VALDOSTA – The Valdosta School System has accrued more than $32,000 in legal fees involving former Valdosta High School football coaches Alan Rodemaker and Rush Propst.

As of June 1, the school system had spent $32,740.28 – $24,790.28 on the Rodemaker lawsuits and $7,950 on the Propst investigation, according to records obtained from the city school system by The Valdosta Daily Times.

The legal fees of the Rodemaker lawsuits were accrued from invoices received from local attorney Gary Moser, Jones Cork, LLP in Macon, and Harben, Hartley and Hawkins, LLP in Gainesville.

Moser, who is the school system’s regular attorney, is the only attorney used for the Propst investigation. In both situations, he performed actions including communicating with outside counsel, drafting and revising various documents, then reviewing them.

Both the Rodemaker lawsuits and Propst investigations span Fiscal Years 2020 and 2021. The budgeted amounts for legal fees in those years are $40,000 and $60,000 respectively with $66,740.89 and $82,589.35 actually spent respectively.

Legal fees are budgeted for retaining legal counsel annually. Retained legal counsel handles writing school policies, making sure school board actions are correct, checking insurance policies, as well as representing the school system in lawsuits, etc.

In the Propst case, the coach’s contract was not renewed April 29 in a 5-3 vote.

Propst, who was placed on administrative leave March 9, led the Wildcats to a 7-5 record in his first season with Valdosta. 

Following the 2020 season, Propst came under fire after allegations surfaced from a 64-page deposition in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by former Coach Alan Rodemaker and his wife against the Valdosta Board of Education.

The deposition included claims that money intended for advertising was personally pocketed, interference with the coach search that hired Propst and requests for “funny money” to pay rent for recruits and their families to stay in Valdosta during the 2020 season.

Recruiting is not allowed for high school football teams.

The Georgia High School Association has levied strict sanctions against the Wildcats going into the 2021 football season. The GHSA denied Valdosta High School’s final appeal against the sanctions last week.

The Valdosta Board of Education voted not to renew the contract for Rodemaker on Jan. 28, 2020, in a 5-4 vote, which reran Feb. 11 with the same result. 

Leah Rodemaker, the coach’s wife, filed a lawsuit in Lowndes County Superior Court against city school board members Warren Lee, Liz Shumphard, Tyra Howard, Debra Bell and Kelisa Brown who voted Alan Rodemaker out as the Valdosta High School head football coach.

She asked the court to block any attempt to replace Alan Rodemaker – he was replaced by Rush Propst, for the former coach’s contract to be renewed for one year starting July 1, 2020, unless “they can show a meaningful, non-racial reason” for his non-renewal. She also requested a trial before a jury of 12.

In June, a federal appeals court overturned a lower court’s ruling, saying the Rodemaker suit fails to show “sufficient facts” he was racially discriminated against when the school board did not renew his contract.

The five board members who voted to let Rodemaker go — Liz Shumphard, Tyra Howard, Kelisa Brown, Warren Lee and Debra Bell — are all Black while the four who voted to retain him are white, the lawsuit said.

Rodemaker believed the decision not to renew his contract was racially motivated, aided and abetted by “illegal meetings held by the African-American Board members,” the lawsuit states.

Shumphard, Howard, Brown, Lee and Bell are named as defendants in the lawsuit, and filed motions in the Middle District of Georgia federal court for dismissal on grounds of “qualified immunity” for government officers. 

The district court denied those motions Dec. 1.

Middle District court documents read the court finding Rodemaker’s remaining allegations as sufficient to nudge his race discrimination claim “across the line from conceivable to plausible.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which the defendants appealed to, ruled June 9 that the lower court erred by not dismissing Rodemaker’s complaint. 

It wrote that Rodemaker did not provide sufficient facts about “racially discriminatory intent” and doesn’t establish that the Board of Education discriminated against him because he was white.

With the district court’s decision vacated and the case remanded for further proceedings, Rodemaker’s attorney, Sam Dennis, said he’s requesting the appeals court’s order be reconsidered, potentially resulting in further costs for the school system.