Fairfax County Public Schools is hiring an expensive K Street law firm as the school district is being investigated by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares.
According to the contract, which was first obtained by the Fairfax County Times, the K Steet law firm’s senior counsel is billing $2,225 per hour to FCPS. The law firm FCPS has hired is Sidley Austin LLP. The typical hourly rate for an attorney in Virginia is between $101 – $399 per hour, according to Clio Manage. The hourly rate for court-appointed counsel is up to $90 per hour, according to the Supreme Court of Virginia.
Attorneys in the Fairfax County Attorney’s Office earn between $28 dollars to $97 dollars per hour, according to Fairfax County’s pay scale. And Fairfax County taxpayers already fund an in-house legal team for FCPS.
On Friday, 7News asked FCPS why it is retaining an outside lawyer for $2,225 per hour.
“Unfortunately, FCPS has been required to retain legal counsel to counter recent baseless claims made by the Attorney General,” an FCPS spokesperson told 7News. “The Attorney General’s office blocked FCPS from working with any of the most highly-qualified and less expensive Virginia-based legal firms FCPS originally contacted and therefore the Attorney General is responsible for imposing these higher legal costs on taxpayers.”
“The FCPS legal team of seven was never sized to deal with the increasing number of claims coming out of the AG’s office,” the FCPS spokesperson added.
“There are thousands of practicing attorneys in the Commonwealth of Virginia,” Miyares Spokeswoman Victoria LaCivita told 7News on Sunday. “Fairfax is free to select any attorney or firm it wishes, subject to Virginia’s well-established ethics and conflict of interest rules. Fairfax’s claim that the OAG somehow blocked the county from retaining any Virginia-based firm is false and a distraction. It is also not the Attorney General’s fault that Fairfax County chose to implement policies that may violate the Virginia Human Rights Act.”
Right now, Miyares is investigating if FCPS violated the Virginia Human Rights Act with its new admissions policy into Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology which some parents say discriminates against Asian students. And the attorney general is investigating FCPS for delaying national merit recognition notifications to students at several high schools.
“We know Fairfax County hired an equity consultant from Berkeley, California, and paid this consultant $455,000 for about nine months of work and their recommendation was equal outcomes for every student without exception, even if it means treating some students purposefully unequally, and so our investigation is to determine, what does it mean to treat some students purposefully unequally and are you doing that based on who they are and their background? If they are, then that's a violation of the Virginia Human Rights Act,” Miyares told 7News Reporter Nick Minock in an interview on March 6, 2023.