CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — During the over hour-and-a-half closed session of a special meeting Tuesday morning, the Albemarle School Board officially directed Acting Superintendent Dr. Chandra Hayes and Chief Legal Officer Josiah Black to hire Richmond-based law firm Harman, Claytor, Corrigan & Wellman to conduct an independent investigation into the division.

The investigation comes after months of backlash into the school system following the June arrest of former Hollymead Elementary staffer Michael Swiney. That backlash led to numerous calls for an independent investigation, including from local public officials like Rep. John McGuire, State Sen. Creigh Deeds, and Del. Katrina Callsen and Amy Laufer.

“We want a thorough, timely and robust investigation by Harman Claytor,” Samuel Miller representative Bob Beard said during the meeting. “And we anticipate that ACPS will give them a full access to the facts. We want to know what happened, and we want to know, to make sure our kids in ACPS are safe, always. Our staff is safe. And to make [sure] what happened, allegedly happened, at Hollymead and other schools, never happens again.”

But even with the investigation now called, parents expressed frustration coming out of the meeting with the choice in law firm, with many questioning whether the firm is actually impartial, since it has a history of representing Albemarle Schools in other cases. In 2022, the firm represented the county when a suit challenged the division’s anti-racism policy.

The firm also defended the division in a 2012 insurance case.

“I am disappointed that it is not an independent investigation,” Albemarle County Republican Committee Chair and Hollymead parent Phil Riese said. “The law firm that they are hiring already represents Albemarle County Schools in other litigation that they have with families, and this law firm has a conflict of interest.”

ACPS parent Jimmy Belew said he is currently engaged in a lawsuit with ACPS, and he shared with Cville Right Now an email sent to him by Harman Claytor on Dec. 19, just over two weeks after court records show he filed his lawsuit.

In the email, Harman Claytor Associate Andrew Mullen wrote, “Our office has been retained to represent all the named defendants in this matter,” then directed Belew to send all communication to them regarding the suit moving forward.

“They’re not representing what the people of the community had asked for,” Belew said of the School Board’s decision. “They’re just ignoring us once again and proceeding to do whatever it is they want to do.”

ACPS spokesperson Jason Grant told media after the meeting the investigation is in fact independent, as the law firm is not a part of ACPS. He said he would need to look into how the law firm may have been used in the past by the division and said it would not be uncommon for contractors to be used in different ways in an organization like ACPS.

“That doesn’t take away one’s third-party independence, simply because they’ve done contracted work with an organization,” Grant added. “They stand by their credentials. They stand by their identity of who they are, and they need to maintain that independence. That’s what they do.”

As part of the ongoing investigation, the board said they have asked for updates throughout the process and committed to updates every 60 days with ideally actionable items for the division.

Rio representative Jim Dillenbeck also said during the meeting he plans to propose in the near future contracting an independent “inspector general type of role” for an annual review into ACPS’ policies and procedures.

He also shared three questions, crafted based on feedback from parents and teachers, that the board will be encouraging the law firm to investigate.

The first asks if there was any mechanism to “aggregate concerns about a single staff member over time so that a series of separate reports would be recognized as a pattern rather than handled as unconnected events?”

The second questions if the reporting pipeline was understood and followed consistently. Finally, the third question asks, “what visibility existed above the building level, so that concerns reach people with the authority to act?”

“The goal isn’t to relitigate one case,” Dillenbeck said. “It’s to find every point where a signal failed, and to fix those systems so that the next time, a concern is caught at the first signal rather than the fifth.”

The board ultimately voted for the investigation unanimously 7-0. But parents like Riese still do not believe it is enough.

Riese said he believes a state investigation, which McGuire had previously called on Governor Abigail Spanberger and Attorney General Jay Jones to conduct in a letter sent to both of them, is needed. He said he plans to call on Spanberger and Jones as well to direct Virginia State Police and possibly a state prosecutor to conduct their own investigation. He said he will also be talking to McGuire as well as his GA representatives.

“In this instance, there’s an alleged sexual assault between a staff member and multiple students,” Riese said. “If that doesn’t call for a state investigation, I don’t know what does.”