Did an attempt to cut legal costs cost Creg Williams his job?
In May during a Board of Education executive session, William Purdy moved that the district should continue to retain Lashly & Baer for its legal services. Ken Brostron, the attorney who has served the St. Louis Public Schools system since the first desegregation lawsuit was filed in 1977, works for that firm.
Creg Williams had told the American during its first at-length interview with the new superintendent in spring of 2005 that he wanted to have in-house counsel and to reduce the legal fees the district was paying.
Sources tell the EYE that Williams thought the district’s legal fees were excessive “and a lot more than they should have been for a district this size.”
The Philadelphia school district from which Williams was hired had a $6.1 million legal bill in Williams’ final year, but it has 235,000 students. He said he found it “unusual” for a district to outsource its legal work so heavily.
Williams succeeded in reducing legal fees. According to figures provided by SLPS during last week’s board meeting, the district’s legal bills dropped from $3.72 million in fiscal year 2004 (William Roberti’s year as superintendent), to $3.10 million in 2005 to $1.43 million during Williams’ first fiscal year.
While the savings are dramatic, the drama might have been too much for Purdy and Brostron, sources say.
Williams reportedly stopped receiving legal advice from Brostron after the April election, with Brostron reporting only to the four-member board majority.
“This appears to us to be just another case of the interest of adults winning out over the interests of children,” said Jeff Rainford, Mayor Francis G. Slay’s chief of staff.
“I think that it’s clear Creg Williams believed the district was spending too much on legal fees. But William Purdy cut him off at the knees.”
Williams wanted to settle the case involving millions of dollars pending from the desegregation lawsuit. Yes, the district had prevailed in the first round of litigation, but a judge later ruled that the case would have to be heard. Talk about a situation that cried out for negotiated settlement. Attorney General Jeremiah “Jay” Nixon, whose errant attacks on the deseg program helped ruin his 1996 senatorial bid against Christopher “Kit” Bond, has been quite wary of the case. Now that he is seeking the governor’s office, he certainly would have been open to settlement.
But Brostron apparently would have no part of it. Why take the risk, the EYE asks? Money could have been pumped back into the public schools, and the legal bills would have halted. Well, SLPS lost the case and its opportunity to settle.
But the influence of Lashly has continued. It was the legal team that hired Diana Bourisaw to audit the district, not district board members. In fact, board president Veronica O’Brien was reportedly notified of Bourisaw’s hiring as auditor on a letter printed on a Lashly letterhead. Having Bourisaw’s audit of the district handled through its legal counsel could have put any information about Williams’ tenure in the district gathered by the audit safely under the protection of attorney-client privilege.
This leads some credence to the suspicion that the new board majority and its legal counsel had Williams’ ouster in its plans as far back as late May. And it would suggest that the secrecy in which the details of Williams’ resignation have been shrouded was crafted in advance.