Baltimore schools settle lawsuit backed by Sinclair exec

Baltimore City Public Schools settled on Wednesday a long-running lawsuit brought by a Republican operative and financed by Sinclair, Inc executive and Baltimore Sun owner David Smith.

The settlement doesn't involve the exchange of money and required Jovani Patterson, the lone remaining plaintiff, to acknowledge the school system hadn't broken any laws, violated any rules and that its policies around truancy are sufficient. In return, the school system agreed to share data beyond what is legally required about student attendance, including how many students were promoted to the next grade level despite missing upwards of 30, 60 or 120 days of school.

The school system also agreed to perform an audit of grade changes at three randomly selected schools for the next three years — a principal and other administrators at Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts were caught orchestrating a scheme to graduate students who did not pass or attend classes.

"These provisions reflect the parties' shared commitment to assuring that information continues to be publicly available in order to keep the community informed regarding City Schools' ongoing compliance with policies, procedures, regulations, and the law," Patterson and the school system wrote in a joint statement.

Smith did not immediately return a request for comment.

Patterson and his wife, Shawnda, filed what's known as a "taxpayer's lawsuit" against the public school system in January 2022. Shawnda later left the case after it was determined she did not live in the city and did not have standing to file suit.

The lawsuit claimed the city school system "wasted significant sums of money" through "illegal" acts by engaging in a "systemic and continuous history of misrepresenting its enrollment data" to the state. School systems are funded based on the number of students they serve, and in Maryland enrollment is determined by how many students are in schools on Sept. 30 each year.

Most lawsuits, even ones against government agencies, proceed in relative obscurity — the media cannot cover every piece of paper filed in every court house. But the Patterson case was different thanks to Smith's involvement. The lawsuit was covered extensively on WBFF Fox45, Sinclair, Inc.'s flagship television station. Prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump publicly joined the plaintiff's team in 2022 and participated in a sit-down interview on Fox45 in 2023.

And the original complaint itself drew largely on reporting from Fox45′s Project Baltimore, a recurring series critical of the school system that once won a national investigative reporting award for its coverage of "ghost students." The term refers to kids who were counted as being enrolled for state funding purposes when they were not. A report from the Maryland Office of the Inspector General for Education found that so-called ghost students accounted for about 0.3% of all city students counted for funding purposes over a five-year period.

But at no point before January of this year did Fox45 disclose that Smith, Sinclair's top executive, was paying for Patterson's legal fees. It was not until The Baltimore Banner revealed Smith's involvement in the case after his purchase of The Baltimore Sun that Fox45 began disclosing Smith's ties. A spokesperson for Sinclair said the station did not know before the .

Jovani Patterson's ties to Smith are extensive. The pair first connected in either late 2020 or early 2021 when a Sinclair producer organized a meeting, according to a deposition of Patterson. Smith suggested Jovani and his wife meet with him and his personal attorneys from the Thomas & Libowitz firm. Jovani Patterson, in his deposition, described Smith as a "partner" in the case and suggested Smith had a say over whether the case could be settled or how it could proceed.

In litigation, typically only the named parties in a case have decision making authority over what happens. Third parties can pay legal fees to advance their interests so long as the client consents and they do not interfere with the attorney-client relationship. School system lawyers asked Jovani Patterson about the extent of Smith's decision-making authority, but their shared attorney shut down that line of questioning citing attorney-client privilege.

The case was supposed to go to trial Wednesday, and the joint settlement nixed that.

"Transparency and accountability have consistently been my objective," Jovani Patterson said Wednesday. "When we know better, we do better. Fighting for our city, our communities, our children, is always worth it even if the results aren't immediately felt."

It's no secret that Smith, himself a graduate of the city school system, thinks poorly of their current state. In January, at his first meeting with Sun staff Smith said products of the modern school system were destined to become welfare dependents.

"They're always going to be on welfare. Always going to be on some structure that the government takes care of," Smith said then. "The only way you're going to fix that is to fix the school system."

Lawyers for the school system deposed Smith as part of the discovery process in this case, but his attorney objected to almost every single question asked of him.