Lawsuit against LR5 over closed-door decision was put on ice. Now, it could be revived

A lawsuit brought by The State newspaper against the Lexington-Richland 5 school district might be given a second life after judges on the S.C. Court of Appeals indicated they believed the suit never should have been dismissed.

“I don’t understand this ruling at all,” Judge Stephanie McDonald said at one point in an appeal hearing Tuesday, referring to a lower court’s decision to throw out the suit in 2022.

Circuit Court Judge Alison Lee dismissed the lawsuit in 2022 but did not address the substance of senior editor Paul Osmundson’s complaint challenging a settlement agreement with former schools superintendent Christina Melton that the district adopted without a public vote. Rather, Lee ruled that a hearing had not been scheduled in line with a 10-day limit set by the law.

Under state law, in a Freedom of Information Act complaint, “a hearing must be held within ten days of the service on all parties and a scheduling order to conclude the action must be held within six months,” Lee wrote in a short court order two years ago. “In this current matter, no hearing was held within the allotted timeframe. Therefore, the Motion to Dismiss is dispositive and the court need not determine the merits of the Summary Judgment claims.”

State law says that after a request for declaratory judgment or injunctive relief is requested in an FOIA case, “the chief administrative judge of the circuit court must schedule an initial hearing within ten days of the service on all parties.”

A panel of three appellate court judges who heard the appeal Tuesday seemed to think Lee’s ruling got the law backwards.

“The General Assembly’s point (in setting a 10-day limit for a hearing to be scheduled) was surely to streamline the process because they had declared this a matter of public importance,” McDonald said.

Judge Paula Thomas said it was hard to square that goal with a ruling that is punitive to a member of the public seeking to protect their right to public information.

“The plaintiff couldn’t schedule the hearing,” she said. “I can’t get much beyond that.”

The State’s attorneys argued the lawsuit should not have been dismissed over a technicality that wasn’t the plaintiff’s fault.

Attorney Patrick Quinn with the firm Nelson Mullins, arguing for The State alongside Joel Collins of Collins and Lacy, told the court that Lee’s ruling was a “clear error of law.”

“Precedent says we’re no less entitled to a ruling on the merits,” Quinn said.

Osmundson filed the suit against the district in August 2021, alleging the district violated the state’s Freedom of Information law in its approval of a settlement for a former superintendent who resigned her post.

Lexington-Richland 5’s former superintendent, Christina Melton, received $226,368 in a settlement from the district after she resigned in August 2021.

The State’s lawsuit alleges the Lexington-Richland 5 school board approved that settlement illegally behind closed doors. The suit also sought to require that meetings of school board officers be open to the public.

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The school district argued the agreement with Melton was reached in accordance with “an established practice in our state” for handling personnel matters and that board officers’ meetings did not constitute a public body subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Melton quit the district in a surprise move in June 2021, only a month after being named South Carolina’s Superintendent of the Year by the S.C. Association of School Administrators.

But Melton and several board members had disagreed over the pace of reopening schools during the coronavirus pandemic and the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions.

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Arguing for the school district at Tuesday’s appeal hearing, Ward Bradley of Moore Bradley Myers said Lee’s ruling to dismiss The State’s lawsuit was based on a “failure to prosecute the case” on Osmundson’s part. “They never made a motion for a hearing,” he said. “The clerk didn’t know. The judge didn’t know.”

While Osmundson’s initial filing asked for a hearing, “in the old days the clerk would just stamp that and put it in a folder,” Bradley said.

But appellate Judge Letitia Verdin again said the 10-day requirement “is for the benefit of the petitioner,” she said. “It’s not meant to be construed against them.”

After The State filed its lawsuit, the Lexington-Richland 5 school board approved the settlement agreement with Melton in a public vote, nearly two months after the superintendent announced her resignation. The district also began announcing its board officers’ meetings ahead of time and opening portions of them to the public.

Bradley argued that those moves negated the need for the lawsuit to continue.

But the three appeals judges kept their focus largely on the stated reason the lawsuit was initially dismissed.

“You might have the opportunity to argue that for a circuit court judge,” Thomas told the attorney.