Tacoma Firm Appears for Port Angeles School District in Hamilton Lawsuit; Corrected Complaint Puts Censure and Letter Into Court File

The first defense filing has landed in Director Nancy Hamilton's lawsuit against the Port Angeles School District, and the complaint itself has been refiled to fix a paperwork error, according to Clallam County Superior Court records reviewed by The Olympic Herald.

Attorney Lori M. Bemis of McGavick Graves, P.S., a Tacoma firm, filed a notice of appearance on behalf of the district and its Board of Directors on Thursday, July 23.

The notice is procedural. It does not answer Hamilton's allegations or argue the merits of the case.

It does, however, signal where the defense may be headed. The notice states that the defendants appear "without waiving" seven potential objections, including lack of jurisdiction, improper venue, insufficiency of service of process, failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted, and failure to join a party under Rule 19.

Reserving those defenses in a notice of appearance is standard practice in Washington civil litigation. It preserves the district's ability to raise them later without committing to any of them now.

The appearance was filed the same day the board held its first regular meeting since the lawsuit, the July 23 session at which directors declined to approve the minutes of the June 18 censure meeting, as the Herald reported Monday.

A refiled complaint, with the exhibits this time

On Monday afternoon, Hamilton's lawyers at Seattle education-law firm Cedar Law LLP filed a notice of errata asking the court clerk to replace the complaint filed July 14 with a corrected version.

The original filing, the notice states, did not include Attachments A, B, and C. The attachments "were provided to the filer but were inadvertently not included with the original filing," according to the notice.

The refiled complaint, docketed Monday at 12:58 p.m., carries the same July 14 date and, according to the notice of errata, differs from the original only in including the attachments. 

It is the 16-page pleading we detailed in our July 15 coverage, bringing six causes of action, including a statutory appeal of the censure, federal and state free-speech claims, and alleged violations of the Washington Open Public Meetings Act.

The correction matters mostly for what it adds to the public court file. The three attachments are the documentary spine of the case:

Attachment A is district Policy 1010, the "Operating Principles for Board Directors" that lists "Requests Information" among the board's own duties and that Hamilton cites in defense of her questions to Superintendent Michelle Olsen.

Attachment B is Hamilton's June 11 letter to the four other directors and district counsel Heidi Maynard, the letter responding point by point to accusations she says were leveled at her in the May 26 executive session. 

The board majority cited that letter as a confidentiality breach when it censured her; the district later released it in full under the Public Records Act, including to the Herald on July 8 in response to our June 22 records request.

Attachment C is Resolution 2526-18 itself, the eight-page censure the board adopted 4-1 on June 18, including Section 3.2, the information-request protocol Hamilton's suit attacks as an unconstitutional prior restraint.

Judge Basden assigned

Court records list Judge Brent Basden as the assigned judicial officer. No hearing dates appeared on the docket as of Tuesday.

The notice of appearance is not the district's substantive response to the lawsuit, and none had been filed as of Monday. Once one comes, it could take the form of an answer or a motion invoking one of the reserved defenses.

Hamilton, an Army veteran, a descendant of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, and the board's only Native American director, remains a sitting director. Five weeks after censuring her, the board named her its 2026-27 legislative representative at the July 23 meeting.

Hamilton has denied wrongdoing. The board majority has said the censure imposed no penalty and that she "retains all rights and powers of her office without diminution," a characterization her lawsuit disputes.