Manatee school district asks that former Lincoln officials pay $272,000 in legal fees

The School District of Manatee County is hoping to recoup almost $272,000 spent on attorneys and audits during the takeover of Lincoln Memorial Academy, a troubled charter school in Palmetto.

Attorneys for the district and the school’s ousted leaders met at a claims office on Thursday morning, adjacent to Flowers Baking Co. in Sarasota. They were joined by Robert Cohen, an administrative law judge who streamed the meeting from his office in Tallahassee.

The school board’s attorneys are working to collect the money from Lincoln Memorial Academy Inc., a company owned by Eddie Hundley, the school’s founder and its former principal.

Attorney Tag Feld is working on behalf of Lincoln Memorial in the dispute over attorneys’ fees. Feld said he would dispute any invoices that were not directly tied to the appeal hearing.

“Look at how much money they are spending,” he said.

The judge has yet to determine exactly how much the district will be paid.

The cost of litigation

Manatee school board members voted 4-1 to terminate Lincoln Memorial’s charter in July, citing problems with its finances and leadership.

The charter school filed an appeal in the Division of Administrative Hearings, and after four days in court, Cohen ruled in favor of the school board on Sept. 27. As the winning party, Manatee is now entitled to attorneys’ fees and costs related to the case, according to the judge.

Cohen will now finalize the amount and issue his order in January or February.

The clerks, paralegals and attorneys at Johnson Jackson PLLC spent more than 1,060 hours on the school board’s case. The staff at Sniffen and Spellman PA spent another 68 hours working on behalf of the board, totaling $175,658 in work between the two firms, according to their motion for fees.

Attorney Erin Jackson said she dedicated nearly all of her time to the case, putting other jobs to the side. She and her colleague, Terry Harmon, both charged $165 per hour, a discount on Harmon’s standard rate of $350 per hour, according to Thursday’s meeting.

“The amount charged was significantly less than the regular rate that we charge our private sector clients,” Jackson said.

The attorneys requested another $29,151 for the cost of transcripts, court reporters, subpoenas and other services, along with $67,087 for two forensic audits that took place after the takeover of Lincoln Memorial.

Audits of former Lincoln charter school

Sylint Group, a company that specializes in cybersecurity and digital forensics, reviewed the school’s computers, cloud accounts and emails, along with other software and devices.

And the school district’s internal auditor — Carr, Riggs and Ingram — immediately started a review of the school’s documents after its takeover.

“Among other things, the report identified the voluminous debts accrued by respondent, the source of some of those debts, and the funds that still remain unaccounted for,” Jackson and Harmon said in their motion.

The motion said Lincoln Memorial was “evasive and dismissive,” avoiding lawful, court-ordered requests for documents before, during and after the four-day hearing in August.

At the meeting on Thursday morning, Jackson said the lack of information created a need for audits, allowing the school board to fully understand the breadth and cause of Lincoln Memorial’s poor finances. The findings became a key component of Jackson’s argument, according to her recent motion.

“The evidence discovered and/or analyzed by Sylint and CRI was vital to demonstrating the necessity of Petitioner’s termination of the charter,” it read.

As a sanction for not producing the requested information, the school’s leaders should pay for both audits, Jackson argued on Thursday.

“LMA has made this unbelievably difficult by its repeated untruths, concealing information and failure to cooperate,” Jackson said on Thursday. “When a party makes it this hard, they should not have the ability or the right to complain about how much it costs.”

In response, Feld repeated an argument that was continually used during the hearing in August. When the school board assumed control of Lincoln Memorial, district officials seized all of its documents and electronics, leaving the school’s former leaders with nothing to produce, he said.

“Every single piece of paper, every single record, was seized by the Manatee County School Board,” Feld continued. “They had access to everything.”

Feld also pointed to the meeting on July 23, when the board took control of Lincoln Memorial and agreed to move forward with the forensic reviews. The audits were approved before the existence of an appeal, Feld said, arguing that both contracts were unrelated to hearings and legal fees.

Judge Cohen seemed to disagree. During the meeting on Thursday, he said Manatee’s school board knew that Lincoln Memorial was running at a deficit and struggling to pay its contracts, creating the need for a thorough and highly relevant audit.

“This was in no way, shape or form a routine audit being performed by CRI,” the judge said. “It was a forensic audit looking for money that was believed to have gone missing, and ultimately, based on my findings, is proven to have gone missing.”

What happens next?

Furthering her argument about Lincoln Memorial’s cooperation, or lack thereof, Jackson highlighted several depositions, when the school’s former leaders invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.

The appeal hearing began less than one month after the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General notified the district that it was investigating Hundley and the school’s former chief financial officer, Cornelle Maxfield.

At the meeting on Thursday morning, Feld said it was unfair to hold the depositions against Hundley and Maxfield, who were torn between the need to defend their school and the desire to protect themselves against a federal inquiry.

“If someone is under investigation, you’re requiring them to testify against themselves, and that is not permitted under our judicial system,” Feld said.

Regardless of the reason, their silence was an important consideration for Judge Cohen, according to his statements on Thursday morning.

“It’s pretty hard for a judge sitting on a case to review the evidence when the two principal witnesses are unable to testify or unwilling to testify to information that could exonerate them,” he said during the meeting.

The case was still active as of last week, according to an email from Catherine Grant, public affairs liaison for the inspector general’s office.

“Per our policy, we do not discuss details of our ongoing work,” she wrote. “This longstanding policy is in place to protect and maintain the integrity of our efforts.”

Meanwhile, the school’s former leaders are fighting the charter termination and the judge’s decision in a state appeals court. Wasson and Associates, the firm representing Lincoln Memorial Academy Inc., recently filed a motion to “stay” the termination, allowing the former leaders to regain control during the appeal process.

They outlined four conditions, including a promise that Hundley would stay off campus, though he would still work for the school as a curriculum specialist. The school would also hire a certified public accountant to manage the finances, and every employee, volunteer and administrator would receive a thorough background check, the motion states.

In his order denying their motion, Cohen said there were “no circumstances under which he would order current or former officers or employees of LMA to set foot on the school grounds,” short of a successful appeal.