Harris County School Board attorney dies after serving district for 40 years
The attorney who served the Harris County Board of Education for 40 years has died.
John Meadows Taylor died July 25 at West Georgia Hospice in LaGrange, according to the obituary by Striffler-Hamby Mortuary. He was 77.
A memorial service and celebration of life will be held at a later date.
Taylor was in the process of retiring from his 52-year law practice.
“This terrible COVID-19 virus has taken so many things,” board chairman Shane Lipp said in the school district’s news release Monday. “While we recognized and thanked Mr. Taylor in June via a Zoom meeting, our hope was to get to the day when it was safe to honor him in person and sincerely thank him for his many, many dedicated years of service to the Harris County School Board.”
Taylor had the coronavirus, according to a July 13 Facebook post by Harris County Commissioner Becky Langston.
Greg Ellington from the Columbus office of Hall Booth Smith, which serves as the Muscogee County School Board’s legal counsel, was appointed by the Harris County School Board to succeed Taylor.
According to the news release, Taylor was a captain in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and practiced law with the LaGrange firm Lewis, Taylor & Todd. He was appointed to the Georgia Board of Education in 1983 by Gov. Joe Frank Harris and served until 1990, including as its vice chairman for appeals and chairman of the administrative services committee.
During his career, Taylor also represented the Harris County Board of Commissioners and the Troup County School System. He twice served as president of the Georgia Council of School Board Attorneys.
“He was a Southern gentleman lawyer through and through, “ HCSD superintendent Roger Couch said in the news release. “To have 40 years of institutional knowledge of school board law guiding us through both good and bad situations was a blessing.”
This story was originally published August 3, 2020 at 1:23 PM.
