Transparency News, 8/23/21

Driven by their own research, concerned citizens addressed school boards across the region in recent weeks, imploring their local leaders to stand against state and national orders that require students to wear masks. Constituents have been to school board meetings in higher than usual numbers, with plenty of parents opposing orders for student face masks. Several elected leaders share those parents’ sentiments. Although rules at meetings allow speakers three minutes each to address the Roanoke County School Board, some carried on impassioned for nine or 10 minutes, with nobody stopping them. First Amendment expressions against masking went on in a similar fashion for the better part of two hours.  Some people seemed angry, shaking fists as they spoke with increasing volume. Others presented by reading directly from website printouts, distributing to the board copies of their online research. At the end of a 45-minute public hearing the same night as Roanoke County’s sound off, attendees at a Botetourt County School Board meeting complained that not everyone was allowed to speak. Members of the public yelled at their school board. After at least one person cursed, Chairwoman Anna Weddle asked county deputies to remove everyone except for school employees from the room.
The Roanoke Times

Virginia Beach School Division leaders are making it known they won’t put up with disruptive behavior at future school board meetings. They sent two warning letters to parents after a disorderly school board meeting last week. 13News Now got a look at the letters. One letter claims a woman made an offensive gesture and cussed at the board, the other says a woman repeatedly yelled, “Arrest me, arrest me, America’s watching,” during meetings. In both letters, Rye said the conduct displayed is a violation of the decorum and rules set in the division’s bylaws, and the women could get banned if their disruptive behaviors continue. Rye couldn’t talk to us about the letters but said as board chair she must make sure the board can conduct business and allow citizens to be heard.
WVEC

Fairfax County held a meeting for their redistricting committee and the attendance and engagement from residents was disappointing. The Fairfax County Redistricting Advisory Committee held their latest public hearing as it gets ready to redraw new electoral maps in late August. The new maps would effectively reshape the districts for the county’s board of supervisors and the school board. The committee set up the hearing in order to hear the thoughts and concerns of the county’s residents on the redistricting endeavor. Unfortunately, the committee received only a few responses from residents, all of them asking the committee to carefully consider their choices when deciding the new borders for the districts. After the comments were done and the committee took a short recess, questions arose among them on how they could have done better in reaching out to the community about the redistricting efforts. 
Fairfax Times

A judge on Friday dismissed a petition to recall Fairfax County School Board member Elaine Tholen after some parents said she failed to keep students in classrooms during the pandemic. Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Richard Gardiner granted a motion filed by Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney James Hingeley to dismiss the recall. Hingeley asserted he had independently checked into the allegations against Tholen (Dranesville), and discovered that many were untrue. That argument proved persuasive. In a court document Friday, Gardiner wrote that he is dismissing the case “upon the Commonwealth’s position that the petition is not based on facts establishing probable cause for removal.” The parent association that filed the petition against Tholen, which calls itself the Open FCPS Coalition, is an advocacy group that formed during the pandemic to push for reopening schools. The coalition is also seeking recalls against two other school board members — Abrar Omeish (At Large) and Laura Jane Cohen (Springfield) — but has not garnered enough signatures to bring those petitions before a judge.
The Washington Post
 

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’ office is illegally delaying the release of public records related to its $26 million, no-bid coronavirus testing contract, a new lawsuit contends. Reynolds and her office’s public records custodian, attorney Michael Boal, are the latest officials to be accused of violating open records laws by a Utah-based company investigating testing programs in several states. Paul Huntsman, chairman of the board of the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper, launched Jittai to seek public records related to Test Utah and similar programs in Nebraska, Iowa and Tennessee. He is funding the requests and vowing to make public the findings, saying he wants to know how well the programs worked and whether public funds were used for private gain.
Des Moines Register

The theme of Bigelow High School’s 2020-21 yearbook was The Roaring 20s. But it appears officials at the Arkansas school wanted the student record of the events of the tumultuous year to be a little less of a roar and more of a meow. Before delivering the keepsakes to students earlier this month, school administrators ripped out a two-page spread depicting a timeline of events from the academic year. Among the high/lowlights included were the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, former President Donald Trump’s claims of a rigged election, the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is unclear who was behind the decision to excise the pages from the student-designed yearbook, but East End School District Superintendent Heidi Wilson justified the move by citing “community backlash.” A freedom of information records request by the Arkansas Times for any evidence related to the so-called community backlash has gone nowhere, according to the newspaper. “When asked if there were any emails, or perhaps a public meeting where people shared their opposition to the timeline, Wilson simply answered ‘no’ in an email and did not respond to further inquiries,” the paper reported earlier this week.
NPR

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to hand over documents related to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s potential conflicts of interest to a government watchdog group. Senior District Judge John D. Bates issued a 20-page ruling, seen by Newsweek, ordering USPS to give the documents to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) after the postal service refused to release them under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 2020. CREW requested the documents pertaining to DeJoy’s potential conflicts of interest and USPS identified seven documents that fit the criteria but refused to release citing exemptions under the FOIA. The watchdog group sued and on Wednesday Bates sided with CREW, ruling that USPS had improperly invoked two FOIA exemptions. USPS has invoked Exemption Three—designed to prevent the disclosure of commercial information such as trade secrets—and Exemption Five, which is meant to prevent the disclosure of material that is protected by “attorney-client and/or deliberative process privileges.”
Newsweek

In Dallas (Texas), at least one murder trial has been delayed after a police employee accidentally destroyed 8 terabytes of digital case files and materials during a routine data migration process gone wrong. A Dallas Police Department (DPD) employee attempting to move older case files out of a cloud-based archive and onto an on-premise server housed in the city’s data center accidentally deleted 22 terabytes worth of files, the DPD told media in an emailed statement. Police recovered 14 terabytes, but DPD believes the remaining 8 terabytes are “permanently deleted and unrecoverable from the archive location,” per its statement. The impacted files include audio recordings, case notes, images, videos and other materials, the DPD said. According to an Aug. 11 memo released by the Dallas County Criminal District Attorney’s Office, the data loss affects prosecution of cases for which the offending event occurred before July 28, 2020. There does not appear to be any malicious activity behind the far-reaching event. The accidental deletions are instead the result of human error, with the DPD attributing it to an employee who “failed to follow proper, established procedures.”
Governing
 

On Tuesday morning, I walked into the Harrisonburg/Rockingham Circuit Court Clerk’s office and filed a writ of mandamus against JMU. On Thursday, Aug. 19, The Breeze ran that suit on the cover of our print edition. We are committed to transparency throughout this process, so I want to, as the editor-in-chief, take a few words to explain how we arrived at this point and why we at The Breeze have taken this step. One year ago this week, JMU was bringing students to campus for the fall 2020 semester, and COVID-19 cases were on the rise. In response, The Breeze filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking for a record of daily case data broken down by dormitory. We did so in the name of transparency — transparency that we believe JMU’s community members deserve in order to be able to make informed decisions about their health.   However, the university partially denied our FOIA, saying it couldn’t break down case information by dormitory without compromising student privacy, citing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). We disagreed and pushed back.
Jake Conley, InsideNoVa

Virginia local school board sessions, historically, have avoided boisterous clamoring. It just didn’t happen. So what in the world was going on in Virginia Beach recently? A load of people appeared before the school board there to plead their case, it seems, on the basis of shouting and single-finger hand gestures. If that works it means I wasted years typing words into a machine for the newspapers.
Gordon Morse, The Virginian-Pilot