Item: Cost of counsel: Price of public education increasingly includes legal fees/Maureen Dolan, Coeur d'Alene Press

More Info: The Coeur d'Alene School District's recent consideration of whether to privatize school busing went on for several months, and it included 64 hours of legal work with an average cost of $180 per hour in attorney fees for the district. The bus privatization plan was expected to save $1 million, but facing public opposition, the board decided in June to step away from the idea. The $11,520 bill for the legal work remained. That's just one of the items adding up to $238,000 in attorney fees that the Coeur d'Alene School District incurred in the most recently completed fiscal year which began July 1, 2012, and ended June 30. The previous year the district spent $38,000 on lawyers

Question: $238,000 for legal fees? Seriously?