Harrisburg School District considers rehiring controversial attorney as solicitor

Harrisburg’s school board will try again Monday to hire a new school board solicitor.

Harrisburg attorneys James Ellison, a private practitioner with 20 years of history in city politics and government, and Trent Hargrove, who has no experience in school law, are being considered to replace current solicitor Samuel Cooper, a source close to the decision told PennLive.

The district’s Monday, April 15, agenda only provides one line in regards to the naming: “Appointment of In-House Solicitor for the District.”

Of the two, Ellison has the most experience working with school boards. However, his most recent relationship didn’t end well. Ellison parted ways with the Coatesville Area School District in 2013 in the midst of Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan’s investigation of the school system.

Ellison was named over 200 times in the grand jury report. It was published Dec. 3, 2014.

Less than two years later, Ellison and Rhoads & Sinon, his former law firm, agreed to pay the school district $420,000 to settle a lawsuit that alleged he provided flawed advice and overbilled the district when he worked as the solicitor.

The grand jury report spelled out Ellison’s billing practices. Not only was he paid more than previous board solicitors, but he also consistently invoiced the district the same amounts regardless of hours worked, the grand jury report showed.

The school district also paid for Ellison’s electronic devices, which the district attorney noted were also used for Ellison’s other clients. See the legal bills per year below.

Effort to hire an in-house school district solicitor exposes old fault lines in Harrisburg School Board

Action is tabled after noisy argument over a process that resulted in two candidates, including one controversial former solicitor for the district.

In addition to describing Ellison’s billing practices, in which he’d file vague explanations as to what he had done within the hours he submitted for pay, the grand jury report noted that Ellison placed politics over students.

Among the findings in the report, the district attorney’s office said when Coatesville’s technology director, Abdallah Hawa, discovered a series of racially and sexually offensive text messages exchanged between former Athletic Director James Donato and Superintendent Richard Como, rather than tell the public the truth Ellison spent taxpayers’ money to cover up the texts.

Hawa discovered the messages when he was reissuing a cell phone.

Instead of complying with Ellison’s legal advice to destroy evidence of his meeting with Hawa and Coatesville’s Area School District Director of Middle Schools Dr. Theresa Powell, Hawa made a copy of the district’s surveillance video to share with law enforcement.

Once the school board was brought into the loop about the texts, the board and Ellison agreed that he would investigate the text messages. But, that turned out to be a witch hunt seemingly against anyone who wouldn’t go along with Ellison’s advice, the grand jury report explained.

During a one-week period in September, the Coatesville board incurred over “20 hours of legal fees just resisting Right to Know requests related to the text messages.”

“That equates to over $3,400 spent, in one week alone, NOT to inform the public,” the grand jury report said. “Moreover, the Board incurred these fees and resisted these requests even knowing the legal basis for doing so was doubtful. As the following email from Ellison to this colleague states succinctly: The Board does NOT want to turn over the transcript. Let’s find an exception. They understand that it’ll end up in litigation and we could ultimately lose somewhere down the line, but they prefer that option to releasing the info.”

The board followed Ellison’s direction and wound up spending “over $100,000 of public money investigating and targeting Powell and Hawa,” the grand jury report noted. And, it didn’t end there.

Board directors spent “$85,659 for the services of Reclamere, a private computer and data security firm, engaged by Solicitor Ellison three days after Powell and Hawa disclosed their role as whistleblowers."

Added the report: “While the Board, both publicly and in their testimony, tried to characterize these services as a routine record retention step taken in response to potential litigation, Reclamere’s internal memos, work, meeting, and call notes all demonstrate that Reclamere’s efforts were directed almost exclusively toward gathering evidence against Powell and Hawa and preventing further public disclosures."

Harrisburg’s school board tabled the subject last month. President Danielle Robinson said restructuring the district’s legal fees could be a cost-savings. But state-appointed Chief Recovery Officer Janet Samuels disagreed with Robinson’s approach to seeking a new solicitor.

The argument between the two interrupted the school board meeting and delayed any further action to make the hire.

Robinson noted the idea of seeking new representation isn’t a reflection of Cooper’s work. She said the district has paid between $800,000 and $1 million for years, and she’d like to rein that in.

Ellison has no record of public discipline by the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the state board that handles professional complaints against attorneys. His license is listed as “active” with his current practice, Susquehanna Legal Group.

Once a former Mayor Steve Reed ally, Ellison was general counsel for the Harrisburg School District during 1997-99 and again after Reed’s takeover of the schools during 2001-05. However, the district stopped using Rhoads & Sinon in 2008. A year later, Ellison ran Linda Thompson’s mayoral race against Reed and later served as a key advisor during the early days of her administration, a time period that included the ouster of then-superintendent Gerald Kohn.

Hargrove, meanwhile, has little direct experience in school law. Since wrapping up 20 years in state government in 2012, he has worked in private practice and served as the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s diversity officer.