As members of the Akron Board of Education discussed in late June what might happen if they declined to approve a transportation contract, Superintendent Michael Robinson suggested they might want to talk to a lawyer about the potential consequences.
A lawyer also would have been helpful this spring as board members tried to understand their options as they considered changing Akron Public Schools’ redistricting policy to speed up the process of taking a vote.
And at its first meeting of the year, the board’s decision to go into executive session to discuss a tutoring contract led to lawsuits that might have been avoided with access to legal advice about how to handle the issue.
But despite multiple requests by board members in committee meetings, in full board meetings and in other instances, the district does not have a lawyer who attends the twice-monthly business meetings where decisions are made.
With no legal representative poised to answer board members’ inquiries, it’s not clear how the school board can deal with basic legal questions during the course of a public meeting. So far this year, their public requests for answers have not been heeded.
School Board President Diana Autry said in an interview the board’s legal representation has offered privileged legal advice in writing.
But frustrated with the lack of accessible legal advice from the law firm under contract to represent the board, members in June decided not to rehire the firm. Its two owners, who did not attend the public meetings, also said in a letter that they no longer wanted the work.
“This was a very difficult decision, but we believe it is in everyone’s best interests,” Megan Bair and Lindsay Gingo, of Gingo & Bair, wrote in a June 13 letter. The letter did not offer an explanation for why they did not want to renew their contract but said the decision had been made after “lengthy consideration.” Gingo did not respond to a phone call and an email seeking comment.
‘Not in a position to break the law’
Last month, the issue came up again — this time, school board members were unsure whether taking a second vote on the transportation contract they’d previously declined presented a legal issue, as one board member insisted it did.
“It would be nice if we had an attorney here to guide us and let us know if we are breaking the law,” board member Rene Molenaur remarked.
She asked if any board members felt comfortable answering the question of the legality of taking action. Her request was met with a long silence.
Autry, the school board president, said the district’s legal counsel — who communicates through the school board president — hadn’t raised the issue of taking another vote prior to the meeting. Still, she described the situation during the board meeting as “not clear and muddy.” Later, in an interview, she said the issue would not have been brought to the board if it wasn’t legal.
Board members tabled the issue rather than risk a vote that might be illegal. Doing so further delayed a decision regarding school transportation for some students; a special meeting to resolve the issue has been scheduled for Monday afternoon.
In voting to table the proposal, board member Job Perry, an attorney, said he wanted to “make sure we’re not breaking the law, first of all.”
Board member Barbara Sykes questioned the process of getting to a new vote and whether attorneys had been consulted at all about the proper way to reconsider an item that had gone through a public bid process but had already been voted down.
“This is asking us not to follow our rules, this is asking us not to follow state law,” she said. “I am not in a position to break the law here.”
A history of issues
The issues regarding legal counsel date back to at least the beginning of the year, when school board members at their first meeting in January discussed the Varsity Tutors program in executive session before holding a public vote. Autry said at the time that was because there were legal questions about the program.
Since then, the district has settled a lawsuit for $4,850 brought by Brian Ames, an open meetings advocate, in response to what he alleged was an illegal meeting to discuss the tutoring contract. The district did not admit fault in agreeing to the March settlement.
The district also contended with outside legal fees related to a lawsuit filed by the Akron Education Association seeking an injunction to stop the tutoring program. School board members later rescinded the vote approving the program. The lawsuit, which also dealt with an open meetings issue, was later amended to remove the injunction request.
The legal questions regarding Varsity Tutors were followed by a tumultuous period regarding the best way to go about a redistricting vote. In March, school board members approved a new redistricting policy that allowed them to fast-track a vote but eliminated public comment from the process.
They did so after asking that an attorney attend the meeting to clarify why changes needed to be made; no attorney was present.
Sykes said in March that an email sent by the attorney was insufficient and did not clarify why changing the rules, instead of suspending them, was the best action for the board to take.
“It’s inappropriate for the attorney not to be here,” she said then.
In July, board members voted to reinstate public comment for redistricting decisions.
Voting to require attendance from attorneys, when requested
The district had an in-house attorney until January 2019 but has since relied on outside counsel; Gingo & Bair had worked for the district since 2022.
The firm’s letter came three days after a meeting in which board members tabled their decision on renewing the legal contracts for eight law firms they had a relationship with, and where Gingo & Bair’s performance had been a topic of conversation.
When the legal contracts returned to the board for a vote June 24, only seven firms’ names were on the agenda. Board members approved the request for those seven firms to do legal work for the district.
In doing so, they added a provision to the hiring resolution saying that “attendance at Board meetings, Special meetings and/or Committee meetings upon the Board’s or Administration’s request” or for other purposes was necessary.
“We need to have an attorney present at our meetings,” Sykes said last week. “I think we’ve been showing that over and over again.”
Since the provision was added, though, there still has not been an attorney to answer questions at a school board meeting.
And Autry said she didn’t intend for there to be in the future.
“We are not going to [have] an attorney giving us legal advice in public,” she said. “Any future president can carry on as they see fit. I am not going to have those types of legal conversations in a public setting.”
Lack of in-house counsel could mean higher costs
The general counsel position was eliminated before Robinson arrived, his chief of staff, Angela Carter, said in a statement.
“The board has attorneys they can consult,” she said.
But that could come with a price. According to the district’s legal budget from 2017 to present, the cost of legal services has been higher most years with outside attorneys than it was when Rhonda Porter served as an in-house counsel until January 2019. Mark Williamson, a district spokesperson, said in a message that purchasing the service from outside providers gives the district more flexibility regarding price and who they want to work with.
The district’s budget does not break down line items for legal expenditures, but totaled $769,227 in 2017 and $585,240 in 2018. The legal fees of $617,048 for 2021 were the lowest for the subsequent six years after the in-house position was eliminated. On average, the annual legal fees for those six years topped $1 million, including a budgeted $1.41 million in 2024.
Stuart Berger, the CEO of Burns/Van Fleet, a consulting firm that completed a transition report for Akron Public Schools, said when it came to legal services, “I don’t understand this organization.”
For a school district of this size, he said, it’s “very unusual” not to have an in-house attorney.
“I recommended that there be a full-time person,” he said of his report. “If somebody thought they were going to save money by [not having one], they were sadly mistaken.”
‘A security blanket’
In the instances when outside attorneys have been present, they have sometimes added to the trouble. Notably, in May, board members abruptly stopped an in-progress meeting and convened in a back room after an attorney, Chris Williams with Pepple and Waggoner, said he was concerned that a school board committee meeting was illegal because too many members who were not appointed to the committee were in attendance.
State law prohibits elected officials from privately meeting in groups that represent the majority of a board, unless they are in an approved executive session. The committee meeting was a properly noticed, public meeting that did not have a restriction on attendance.
Williams was at the meeting representing the human capital department to discuss planned job cuts.
Reporters followed board members to the back room, where Williams asked if they wanted to “disclose the contents of my communication with the board, attorney-client communication, privileged communication.” Board members agreed to, and soon returned to the meeting.
Sykes said his statement “blew my mind.” She called the attorney-client privilege comment “a security blanket.”
Attorney-client privilege is something that Gingo, the attorney who previously represented the board, has also used to explain why she wasn’t at meetings to offer legal advice.
In an email to board members in March, around the time of the redistricting vote, Gingo said she would have been “professionally required to refuse to answer the question” if a board member asked about her legal advice in a meeting. It would be “highly inadvisable for the Board to act to waive attorney-client privilege,” she said, “and ask me to publicly speak to legal advice given.”
“That could create a scenario where your attorney is forced to become a person testifying to the detriment of the district,” she wrote. “Very respectfully, please know our firm would withdraw from representation before we would do that and jeopardize the Board and district in any way.”
Instead, she offered to respond to questions via email or in executive session, when appropriate. While she was aware that there have been suggestions that legal counsel be at meetings, Gingo wrote in the email that her firm had not been invited to sit in on all board meetings.
“From my vantage point, things you might consider are the cost of doing that balanced against the benefit, and that any legal counsel (myself or someone else) is going to be bound by attorney-client privilege throughout that process,” she wrote. “Counsel could, of course, support the Board without giving public legal advice (for example, being available to speak to board leadership during a recess).”
Frustrations mount
After the May incident, where the committee meeting was stopped because the attorney thought too many board members were present, Autry said in an interview she was “fine” with the district’s attorneys and would not engage in conversations around the district’s legal representation. She said she didn’t want to “litigate” the board’s relationship with its attorneys.
“That’s for the board to figure out,” she said.
Still, she said after the March redistricting vote that while the board could have opted to go against Gingo’s advice, she did not know board members had the option to suspend rules, instead of changing the redistricting policy, “until it was probably too late.”
“It wasn’t until the day before the meeting I was aware that was an option,” she said. “It was too late to change the agenda.”
For other board members, the lack of regular legal advice continues to be a frustration. Carla Jackson, the school board’s vice president, said in May that it was concerning that the advice the district was receiving “is not overall the best option.”
“At this point, my position is valid concerns are being raised regarding counsel,” she said. “These are areas of concern.”
Incidents like the May committee meeting are among the many reasons why the board needs someone to attend meetings who knows the dos and don’ts of conducting school board business, Sykes said in May. She said she wants the board’s attorney to “be the voice of reason that makes me feel comfortable.”
Not having that, she said, is a big problem.
“I want common sense advice, and I want all the options,” she said in a May interview. “I have not been given a sense of comfort, which is what I expect attorneys to do.”
The result of absent legal advice when board members request it, Sykes said, is frayed trust with the community at a time when the district is asking voters to approve a levy in the fall.
Trust with board members is also frayed. Molenaur, who said fellow board members communicated the message that she needed to leave the May committee meeting on the advice of the attorney because she wasn’t a member of the group that was meeting, said without direct communication, it was impossible to know if the issue was “bad advice or a bad game of telephone.”
That came after she was told in March she couldn’t address redistricting questions to the attorney directly, she said; questions had to go through board leadership.
Molenaur said after the redistricting vote she was “troubled” an attorney was not present even when board members requested one. It was “completely unfathomable” that there was no one who could help board members make decisions, she said.
“I perhaps naively felt our public request for one … meant someone would be there,” she said. “There was a better way to do things. We can do better, and we should strive to do better by our community.”