In a court filing Monday, the attorney for the Douglas County school board disputed that their clients asked their then-superintendent to resign, and they urged a judge to allow the case to proceed to a January trial.

The filing is the first legal response the board has had since county resident Robert Marshall in June released a tape of board leaders meeting with then-Superintendent Corey Wise six months ago.

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The tape shows board President Mike Peterson and Vice President Christy Williams telling Wise they are committed to changing leadership in the school district and that if Wise doesn’t step down, they will initiate proceedings to have him fired.

Marshall sued the board on Feb. 4, alleging that the board’s four leaders — Peterson, Williams, Becky Myers and Kaylee Winegar — had all privately discussed Wise’s future and mutually decided, outside of public view, to replace him. Those conversations, Marshall has alleged, violate the state’s open-meetings law. 

Those conversations happened in a one-on-one capacity between board members. Marshall alleges that a decision was made between those conversations — hence Peterson telling Wise that there was a “very strong commitment” to getting rid of him. But the board and its attorneys have maintained that the board members were only checking in with each other and that no decision was made until a Feb. 4 formal meeting, which lasted hours and ended with Wise being fired on a 4-3 vote.

The board’s attorney, Geoffrey Blue, reiterated that position Monday. After the tape was released, Marshall and his attorney, Steve Zansberg, asked a judge to rule in their favor and find that the open-meetings law had been violated. The board’s attorney disputed that one-on-one conversations could’ve broken the law and, even if they had, the subsequent public vote on Feb. 4 cured any violation.

Blue said one-on-one conversations between boards members were for the purpose of “merely learning two or more (board members’) position on a public issue” and such conversations “should be permitted.” He noted that the state legislature had the repeated opportunity to amend the state open-meetings law to address private conversations like these and hadn’t done so. 

Blue also stated that Peterson “never actually asked Superintendent Wise to resign”; instead, he alleges, Peterson only asked Wise “to consider his future” and let Peterson know within the next few days.

Douglas County school board leaders told superintendent to step down or be fired, recording shows

According to the tape, Peterson told Wise that he and Williams had spoken with Winegar and Myers and that they were committed to ousting Wise. Peterson said he didn’t know when Wise was planning to retire but wondered if that date could be moved up. He also said that if Wise did decide to step down, he would like it to become effective almost immediately. Peterson would advocate for Wise to get paid through the end of the year, he added.

Williams told the superintendent that the board wanted “to do what’s right by you. We don’t want to make this horrible, we don’t want to make this super public, but we’re prepared to do that if that’s the direction in which it has to go.”

Peterson then told Wise that if he decided not to resign, the board would move forward with a hearing to have Wise formally fired for cause. He then told Wise, who was about to leave for a short trip, to think about it and let him know within four days. He would like the resignation to be effective by the fifth day, he said.

Blue, the board’s attorney, wrote that the two leaders “said they were committed to a new direction, but they did not ask for (Wise’s) resignation and only said that they would appoint a hearing officer and move forward with the termination process. But it is not clear that termination would actually have happened after that process played out.”

Ultimately, the board voted to unilaterally terminate Wise without cause. That was allowed under Wise’s contract, but it also requires the board to pay him another year of his salary.

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The judge in the case, Jeffrey Holmes, will rule on Marshall’s request for a total finding in his favor sometime later. Marshall and Zansberg, his attorney, have already agreed to a three-day trial, scheduled for late January, should Holmes not rule in favor of ending the dispute now.

Should that happen, the trial will occur almost exactly a year after Wise, Peterson and Williams met in a now infamous encounter. Wise is engaged in his own litigation against the district, as well.