Having the law in your pocket Part 1

GUEST EDITORIAL

Have you ever considered what it would be like to have your own personal genie . . . especially if he wasn’t limited to just three wishes?  This is not just a fantasy for young children.  Grown adults can have a real-life version of this.  Or at least certain adults in key positions of power can.  The adult version of this is having your own private attorney, especially one for which someone else has to foot the bill!  Follow along as I lay out one such case.

Imagine you are the superintendent of a large, successful school district.  The principal obstacles you face are: 1) laws that constrain your actions, and 2) community members that want to have a say in running the district.  The solution to both challenges is a good attorney.

A large, progressive organization like your school district is inevitably going to encounter legal “nuisances.”  A good attorney is a legal bulldozer.  His job is to find legal pretext for you to get away with doing whatever you set out to accomplish.  His job is to negotiate all the burdensome laws in your path so that you can still do whatever you want, regardless of what naïve and troublesome state and federal legislatures intended.

As the leader of the community’s schools, you are technically accountable to your community.  You are not supposed to get to just do whatever you want.  Community members elect a school board to represent them in governing the school district by directing your work.  This is where the genius of having a private attorney comes in.  A good attorney will stand as buffer between you and the school board, ensuring your rightful place as the uncontested commandant of schools (and the most powerful member of your community).

A good attorney tells others what to believe.  Despite your extensive education, robust experience, and innate wisdom, the school board may sometimes attempt to direct your work.  (The audacity of some people!)  Not to worry, you can just have your attorney advise the board that what you are doing is legally mandated.  The board will fall in line.  You can invite your attorney to regale them with horror scenarios of potential lawsuits if they don’t do as you say.  Not only will the board fall in line, they also will compose loyalist ballads praising your goodness and wisdom.

A good attorney tells others how to behave.  Perhaps a renegade school board member might periodically gets the notion it is his job to represent the public, rather than merely to facilitate and celebrate your agenda.  Not to worry, your attorney can sternly warn him about the legal repercussions – including even personal liability – should he attempt to interface with the public that elected him.

A good attorney can invert the law for you.  If need be, an attorney can even make law say its opposite.  If the law says that because an individual school board member is not empowered to speak for the full board, he is therefore at liberty to interface with the public, a good attorney can selectively excerpt from that law to pretend it says the exact opposite!

A good attorney creates consensus.  When the school board is divided on an issue, the attorney can again explain to the school board how being divided opens them up to lawsuits.  Unless they act unanimously, they are subject to legal scrutiny and legal challenge.  With this drumbeat so regularly and loudly sounding in their ears, school board members quickly come to understand that their elected responsibility is to listen to the attorney and echo whatever he tells them.

A good attorney suppresses dissent.  Perhaps you encounter parents protesting that your administrators interrogated their child – in a context that included allegations of misconduct that could result in legal consequences – without parents being informed and permitted to be present.  If parents have difficulty understanding how the pure hearts of school administrators qualify them to serve as both prosecution and defense in student interrogations, then you can summon your attorney.  With his spewing Latin phrases like “in loco parentis,” you can confuse and intimidate those parents into believing they forfeit their parental rights and authority while their kids are in school.

What would one pay for such a personal champion?  Again, the genius of this solution is that you as superintendent DON’T HAVE TO PAY A DIME for this service.  You can impose all the costs of your unlimited legal intimidation on the very community that you are using your attorney to rule over.

The only drawback here is the prospect that your attorney might have his own agenda.  As you employ him to subdue all opposition, the thought occasionally crosses your mind that your attorney might have a private agenda of his own.  He could use the extensive platform you have given him to advance a social agenda within your school district.  Oh well, there are some prices that one simply must bear for such an opportunity as this!

Click here for a recent article about the Ozark R-VI School District.

Who is the Ozark School District Attorney? Click here to find out!

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On a less satirical note, readers may have trouble understanding why I would allege that the school district attorney works for the superintendent, rather than the district as a whole.  They may have trouble understanding why the attorney should be seen as working for the superintendent rather than the board.

The superintendent consults directly and continuously with the attorney.  The board does not.  The superintendent performs his official duties principally during the business day.  So does the attorney.  The school board does not.  Furthermore, no single school board member, not even the president, is empowered to speak for the board (not in the sense of making decisions by himself anyway).  So it is only natural that the superintendent is the one who consults with the attorney.  He then either explains to the board what the attorney said, or he invites the attorney to do so at an after-hours gathering of board members.  Since the attorney consults with the superintendent most extensively, that is to whom his loyalties will be directed.  That is the one whose cause he will champion.

Law frequently can be interpreted in a variety of ways.  (That is precisely why it needs to be interpreted.)  The fact that two attorneys will battle in court to persuade the judge to interpret the law their way illustrates this fact.  An attorney advising a school board on what the law states is offering but ONE way of interpreting the law.  And that way will reflect whatever the superintendent wants the board to believe the law requires.

Board members work perhaps 8-12 hours per month on school business.  The superintendent works probably at least 60 hours per week (or approximately 260 hours per month).  The board’s natural disposition (thereafter heavily reinforced by Missouri School Board Association indoctrination) is to simply defer to the superintendent in all things anyway.  It doesn’t take much effort from the attorney to tip the board this way any time there is a temptation to counter the superintendent.

The board consistently ignores the fact that their relationship with the superintendent should be that of boss to employee.  Board members regularly repeat the mantra that they and the superintendent are all part of the same team.  They are supposed to be the COACH of that team.  The superintendent is the team captain.  When board members place themselves on the team alongside the team captain, their natural role then is simply to play along with whatever the superintendent wants.  Boss and employee naturally have slightly different perspectives, motives, agendas, visions, etc.  Since the superintendent has his own attorney, the only way for the board to effectively counter the influence of the superintendent’s attorney is for them to retain their own attorney distinct from the superintendent’s.

Click here for part 2…how this relates to the Ozark R-6 School District!

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