Superintendent and Board of San Juan Island School District, I write with what is now becoming my yearly distress with the Districts explanation for the perceived budgetary constraint which unfortunately again comes to a head just at the start of the academic year. Again, the Superintendents explanations are insufficient, and again, it is the teachers and students who are asked to feel the pinch. As the Board and Superintendent will uncomfortably remember, it was last year at this time when many of us expressed our collective dismay at the literally inexplicable misplacement of nearly a quarter million dollars. A mistake resulting in elementary class sizes in the mid thirties; an entirely unacceptable result in a district as prosperous as ours. Now we are faced with the District taking the stance that the budget does not contain excess sufficient for a modest and long-deserved COLA for certificated employees. Knowing that the District opts to use private attorneys rather than the free-of-charge Prosecutors office, that is, by law (RCW 36.21.020), required to serve as the Districts lawyer, I made a public records for the documents showing the Districts legal fees paid private attorneys. As you know, this request yielded an invoice several hundred pages long. For your convenience I have posted them here: 131024 np records final1.pdf - https://drive.google/file/d/0B-gbxT4BCSzuQk0zUjVIWUUzS1Rqd1c0cUpZNXBnY2M4NFUw/edit?usp=sharing and here 131024 np records final2.pdf - https://drive.google/file/d/0B-gbxT4BCSzuRXJJRzNJWU0zUjQzcC1ibk5kbG91M3J0S2s4/edit?usp=sharing Frankly, I am shocked and disgusted by the fees that have accrued to the District. I am very distressed that work was invoiced for non-specialized and eminently straightforward tasks such as document review for public record requests. It simply cannot be seriously argued that these tasks require the specialization of outside counsel. That the District does not utilize our perfectly qualified, available, and best of all -- our already paid-for Prosecutors Office is an utterly avoidable waste of District resources. I suspect that this situation suits everyone very well from the administrations vantage. Superintendent Thompson benefits from having no local legal oversight, and his hired guns from Seattle are happy to bamboozle the Board with how complex and specialized school law (if there is such a thing) is -- while laughing all the way to the bank. The billing by the Districts counsel becomes even more outrageous when it is realized that they are paid $1250 dollars a month just to be AVAILABLE to undertake work for the District -- it is only after this payment is made that the hourly rate is charged in addition to the retainer. The expenditures on outside counsel are truly a gratuitous waste of District funds in if not all, very certainly most, cases. While I am deeply appreciative of everyones support of the District and community, I will not accept the explanation that no fat in the budget exists to fund a COLA. You should be paying your teachers, not your lawyers. Regards, Nicholas Power Attorney at Law
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 16:09:28 +0000