From Jonathan Dame on Wicked Local Newton….
The Newton Public Schools has paid its private attorney well over $5,000 to repeatedly oppose the public release of an investigative report completed last school year on anti-Semitic incidents at F. A. Day Middle School, the TAB has learned.
The Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office has now four times ruled the district is not providing enough justification for its extensive redaction of the report in response to a public records request from the TAB.
Here’s a question for all those folks who’ve been studying our charter closely:
How can the city solicitor and the mayor can both say they want more of the report released but the school committee chooses to defy them and the state? Does our charter really provide that separation of powers between the executive branch and school committee?
And good for the TAB for not letting this go.
Especially given the TAB article you posted about last week. If this report is correct, Turner lied about not knowing about the earlier incidents. If that is the case, disciplinary action should be taken.
The School Committee answers to the voters, not to the Mayor (the City Solicitor answers to the Mayor). But the mayor is a member of the School Committee (a voting member, but just one vote of 9). While one would hope a school committee and mayor would work together on something like this, the School Committee answers to the Secretary of State on this issue.
Thanks Rhanna
Rhanna: on the one hand, you suggest the school committee answers to the voters, but only on election day, every two years. Currently, and in the new proposed version, the voters have no ability to rid themselves of a school committee member(s) who the voters overwhelmingly do not want.
If the Mayor called the City Solicitor and directed them to release the report, they would, or be fired; and their replacement would.
Nothing in our charter says the school committee decides what city paid for reports can and can not be released in accordance with the freedom of information act.
The charter does say this: The mayor shall cause the laws, ordinances, and orders for the government of the city to be enforced…”
Which is more than enough for the Mayor to act, and in my opinion, obligated to.
I’m 100% in agreement with Neal. The Mayor should have ordered the release of the requested material. I expect this kind of nonsense from the School Committee. They have proven time and time again to be a group of pathetic losers. And Mayor Warren has gone along–to get along far too many of those times. This time he should show a little respect for the press, the FOIA, and the public who elected him, by releasing the material.
.
Rhanna’s assessment of the situation is accurate. According to the article, the Newton Public Schools paid a private attorney so the city solicitor was not used in this process.
It’s a public document that’s at issue here. It doesn’t matter who paid the attorney.
The city solicitor didn’t author it, but is responsible to review it, and should then release it, without any further delay. The Attorney General should be filing a motion in Superior Court to force the city to comply. The city should be fined to the full extent of the law for its repeated effort to deny citizen’s of their right to see what its “Representative” government is doing.
The Mayor should recognize this will be a stain on his record as the chief executive of the city, who now has a record of obfuscating and denying the public access to information. Any claim by him of running an administration in a transparent fashion would not be supported by facts.
The Public records law is ineffective in its intent. It does not resolve issue of public trust in a timely manner. It has been my experience with the Cohen administration, that the members of the Division of Public Records are fair, and listen to the issues, and make a good faith effort to resolve these matters, but there is little incentive ( strong admonition and punishment for failure to comply- I do not want to imply the Cohen administration did not comply, eventually they did, but it was a long drawn out process, taking months)
The school department and outside school legal counsel consider the report to be a personnel record based upon the material contained within. After reading the unredacted report the Secretary of State’s office largely agrees.
Personnel records are not public documents and are protected by law which is why only a heavily redacted version is available to the public.
At issue is not whether the report should be released as it already has been – the ongoing back and forth is about sorting out what specific content is protected, a matter subject to interpretation. The NPS legal counsel and the State are essentially negotiating this issue via the findings/response process.
Rhanna’s explanation is accurate and I shouldn’t have used the word “paid”. The city charter provides the governmental structure but many issues are settled by ordinance.
Our position all along has been that while some aspects of the report (recommended disciplinary action) are indeed personnel matters and thus protected, the bulk of it is a summary of an investigation, and thus should be made public. Residents of the city have a right to know more then they do now about what happened at Day. I’m confident they will… eventually.
Thanks Andy, better legal minds than mine are looking at this so I’ll await the outcome of their work with you!
@Steve: I certainly respect the legal requirements to protect personnel records. The part that’s harder to understand (without of course seeing it) is the justification for so much of the report to have been redacted.
The mayor and city solicitor did review the report and said they think more info should be available to the public. The SC paid private counsel, it seems, so they would be represented by someone working only for them. Where did they find the money when they are preparing to end the fiscal year in the red?
The state department has 4 times said there weren’t valid reasons supporting the redactions. Why haven’t they made a decision to order portions of the report that they say do not have enough substantiation to be available to be viewed by the public? Four tries are enough. Continuing to give the SC more opportunities to manufacture reasons that fit their agenda could go on forever.
Since Matt Hills knew about the FOIA filing by the Tab, it was he and the SC’s responsibility to inform the mayor at the start. Why didn’t they? Why wasn’t the mayor at these meetings voicing his opinions? He may be 1 of 9, but the weight of his opinion is greater.
I’m more interested in the the reasoning and the process than in the confidential personnel data or who was disciplined and how. Why were the discipline letters to the vice principals reversed? Was their new information?
Steven Siegel writes: “The school department and outside school legal counsel consider the report to be a personnel record based upon the material contained within. After reading the unredacted report the Secretary of State’s office largely agrees.”
According to the TAB: “City Solicitor Donnalyn Kahn said in an interview she agreed with the Secretary of State’s office’s latest ruling, from Dec. 22, which found the district had yet to meet its burden of explaining with specificity why the report should be so extensively redacted. The ruling came after the Secretary of State’s office had reviewed an unredacted copy..” Apparently the Mayor also agrees with the ruling.
With so many agreeing that more needs to be released you have to wonder what the hold up is?
Steve, I don’t believe your assessment is consistent with the TAB reporting.
@Andy Levin: I’m wondering if you could tell us who did the TAB make the request for the information to? Was it sent via email, and addressed to who?
I would think the TAB might have viewed custodian of this information at that time as the Superintendent?
The TAB filed their first request with the state in April 2016, and yet the Mayor and other members of the school committee were unaware of the TAB’s efforts until recently? How can that be?
Hi Neal,
I don’t want to engage further in a back and forth about this topic as I’ve shared what I know. But this is a quote from the TAB article:
“Fleishman said the district’s private attorney had been advised by the Secretary of State’s office in conversations following the Dec. 22 ruling that much of the report can, in fact, remain redacted.”
This calls for a Mitnick investigation.
Seriously, thanks to the Tab for staying on this issue. Keep up the great work!!
If only the School Committee worked half as hard to protect our students as they do to protect themselves from public scrutiny. Just look at their record. They tried to cover up the minuscule penalty they assessed the Superintendent for plagiarism. That coverup cost them 5 citations from the AG for violating FOIA. The only reason they’re using outside council in the Day case is to provide thin cover for once again subverting the law.
Matt Hills is the slimiest elected official I can recall in Newton. He is a living-breathing example of why we need a recall provision in the City Charter. And Steve Siegel is not only Matt Hills, Excuse Maker in Chief, his comments here are disingenuous half-truths. No one on the School Committee has any respect for the public’s right to know. Andy Levin has this exactly right… “Residents of the city have a right to know more than they do now about what happened at Day. I’m confident they will… eventually.”
*Correction: In the case of the Superintendent’s plagiarism, the AG cited the SC for Open Meeting Law violations, not FOIA. It’s the Day case that relates to FOIA.
After attending a school committee meeting to see what they had to say about the lead in the water at Burr School, I saw what a disinterested crew our school committee is. Everyone looked checked-out, they passed around a bag of chips, and slouched in their seats. I’m not sure why these people even ran. We need some new blood in the school committee. Some fresh perspectives will do a world of good.
Having watched the meetings on NewTV, I cannot blame the School Committee members for looking bored and/or more concerned with the snacks. When you’ve determined beforehand how everyone feels about an issue and predetermined the course of any vote, I imagine that arranging and then sitting through the subsequent public Noh play of the fifth type must be torturous indeed.