At the end of June, WHQR filed a fairly routine public records request for emails from the New Hanover County Schools district. This week, the district notified WHQR the request was being delayed by the Vogel Law Firm’s inability to process it.
According to a district spokesperson, NHCS’s communication office “reached out to Mr. [Jonathan] Vogel regarding the status of your PRR, along with others, and he mentioned that his firm could not open the files the district shared with them, and they are working on getting a software to help review them.”
NHCS confirmed that the files in question are in a compressed 'zip' format, which mostly contains Microsoft Outlook email documents. The district did not suggest a timeline for when Vogel would get up to speed on the necessary software.
Vogel took over from Tharrington Smith, LLP as NHCS’s legal representative on July 1 after a contentious selection process, where the selection committee ranked Vogel below both Tharrington and another firm, Poyner Spruill.
In the months leading up to Vogel's hiring, Superintendent Dr. Charles Foust expressed concerns that Vogel lacked experience with boards of education. Board members Stephanie Kraybill and Stephanie Walker expressed concern that Vogel had misrepresented itself as being “in the running” to continue representing Cabarrus County.
At the time the New Hanover County Board of Education considering its options for legal counsel, Vogel's contract was up for renewal in Cabarrus County. According to documents acquired by WHQR, Vogel was ranked fourth out of five by Cabarrus County school board members — every one of the nine board members ranked Vogel either last or second to last. Their contract was not reviewed; the school district hired Johnston Allison Hord and Middlebrooks Law, instead.
However, Vogel did receive a wave of support from the local Republican establishment, including former county commissioner and current UNC Board of Governor member Woody White, who suggested in a letter that Vogel would help NHCS “re-calibrate the liberal orthodoxies that have made their way into our local system.”
Related: NHC school board switches legal representation in contentious vote
The New Hanover County GOP also wrote a letter, calling to replace Tharrington Smith; the letter didn’t specifically endorse Vogel, but cribbed some of White’s language verbatim.
