After the six Democrats on the Guilford County Board of Education voted to appoint their choice – Bill Goebel – to the vacant District 3 seat, rather than the choice of the Guilford County Republican Party – longtime teacher Michael Logan – state Rep. Jon Hardister said a lot of angry people have very good reasons to sue the school board.

Hardister added that he thinks there’s no question the school board will lose such a fight because it is standing on extremely shaky legal ground.

Goebel is– at least for the time being – in the school board seat that was slated to be filled by Logan before the six school board members decided to name Goebel instead.

The Tuesday, April 4 decision by the school board directly contradicted the intent of a bill that Hardister himself sponsored and that state lawmakers put into law.

Hardister said a number of aggrieved parties have a right to bring a lawsuit.

“The GOP obviously could be the plaintiff,” Hardister said.

“Logan could also do it,” he added, noting that Logan is the one being deprived of a seat on the school board that’s rightfully his.

Hardister said there are tens of thousands of other people who have a legitimate claim to being harmed by the school board’s actions: any resident of District 3, since they can claim they’ve been denied proper representation on the Guilford County school board.

Goebel is a Republican but he is not the person chosen to fill the seat by the Guilford County Republican Party, which in the state of North Carolina, is the body that has the right to fill vacant seats that are left by Republicans.

In fact, Goebel was passed over by the local Republican party when he initially sought the seat right after it became vacant last year.

Hardister said that, if the case does go to court, he fully expects the school board to lose.

He said that, clearly, the Democrats wanted to keep Logan off the board despite the new state law that clarifies that the local party makes the pick. However, he said, he believes the Democrats on the board asked Wilson to come up with some sort of legal argument that could make the board sound like it had some sort of legal justification to do what it did.

“Attorneys do this all the time, “ Hardister said. “There will be a chair and the attorney will say, ‘It’s not a chair – it could be used as a table.”