Month: June 2023

Josh Daniels is leaving – it is time to “reimagine” OUSD’s legal needs

~ kzt123 ~ Leave a comment

Chief Governance Officer Joshua Daniels is leaving OUSD in August, 2023, and OUSD is “planning” to do a central office reorganization this year as well. OUSD should use this opportunity to eliminate the Chief Governance Officer position and reimagine our legal strategy as a District to ensure we are using our student dollars efficiently and in alignment with their needs.

OUSD needs to eliminate the “Chief Governance Officer” position

Oakland Unified School District is the only California school district that has a “Chief Governance Officer” (or anything like it)1. The Board created the position for Josh Daniels in 2021 and extended his contract with a 17% raise in 2022. This Chief Governance Officer position puts Mr Daniels at the center of all policy making and district/board operations, and then uses the “attorney-client privilege” to shield it all from public view.  The first thing that the OUSD board needs to do is eliminate this position. 

The Board will be voting on an “interim general counsel” contract this week at the final board meeting of the academic year, and they are offering the position to OUSD Executive Director of Labor Relations & Alternative Dispute Resolution Jenine Lindsey, who was OUSD’s chief negotiator during BOTH of the recent OUSD teachers’ strikes. Ms Lindsey has been in the OUSD Labor Relations department since 2013, became the Executive Director in 2018 but was admitted to the California State Bar (i.e. became an attorney) in September 2022, just nine months ago. The salary plus benefits for the agreement total $294,686.

Most California School Districts do not have an in-house General Counsel

A few months ago as part of our review of Central Office Salaries, we discovered that most California School Districts do not have a General Counsel at all, instead relying on outside legal counsel on contract. 

Of the 939 k-12 school districts in California,2 we could only find 13 (or 1.38%) that had a “General Counsel” or “Legal Counsel” on staff3. The two largest school districts have a legal department, as does San Francisco Unified, but the vast majority of other districts, including every district in Alameda County, chooses not to use an in house general/legal counsel.

These in-house General Counsel are responsible for the wide variety of legal issues that confront a school district, from contracts and policy, government and ed code, construction, facilities, special Education, safety and of course Labor relations. As a result, General Counsel are generally, and in fact must be, seasoned attorneys with a broad expertise and understanding of the complicated legal issues they must address. Of those 13 districts with in house legal counsel, the lead attorney has between 10 and 41 years of legal experience4. 

While Ms Lindsey clearly has experience in the Labor Relations department, as an attorney of less than a year, she has not had the time needed to gain the broad expertise that the General Counsel position requires to do their job. Ms Lindsey is not the right person for this role at this time.

Instead of hiring a new general counsel right now, OUSD should take the time to do a deep dive into how we manage the legal needs of OUSD. Right now, we have about 5 attorneys in our legal office5 and we also have retention agreements with 28 different law firms at an astonishing “not to exceed” amount of $5,088,500 in possible legal costs for this year alone6.

OUSD needs to use this opportunity to examine exactly how much we are spending in legal costs, and whether our current “General Counsel along with large outside counsel contracts” model is the best way to serve our students, families and staff. In the meantime, we can use some of those outside counsel to provide legal advice as needed. Ask the board to vote “NO” to the interim general counsel contract and instead push for an in depth assessment of alternatives that serve students and staff while efficiently using the tax dollars generated by our students.