APS; "... (the defendants) have hired an army of lawyers."

A development like that might come as a surprise to some.
It will not come as any surprise at all to anyone who has filed a complaint against a senior APS administrator or school board member.

The Journal comes this morning, link, with a report including perhaps the most telling eight words the Journal has ever printed about the leadership of the APS;

"... (the defendants) have hired an army of lawyers."

I'm sure it must have been an accident.  I posted this comment;

There is an expression about keeping one's eye on the ball. The Journal has (unwittingly) dropped "the ball" into a front page story;

"(APS) ... (the defendants) have hired an army of lawyers".

Full disclosure; those are not the Journal's words and I had to take them out of context to cut and paste them. Nevertheless, the Journal has mentioned APS "legal" defense tactics; one of which is to hire "armies of lawyers" to provide "cost is no object" legal defenses underwritten by "operational" funds. Operational dollars are dollars that would actually be spent in classrooms, were they not being squandered in courtrooms.

The ball; the underlying issue; the fundamental failure is that politicians and public servants, in this case school board members and superintendents without any real oversight. "Subordinate oversight" is not oversight; it is an oxymoron.

They and the law "allow" (as opposed to "require") them to spend unlimited amounts of operational dollars on their own defenses. They discuss and approve it all in meetings they hold in secret and relentlessly refuse to record.

They spend, if they want, on litigation and legal weaselry against the public interests. They spend in violation of the first ethic in their code of ethics;to spend ... in the best interests of students" Their code of ethics is of course, utterly unenforceable, by their own deliberate choice.

They spend until they have spent enough to make their problem go away, or at least until they have spent enough to but "admissions of no guilt"; the opportunity to take their name and guilt out of the settlement. Even for those who are guilty beyond reasonable doubt. All it takes is power. Power and or unlimited access to money that can be spent in secret from the people whose money it was.

This will be the last time the Journal drops the ball.

Not only will they never again mention the "army of lawyers" serving not justice, but rather and instead, the personal interests of school board members and superintendents, they will never investigate and report upon the millions of operational dollars the "leadership" of the APS spends every year to escape the legal consequences of their individual and collective incompetence and corruption.

It isn't newsworthy, apparently, not even in the face of a bond issue election worth millions more dollars.

Somewhere in the Journal, if you go looking for it, you will find them wondering why people don't vote in school board elections. You will not find "the ball" mentioned anywhere, nor will you find any investigation and report on ethics, standards and accountability in the leadership of the APS - good or bad.