Los Angeles School District's Settlement in Sex-Harassment Case Is in Dispute LOS ANGELES - Last week, officials with the Los Angeles Unified School District announced that they had settled with a senior employee who accused former Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines of sexual harassment. But that settlement appears to be coming undone, and the matter could be on the way to a long legal battle. According to the terms of the settlement laid out by officials last week, the school district would pay a lump sum of $200,000 and lifetime health benefits, which they estimated to be valued at $250,000 to $300,000. The employee, Scot Graham, would step down as the director of leasing and asset management, a job he has held since 2000. But Mr. Graham's lawyers said the district had acted prematurely in announcing the agreement to the news media, because nothing had been signed. They also said the district had violated a confidentiality agreement by announcing Mr. Graham's name and the allegations. Mr. Graham, 56, accused Mr. Cortines of taking him to his ranch north of Los Angeles in July 2010 and making inappropriate sexual advances. Mr. Cortines, 79, said in a statement last week that there was no harassment and only consensual and spontaneous "adult behavior." Mr. Cortines was a schools chancellor in New York City and took the reins in Los Angeles, the country's second-largest district, in 2000. What happens next remains unclear. District officials said they had agreed to a plan that would require Mr. Graham to step down from his $150,000-a-year job by May 31 and since last week have blocked his access to district buildings and e-mail. District officials said that they were trying to be transparent in announcing the settlement last week. But Mr. Graham's lawyers said that the district would have been obligated to release only Mr. Graham's name, not any of the specific accusations. They also said the district had told them the lifetime benefits were valued at $50,000 more than what was reported in the news media. "The economic value of the medical benefits were one of the reasons he agreed to a lesser amount than he otherwise would have," said Arnold Peter, the lead lawyer for Mr. Graham. They acted in bad faith by misrepresenting that and by releasing otherwise private information we had agreed to keep confidential. Mr. Peter said they also believed that the timeline of events released by the district was incomplete and unfair. It did not indicate, for example, that Mr. Graham went to the district's chief counsel on three separate occasions to complain of harassment by Mr. Cortines. Linda Savitt, a lawyer for the district, said that for now the board planned to "rely on the verbal acceptance of the agreement we reached last week." "We're not stepping away from that, and if it unravels, as these things sometime do, we will have to move forward," she said. The board made this decision to deal with risk management. Last week, three of the seven board members of the district voted against the settlement and made it clear they would rather fight the accusations in court than settle.