Transparency News 9/14/16

 

Nominations are being accepted for VCOG’s Freedom of Information Awards, to be presented in the fall of 2016. Entries should be submitted by November 2, 2016, by filling out the form below or by mailing the same information to VCOG, P.O. Box 2576, Williamsburg VA  23187. Awards are given to citizens, media and government for their recent efforts in keeping Virginia state or local government open and accountable to the public. Click below for a nomination submission form.
VCOG

For about two decades, Virginia Department of Education officials warned against using class scheduling to manipulate standardized testing, but school divisions were left to police themselves. Now, the state plans to get more involved. Next week, the state school board will review a measure that would require superintendents to sign off on a policy that prevents changing schedules to avoid having weak students take Standards of Learning exams. SOL pass rates determine accreditation, which affects schools’ reputations and educators’ jobs. The state will release new ratings Wednesday. Virginia officials don’t monitor SOL course enrollment trends, even though the state maintains a database of all the classes, students and teachers in public schools. The Education Department says it doesn’t know whether the data is accurate because it doesn’t check. The state denied a Pilot request for the entire database, saying students could be identified even if personal information was removed. The department provided part of it, but because divisions use different course codes and schedule patterns, SOL enrollment couldn’t be compared across divisions or between semesters.
Virginian-Pilot

Going forward, city residents will be provided an extra form of notice when the vacating of city streets is up for consideration. Lynchburg City Council approved an ordinance Tuesday which amends several sections of the city code pertaining to the processes by which the city vacates a public street or alley. Following the changes to the city code that were approved Tuesday, signs now will be posted at the site notifying the public of an application for vacations or alterations, and property owners within 200 feet of the proposed vacation or alteration will be notified by mail prior to the public hearing. Mailed notices also will be sent to property owners along unused and unopened “paper” streets or alleys that are up for vacation or alteration. Notices will continue to run in the newspaper prior to a public hearing.
News & Advance

The Winchester City Council may begin taping and televising its work sessions again. Council work sessions and regular meetings are two separate meetings, but occur back-to-back on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month at Rouss City Hall. Agendas for each can be found on the city’s website. While work sessions were only televised for about a year — from 2012 to 2013 — regular meetings have been aired for years, playing live (beginning at 6 p.m.) on the city’s local Channel 6 and then re-airing at 6 p.m. the Thursday after the meeting. Multiple councilors said Tuesday that constituents often tell them that they’ve watched the regular meetings, but didn’t see much worth watching. "You guys didn’t do much," is something councilman Corey Sullivan said he hears. That’s because, as councilman Evan Clark put it, "all the work is done in a work session."
Winchester Star

The Purcellville Town Council took concrete steps toward government openness by voting in favor of budget transparency software and considering an efficiency audit during its Sept. 13 meeting.
Loudoun Times-Mirror

The Loudoun County School Board voted against considering a motion to censure board member Joy Maloney (Broad Run) for her Aug. 2 arrest at a Donald Trump rally at Briar Woods High School. Before Chairman Eric Hornberger (Ashburn) had a chance to read the motion to introduce the resolution aloud, Brenda Sheridan (Sterling) objected to considering it. Hornberger then asked the board to vote on whether or not to discuss the resolution at all. DeKenipp asked Hornberger why Sheridan’s motion to object was allowed. The chairman cited a page of Robert’s Rules of Order that said “objection to consideration takes precedence” over the original motion. The board ultimately voted against discussing the censure, with six opposed, Maloney abstaining and Turgeon and DeKenipp in favor. “That seemed a little bit too coordinated for me,” said Dekenipp immediately after the board voted. DeKenipp, who wasn’t able to argue his motion to the board, shared his prepared statement with the Times-Mirror.
Loudoun Times-Mirror


National Stories
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The Salt Lake Tribune won, in part, an appeal to the State Records Committee on Thursday, requiring the Provo and Orem police departments to provide a report showing any instances of Brigham Young University officers accessing the two agencies' records through a shared countywide database. Jessica Miller, a Tribune reporter, filed the appeal in July after the two agencies denied her initial requests, filed May 25. The records would contribute to the newspaper's investigation of students' assertions that they were targeted by BYU's Honor Code Office after reporting sexual assaults. The Tribune previously obtained documents showing that one BYU police lieutenant accessed a Provo police record, purportedly so he could collect information for an Honor Code investigation into a female student who filed a rape case. He read the report by using the countywide database shared by 22 law enforcement agencies in Utah County, including Provo, Orem and BYU police.
Salt Lake Tribune

A federal appeals court Friday overruled a lower court decision to throw out a lawsuit brought by the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over its release to environmental groups of personal information on tens of thousands of farmers. In late 2015, a U.S. district court dismissed the NPPC-Farm Bureau suit for lack of standing. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in St. Louis unanimously ruled that “the associations have established a concrete and particularized injury in fact traceable to the EPA’s action and redressable by judicial relief.”
Farm Futures

Editorials/Columns

State Sen. [sic] John O’Bannon (R-Henrico) sums up the situation well. He describes the state’s troubled information technology contract with Northrop Grumman as a “whirlwind courtship, short honeymoon, rocky marriage, and now we’re headed for any ugly divorce.” Northrup Grumman defends its records. Laymen find the situation as difficult to sort out as friends trying to sort out the troubled marriage of the couple next door. We trust VITA in part because we have grown skeptical of privatized programs generally.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

It remains to be seen whether the reversal of McDonnell’s conviction will make ethics laws even more ineffective. We certainly hope not. Let’s remember that even before his conviction, McDonnell said accepting the gifts was wrong and he apologized to the people of Virginia. And he favors ethics reform in the state. It’s puzzling why some legislators—clearly not all—like the idea of receiving gifts from lobbyists. Some absolutely refuse to accept any kind of gift, and that number has increased since the McDonnell case erupted. To them, it’s probably demeaning to accept something of value, even a meal, from someone trying to gain a vote for a piece of legislation. Much has been made in recent years about how candidates—Democrats in particular—promise “free stuff” for constituents to gain supporters. Maybe some Virginia legislators should be included among those who like “free stuff” from lobbyists and corporations. True reform would be a ban on all gifts to Virginia legislators, and we hope it happens.
Free Lance-Star

Just how good – or bad – are Norfolk public schools? Impossible to tell. Certainly, when accreditation ratings are released today, they should be viewed with skepticism. According to a front-page story in Sunday’s Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk school officials have for some time quietly engaged in a bit of hard-to-detect gamesmanship that casts a shadow of doubt over standardized test results. The Pilot’s Cherise Newsome found that Norfolk schools regularly yank struggling kids out of classes before they take the Standards of Learning tests. There’s a name for this practice. It’s called “recycling.” Although Norfolk’s schools chief Melinda Boone, who refuses to prohibit these convenient course withdrawals, doesn’t use that term. She euphemistically refers to recycling as “a different pathway.” Recycling appears to be fairly common in the city’s high schools. It is difficult to prove, however. The Pilot was able to point to what looks like widespread recycling by using FOIA laws to obtain five years’ worth of data.
Kerry Dougherty, Virginian-Pilot

Fifty years ago, the American Society of News Editors led the push for passage of the federal Freedom of Information Act that, along with the state and local laws it spawned, set open government standards across the U.S. This week, the nation’s editors and managing editors meet in a joint convention in Philadelphia, facing a new era for speech and press rights that comes with long list of obstacles and opportunities. In preparation for a segment on freedom of information, convention organizers asked media leaders across the country what they think editors and their organizations should do to promote the public’s right to know in a time of change. They had a lot to say: They worried that news organizations and industry groups are failing to keep up with digital FOI developments, trends in government secrecy and the imperial way technology companies handle news and information. Some said it’s time for an effort along the lines of the FOIA campaign a half-century ago.
Anders Gyllenhaal, Poynter