ESU #15 files suit against school for nonpayment of bill

    Officials at Educational Service Unit #15 have filed suit against Chase County Schools for nonpayment of their bill for special ed. services.
    The case filed in Chase County District Court Sept. 17 asks for payment of $168,852.70, the balance of the 2020-21 CCS contract the ESU says it is owed.
    The suit also asks for 12% interest accrued since Feb. 1, as well as “reasonable attorneys’ fees, costs and expenses” incurred by ESU #15.
    Due to nonpayment of the bill, the ESU stopped providing its services to CCS in early March this year.
    To compensate, Supt. Adam Lambert said the district found alternative service providers to serve CCS students.
    Since these students usually receive their full services during the school year, Lambert said CCS offered extended services to families in the summer.
    Summer sessions are not the normal practice, he said.
    Included in the documents filed last month with the lawsuit are signed contracts by several CCS superintendents that date back to the 2012-13 school year.
    The 2020-21 contract, totalling an estimated $310,900, was signed March 18, 2020 by Larry Lambert, who was serving as interim superintendent at the time, prior to the CCS board’s hiring of his son, Adam.
    ESU Administrator Paul Calvert said in a March 17 Imperial Republican story that Supt. Adam Lambert told him and another ESU official last fall he didn’t like the ESU’s billing system the way it was.
    In the same March 17 story, Calvert said the billing system had been that way for 12 years and none of the other schools in the ESU #15 service area have problems with it.
    In their lawsuit, the ESU states the 2020-21 contract is in the same form and has the same substance, terms and provisions of previous years.
    It adds, “no other ESU in the state of Nebraska includes the unreasonable level of detail now demanded by CCS.”
    While they hadn’t done it in previous years and none of the other schools they serve require it, the suit says Supt. Adam Lambert informed the ESU at the start of 2020-21, “they (ESU personnel) would be required to clock in and clock out when they arrived at and departed from a CCS building.”
    Calvert said they complied with that request and his staff began clocking in and out.
    However, Supt. Lambert, in the March 17 story, said what is lacking and what he wants is “the name of each child served and the hours spent with that child.”
    He said the clocking in and out only shows the time they were in the buildings, not time spent with each child.
    The suit adds that CCS, or any other school served by ESU 15, has not been denied state or federal special education reimbursement because of the billing format.
    After additional questions were posed to Supt. Lambert on the lawsuit, he said the situation is being handled by its legal counsel, and he will not be addressing anything related to this matter moving forward.
    “After many attempts to resolve this with ESU 15 including them refusing to meet with myself and the board of education, they have chosen to file a lawsuit against Chase County Schools instead,” he wrote in an email response.
    CCS is being represented by KSB School Law of Lincoln.
    ESU 15 hired Perry Law Firm of Lincoln for its representation.