Maryland’s largest school district drove up its legal expenses by 548 percent last year hiring counsel to investigate the school district’s potential cover-up of sexual harassment and defend the district against parental complaints over mandatory LGBTQ curriculum.
Montgomery County Public Schools has so far spent $412,544 more on legal fees this fiscal period than last, “due to substantial litigation on two separate matters pending in Federal Court,” according to the district’s most recent legal-fees report. The district spent $75,191 on legal fees in July-August 2022 and $487,735 in July-August 2023.
MCPS has been involved in two high-profile cases since last year: Mahmoud v. McKnight, which challenges the district’s refusal to allow parents to opt their children out of sexuality and gender curriculum, and an investigation into the district’s alleged cover-up of a principal’s decades-long sexual abuse record. WilmerHale, the law firm representing MCPS in Mahmoud v. McKnight, cost Maryland taxpayers $195,184 in legal fees while another $195,626 went to Jackson Lewis, the Baltimore firm MCPS hired to investigate “significant allegations of harassment and bullying involving one of our principals.”
MCPS hired WilmerHale to combat claims that the district’s mandatory gender and sexuality lessons undercut parents’ First Amendment rights to opt their children out of lewd curriculum that violates their religious beliefs. An interfaith coalition of parents is asking MCPS to restore an opt-out option for the curriculum, which among other things, requires students to read LGBTQ books. Parents could opt their children out of the curriculum until the district abruptly and quietly changed its original policy in March 2023.
Halting instruction in gender and sexuality is “precisely what this curriculum is trying to prevent,” a lawyer from WilmerHale said during oral arguments in August. The curriculum is “critical for educating children in a diverse society” and “doesn’t work” unless all children participate, he added.
WilmerHale is the firm that helped JPMorgan Chase reach a settlement last year against victims of child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The bank was allegedly one of the financial institutions that ignored suspicious signs which may have pointed to evidence of Epstein’s trafficking ring.
The district hired Jackson Lewis after the Washington Post published a bombshell investigation into former Farquhar Middle School principal Joel Beidleman’s alleged pattern of misconduct. MCPS received 18 complaints against Beidleman in seven years and promoted Beidleman after receiving reports of his sexual harassment.
“The independent investigation that’s underway will help us get an objective look into how the system may have failed, and who may have failed it,” MCPS superintendent Monifa McKnight told the Post.
The “independent, external investigation” was questioned as such after media revealed that MCPS had previously hired Jackson Lewis to represent the district in “smaller” cases, school officials said. Janis Sartucci of the Parents’ Coalition of Montgomery County raised concerns over the firm’s potential conflict of interest in August, concerns that county executive Marc Elrich echoed.
“I don’t have any problem having an independent firm do [the investigation],” Elrich said. “I understand if the company has worked closely with the school system having concerns about whether or not they should be investigating the school system.”
The third-largest legal expense MCPS incurred was for special education outside counsel ($76,323). In December, the district recommended a $3.32 billion operating budget for FY 2025, a five percent increase from the district’s previous budget.