The BHPSNJ OPRA Disconnect

The District is taking steps to undermine one the few remaining avenues families have in getting accurate information…..and the BOE Majority is using dollars that should be going to classrooms to do it.

The Custodian of School Records position remains, and Stephen Hopkins has been approved again for the job, along with an accompanying stipend of $12,000. The core responsibilities of the job are processing OPRA requests. This particular subject has been one of the least understandable processes, with the most implausible justifications, to come out of our district recently.

The creation of the position stemmed from Business Administrator Julie Kot’s insistence that she doesn’t have time to fulfill this duty; a duty that is part of nearly every single business administrator’s job here in New Jersey. The reason given for her inability to take care of the OPRA requests was, in the words of our Superintendent, an “onslaught” of requests. This claim was not borne out when looking at the OPRA requests published on the District website, yet our BOE voted for the creation of the position and Stephen Hopkins to hold the role. According to Mrs. Bradford, she was given information by Ms. Kot that led to her ‘yes’ vote, yet to date that information remains unavailable.

When questioned as to whether Mr. Hopkins would have time to take on this role in addition to his other responsibilities, particularly since Ms. Kot claims it is impossible for her to do it, we were only told he could. There was no explanation given, despite the obvious conclusion any thinking person could draw (if we were to believe the “onslaught” was real). The reasonable conclusion is that he can’t do the job, either.

Fast forward to the June 5th BOE meeting, where this position was on the agenda and subsequently voted to be renewed, with Stephen Hopkins again at the helm. (Natasha Joly’s excellent article mentioning some of the details of that meeting is a must-read.) Following up on that article, let’s focus on Ms. Kot’s claims made during her report and her public exchange with Mrs. Bradford (not to be confused with their initial conversation which remains secret).

Ms. Kot brought up how time consuming it is to compile email logs, despite no requests for such logs having been received from the public. We can assume this was brought up to support her claim that OPRA requests take 5-18 hours to complete. (Keep in mind that her previous claim of a single OPRA request taking over 95 hours was never able to be verified; no documentation of such a request exists.) She stated that Mr. Hopkins had received 44 OPRA requests in the 3.5 months he had held the position. This number conveniently cannot be verified, as Mr. Hopkins elects not to post the requests – unless we want to OPRA it, adding to the “onslaught”. Which leads to one wondering if the entire system isn’t set up to create more requests. In any case, giving the benefit of the doubt on that number, we still have no information about how many are duplicate requests and how many were dismissed. Now let’s do some simple math.

There are an average of 20 working days in each month. Over a 3.5 month period, that’s 70 days. Taking Ms. Kot’s statement that the requests take 5-18 hours to complete, we’ll use the mid-point of 11.5 hours per request. Since Ms. Kot said that even if there were duplicates it didn’t mean that significant work didn’t still need to be done, since she has declined to show us an OPRA log at any point, and since we can’t know the complexity of each, we’ll go with 44 requests needing average time during this period. That’s a grand total of 506 hours needed. Over 70 days, that’s 7.23 hours per day.

No wonder neither she nor Mr. Hopkins can do the job. Mr. Hopkins’ responses to requests are currently requiring 5-week extensions, the work is so onerous. Another possibility, however, is that neither Ms. Kot nor Mr. Hopkins has the necessary knowledge to complete OPRA request searches in an efficient manner. Equally possible is that the requests are taking more time than necessary because Ms. Kot, and now Mr. Hopkins, spends hours looking up legal precedent in order to deny requests, as we frequently have seen in their responses. More plausible is that they are purposely extending the amount of time needed. Perhaps the most believable scenario is that there is some extreme exaggeration going on.

In a recent OPRA of the OPRAs – since this is the only way to get any kind of detail – we see that Dr. Foregger suggested writing or using a script that would remove the need to print out pages in order to manually redact personal email addresses. These scripts are widely used in business (think of the form letters that replace customer names for each recipient). He did not receive any response other than a threat from Melissa Varley that if the Custodian position were not approved, she would spend $250,000 having the lawyers fulfill OPRA requests. We also noticed that each individual printed page appears to have been manually scanned. (Badly, no less, with the pages askew and often times with words cut off at the edges.) There is absolutely NO need to manually scan documents when there are machines that can do it. Why is Mr. Hopkins doing this manually? We can only guess it’s ineptitude or malicious intent.

Ms. Kot also stated that she had reached out to several other Union County schools, and that our district far surpasses others in number of OPRA requests. She declined to specify which districts she contacted or what the difference in number is. Just take her word for it. Again, what she is missing is that the District can cut down on the number of requests. Before the practice of putting OPRA requests on the website was ended, a review of requests showed multiple times residents asked for executive session or committee meeting minutes. Why can’t these documents be routinely uploaded to the BOE page? She also can’t be bothered to separate out duplicates, instead insisting that those still take a significant amount of time because they are going to different individuals. Sorry, but changing an email address and editing the cover letter sent to recipients should not take five hours. Inept, or malicious?

Lastly, Government Records Council does not allow for “I’m too busy” as a legitimate reason for needing an extension. Perhaps, in the interest of not having any further lawsuits filed, our district should list a full-time position for OPRA Custodian. Why not? We apparently care more about shielding our Superintendent and her favored employees from – everything, really, than we do about educating children. To paraphrase a statement from the last meeting, for our kids, it’s “V as in victim”.

Other Articles About OPRA (including Natasha’s article referenced here)