Check CU has acquired legal invoices showing line by line expenses related to an Open Meetings Act (OMA) violation by the Yorkville, Illinois Community School District 115 Board of Education last year.
On December 31st, 2023, we published an article about a determination issued by the Illinois Attorney General that the District had violated the OMA by unlawfully closing an 80 minute long portion of their meeting from public view.
The meeting in question was a closed “executive session” discussion about the removal of the book Just Mercy from the curriculum for being “too controversial”. However, Chief Deputy Attorney General Brent Stratton determined that the Board of Education had no right to conceal their discussion from public view.
The decision to remove the book from the curriculum, along with the efforts by the Board to keep the matter hidden from public view, caused considerable strife between the Board and many members of the public, including parents of students.
More than one month after the Attorney General decision and order that the meeting recording be publicly released, the District finally relented and provided a copy of that recording to Check CU on January 29th. The recording has since been viewed over 500 times.
Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, we obtained possession of the District’s legal expenses incurred while fighting the release of the closed meeting recording. From July 12th, 2023 to November 20th, 2023 the District had paid $20,180 to the law firm Hodges, Loizzi, Eisenhammer, Rodick & Kohn LLP. This amount does not take into account time and hours spent internally by District employees, such as their own legal staff.
Since the Attorney General determination was not issued until December 27th, 2023, it is also likely that there have been additional legal expenses from December and into January which weren’t billed at the time of our January 11th FOIA request.
The legal invoices we obtained are provided below.
Loading…
Reload document 
Open in new tab
If it was illegal put them in jail
I asked at the last school board meeting whether the attorneys knew about the plan to go into closed session, were they in attendance, did the board president ignore the mandate to discuss only the matters allowed in closed session that lasted 80 minutes where the entire time was spent planning how to remove the book
There has been no public discussion about this book nor the steps taken to ban its use in the curriculum