Barbara Myrick, Broward schools’ top lawyer, helped withhold info after Parkland shooting
As the top staff lawyer for the Broward School Board, Barbara J. Myrick has been a fierce protector of secrets. Now she’s been been charged with doing the opposite — illegally leaking information.
Myrick, 72, has frequently found ways to keep public information from getting out in the public, during her five years as general counsel. In one high-profile case, she sought to arrest reporters with the South Florida Sun Sentinel for publishing information her own office accidentally released.
She is now under indictment, accused of unlawful disclosure of statewide grand jury proceedings, a felony punishable by a maximum of five years in prison. Her $220,000-a-year job and professional reputation are on the line. The charge was announced at the same time the Florida Department of Law Enforcement disclosed a perjury charge against Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie, who was arrested, jailed and released Wednesday morning.
Law wasn’t Myrick’s first career choice.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, she worked for the state and several nonprofits as a counselor and director for programs serving at-risk youth.
She attended law school at Nova Southeastern University in her late 40s and early 50s, graduating with a 2.64 grade point average in 2000, according to her transcript.
She was hired by the school district in 2002 as a coordinator for a program serving special-needs students and was promoted to assistant general counsel a few years later. The School Board appointed her as general counsel in 2016.
During the past five years, Myrick has been fiercely protective of the School Board’s ability to conduct business without disclosing records that are legally exempt from being turned over to the public.
Her position often put her at odds with the news media, which sought information the district would rather conceal. She often disagreed with the Sun Sentinel about what records could be exempt from release under the state’s broad public records law.
In 2019, she argued it was legal to lock the press out when two School Board members and Runcie met privately with families affected by the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas.
State law considers meetings between officeholders to be events that should be accessible to the public, including the media. But Myrick argued the secrecy was acceptable “so long as Board members do not exchange remarks with one another or comment about each other’s remarks about a matter that can foreseeably arise before the School Board in the future.”
Myrick also led the legal team responsible for heavily trimming a report about the failures leading to the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas in 2018. The district released a censored version of the report to the public, but Sun Sentinel reporters realized the blacked-out content could be recovered simply by copying the report and pasting it into another file.
The Sun Sentinel published the report’s full findings, which included criticisms about the services provided and denied to school shooter Nikolas Cruz.
Myrick responded by trying to have the Sun Sentinel’s reporters found in contempt of court for disclosing information the school district felt should have been kept under wraps. The newspaper successfully argued it was the school district, not the reporters, that erred by releasing the information.
Myrick had a generally good relationship with most School Board members, with one major exception: Lori Alhadeff, who often butted heads with her.
Myrick demanded in February 2019 that Alhadeff explain why she was voting against a candidate Runcie had recommended as chief of safety and security. When Alhadeff said she felt the hiring process was flawed, Myrick said that wasn’t “good cause” as defined by the state.
“I’ve never seen that type of interrogation of a board member before,” community activist Mary Fertig said at the meeting.
In early 2020, during a meeting Alhadeff didn’t attend, Myrick falsely accused her of using general counsel letterhead to write a letter to the state attorney general requesting an opinion. The letter was actually drafted by another lawyer, and Myrick apologized to Alhadeff.
Some lawyers who’ve crossed her were stunned by Wednesday’s indictment. They describe Myrick as a consummate professional who does things by the book.
“This comes as a tremendous surprise,” said attorney Russell Williams, who represents former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School campus monitor Andrew Medina. “I felt she was always above board.” Williams described Myrick as a lawyer who could be a legal adversary without being contentious or hostile.
“If she can help you with something, she will, within the bounds of the law,” he said. “And if she couldn’t, she’d tell you.”
Her lawyer, David Bogenschutz, said Myrick, an attorney since 2001 and a current member of the Florida Bar’s education law committee, chose her line of work because of her passion for protecting children.
“She has a stellar reputation in the legal community,” he said. “It makes me sick to think that she has to deal with something like this at this stage of her career.”
