus in Raleigh, keeps telling them they have to follow the state DPI on curriculum.

That is why the weak as water local School Board policy provision on Critical Race Theory is crafted with an excpetion you could dirve a Mack Truck through. It waives the prohibition if state curriculum provides for CRT.

The current Durham attorney's big education client is the NC School Boards Association, a group run by very liberal bureaucrats that tends to be in lockstep with the liberal bueraucrats at DPI. That organization is dominated by the liberal school boards of the big urban counties. They took no action, for example, to assist local school boards against Biden's attempt to hijack Title IX. The current Beaufort County school attorney is on retainer to this state body to handle major lawsuits against local school boards. All the local boards which are members pay into a fund to cover such lawsuits. It is a stretch for school board members to claim he "represented" county schools "at the state level" before they hired him as county school board attorney. Who he actually represented, and it would be a major client for him, was the fund managed by the NC School Boards Association. Only if Beaufort County schools had been sued would he have been called in to represent them. It seems there are more than one attorney who does that as the Davidson County School Board which is now being sued over suspending a student over his asking a question about "illegal aliens" in class is being represented by a different attorney in that lawsuit.

As to the partisan or ideological nature of legal positions in government, my time in the Martin administration showed clear examples of that. At the end of the administration, the incoming governor was of a different party, Democrat Jim Hunt, and he removed all of the departmental general counsels immediately on taking office and replaced us with Democrats. Governor Martin had similarly replaced all the Democrats he had inherited when he took office with Repuvlicans.

Governor Martin's own General Counsel advised department general counsels not to request Attorney General opinions because Democrat Attorney General Lacey Thornburgh was likely to put a partisan flavor to them. Two AG opinions pertaining to our department that I shot down shows how politics can enter into these things. In one AG opinion they "overlooked" a statute that was right on point and destroyed their argument. In another they cited the opening provisions of a federal statute, which seemed to support their position, but ignored the next few sentences of the same statute that destroyed their position. While legal issues can often be in a grey area that can be argued either way, in those two instances the AG's pffoce played fast and loose with the statutes involved to push the politically driven result they wanted.

I do not know when the contract of the current school board attorney is up for review, but when it is, all of these issues need to be thoroughly discussed. The position should also be put out for tender to local attorneys in Beaufort County and nearby counties.