State oversight of schools may keep it on hook for $4M award

The state of Missouri‘s 12-year takeover of the formerly unaccredited St. Louis Public Schools may be complete, but a legal dispute involving a $4 million default judgment against an ex-music teacher imprisoned for repeated sexual assault of a female student appears headed for a lengthy fight.

The former student at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School in the Southwest Garden neighborhood is a Texas resident identified in the complaint by her initials SMH. She sued former music teacher Allen Merry in October 2015. The woman alleged a “multi-year molestation” starting in 2006, when she was 15, at both the magnet high school and the now-shuttered Bunche International Studies Middle School, where Merry also taught.

Merry, who was in his late 60s at the time of the abuse, pleaded guilty in 2012 to 17 felony counts of statutory rape, sodomy, sexual exploitation and related charges, as well as two misdemeanor offenses. Now 79, the onetime recording artist who worked with Ray Charles and Ike Turner and formed the Young Disciples in late 1960s in East St. Louis, Illinois, has been released from state prison but remains on probation as a registered sex offender.

After the Missouri Attorney General’s Office declined to represent Merry, who tendered his defense through the State Legal Expense Fund, St. Louis Circuit Judge Joan Moriarty awarded the seven-figure sum to the victim in a March 2018 default judgment.

Former Attorney General Josh Hawley and his successor, Eric Schmitt, argued that neither the state-appointed Special Administrative Board, which oversaw the city school system until June of this year, nor the Transitional School District was a state agency covered by the fund.

“Merry was not a state employee and did not work for a state agency,” Assistant Attorney General C. Douglas Shull wrote in a December 2018 brief. “Under petitioner’s argument, every employee, from teachers to bus drivers to janitors, in an unaccredited school district would have coverage” under the legal expense fund.

Plaintiff’s lawyers countered that the unique structure of the state takeover, with a CEO appointed by the governor and a three-member board that exercised wide authority over school spending and academic reform, made the city system a de facto state agency.

Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce agreed, siding in late July with SMH’s motion for summary judgment.

“They controlled everything,” said Kansas City plaintiff’s attorney Christopher Dandurand, referring to the state’s oversight of St. Louis Public Schools.

Schmitt’s press secretary, Christopher Nuelle, and communications director Marianna Deal did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But in a post-trial motion for a new trial, Assistant Attorney General Charles Adamson asserts that “this court has erred on both the law and the facts.”

“Merry, the judgment debtor, worked for the St. Louis Public School system and thus, as a matter of law, was not a state employee,” Adamson wrote, adding the state also disputes that Merry tendered the lawsuit to the state for coverage but instead sought coverage on a different lawsuit in a separate case.

The dispute next heads to the Missouri Court of Appeals Western District. Given the amount of money involved and the underlying legal arguments at play, Dandurand said he expects the appellate court ruling to be challenged by the losing side up to the Missouri Supreme Court.

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