OPRA, ATTORNEYs and AWARDS CEREMONIES

The District is playing a very costly and cynical game regarding requests made under the Open Public Records Act.

OPRA is a law that allows everyday people to get information from public entities. It is a tool that holds tax funded public entities accountable to the people who pay their bills and use their services.

Let’s start this post with a simple request for email headers that I made recently.

I sent a request for email headers back in May.

The District denied that request.

Since then, I became aware that another resident filed suit for a similar denial, and the District ended up settling and paying the resident’s legal fees.

The District paid its attorneys and the resident’s attorneys for refusing a request it has historically always honored and is required by law to honor.

After learning of the settlement, I submitted my request for headers again.

The District denied a portion of my request because it wanted me to refer to individuals v positions (BOE Members). Inconsistent, but okay.

But here’s the rub.

On the part of the request that was honored (headers for emails between Dr. Varley and Ms. Kot), a one-month extension was requested so that the District could review 6,000 email headers for redaction.

The District was going to use resources (and I’m sure Attorneys) to review 6000 email headers for redaction.

What’s in an email header?

Sender
Recipient
Subject Line
Date Sent
Date Received
Labels (Inbox, Status)

Suppose high-level District Administrators are putting confidential information in any of these areas. In that case, the District needs to invest less in attorneys and spend more on trainings concerning email and sensitive information before we find ourselves in a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

Are emails just sitting on their desktops with kids’ names lining their inboxes for all to see?

The other possibility is that this need to review 6000 email headers has nothing to do with confidential information. Maybe it’s more like “Let’s go through these, mark out what we don’t want him to ask for, and pay our lawyers to write a bunch of words that aren’t true but sound intimidating so he goes away.”.

This will probably be after the lawyers are done attending an all expenses paid BHPS awards ceremony or pizza party to make sure they can create more business for themselves by giving the District terrible legal advice like “Hey let’s have the BOE vote to file bogus ethics charges against another BOE Member for offering her opinion on toppings.”

The District lawyers have to love this scheme. It’s easy money, and there might be a bonus if I decide to hire my own Attorney to challenge the decision- more money for the District’s Attorney- even if the District settles. Sort of what happened with the recent OPRA settlement referenced earlier in this post.

The charade allows District Administrators to go to BOE Meetings to report parents are hurting the District with OPRA requests (in some cases, oddly referring to residents now by their social media handles instead of the name listed on the correspondence).

This is one tiny thread in what is now a massive ball of practices and facts pointing to a small group of angry BOE members and Administrators using District dollars to cover themselves while simultaneously marginalizing parents and losing focus on whats important – our students.

Related Articles:

OPRA: THE FINAL LINE OF DEFENSE

UNION COUNTY PROSECUTOR INVESTIGATIONS OF THE BOE: ALL THE LETTERS

THE DISTRICTS WAR ON COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CONTINUES: THE 2022 LWV BOE DEBATE

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