Open and shut case
Posted: Sunday, April 29, 2012 6:00 am | Updated: 7:00 pm, Fri Apr 27, 2012.
Morrisville School District is in violation of the open records law.
Here’s a suggestion for the chief educator at the Morrsiville School District: Do your homework!
Among the varied duties of Superintendent Bill Ferrara is satisfying requests for public records. The state has a law regarding such records as well as an agency to enforce the law. That would be the the Office of Open Records. It has a website on which the uninformed can go to find out all they need or want to know about the law. We strongly urge Ferrara to do so — because he appears to be breaking the law.
If you missed the story this week, we reported that Morrisville teachers and school board negotiators are in the throes of working out a new contract. So we naturally figured that folks would want to know what’s in the old contract so they can compare and contrast. At a time when school districts are under immense financial pressure thanks to state budget cuts and a mushrooming public pension crisis, school officials have to be extremely cost conscious. And taxpayers, who foot the bills run up by school boards, have to make sure that they are.
To that end, we asked the school district for a copy of the old contract. We were, to put it mildly, surprised when that request was denied and denied and denied. On what grounds? we asked. Said Ferrara: “I do not want the appearance that the district is negotiating through the press.”
It was a hackneyed response invoked by public officials everywhere. But that’s beside the point. By grounds we meant legal grounds, which isn’t what Ferrara provided. He told us what he didn’t want, not what the law wants.
Calling Ferrara’s explanation “insufficient as a matter of law,” Melissa Bevan Melewsky, an attorney for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, said, “the current teacher contract should be readily available to any interested person who requests it. The school’s response is simply an inappropriate barrier to accessing a clearly public record.”
In a further attempt to access that clearly public record, the Courier Times on April 20 filed a Right-To-Know request.
Meanwhile, Superintendent Ferrara sent us a letter stating that the district was “utilizing 30 days to research’’ the newspaper’s request. Again, no legal grounds were provided for denying our original request; likewise, no legal grounds were provided for invoking a 30-day delay in considering our formal Right-To-Know request.
Indeed, the law does not provide 30 days to do homework. According to the law, as explained by attorney Melewsky, a public agency has five days, not 30, to research a records request, although the law does cite seven reasons why additional time to satisfy a request might be granted. In Morrisville’s case, none of those exceptions were cited. The district also did not comply with other stipulations when the 30-day delay is invoked, including: sending a notice that a request is being reviewed; citing the reason for the review; indicating a reasonable date by which a response will be provided; and providing an estimate of applicable fees.
Morrisville school officials can review that and more by going to openrecords.state.pa.us. We urge Morrisville citizens to do so as well. While they’re at it, they should click on “Citizen’s Guide” and follow the steps to file a Right-To-Know request. Might be a good thing to get to know considering the school district’s apparent fondness for secrecy.
