Complaints about Public Records

Sharpie-Gate?

The sequence of events was as follows:

1. In order to get a full view of parent and teacher opinions on the topic of school reopening, I submitted a California public records act (CPRA) request for emails to the school board on that topic in the months of June and July 2020. Any person in the United States is entitled to receive this information, per California law.

2. Sylvia Eggert, assistant to Superintendent Booker, fulfilled the PUSD response with 647 pages of emails in PDF files stored on a Google Drive. First names and health conditions of minor children were redacted per law. These were very infrequent. Due to the pandemic, Sylvia was working from home and did not have access to Adobe Acrobat that can digitally redact words so she printed out the set of pages with words needing redaction, manually redacted those words with a Sharpie, and then rescanned those pages.

3. I didn’t want to be the only person with access to the raw data that literally anyone interested is entitled to. I decided to share the fact that I had this data with other parents, uploaded it to my website (using robots.txt settings to prevent Google indexing), and posted a link (not the contents) on the Piedmont Parent's Facebook page. Note that this simply made the data available to those interested in it. It was not distributed broadly and only parents who wanted the information were voluntarily downloading the contents by clicking the link.

4. Within a day of posting the link, I got complaints from parents who downloaded the information. The nature of the complaints fell into these categories: a) confusion over how the CPRA works and why I have access to this information, b) this information should not be made available on "the internet", and c) that some minor student names or health conditions were not fully redacted. One parent said she could Zoom into a section of the Sharpie redaction and make out the name of a minor child. No details were provided. Given the 647 pages of PDF, there was too much real estate for me to search. It's still baffling how this parent was able to find all the redacted parts, zoom in and out and discover a problem.

Please note a posting a link on Facebook is usually referred to as sharing on "social media", not "posting on the internet". The expression "the internet" has the implication of being searchable using Google, Bing, etc. Facebook requires a user login and acceptance by the Admin of the Facebook group and comments are not searchable using those Internet search engines. A robots.txt was also used to prevent those Internet search engines from indexing the CPRA response PDF files.

5. The parent refused to respond to my email questions and requests to speak on the phone. I was unable to get clarifications on a) Is this child 18 or 19 years old or a minor child? b) Since it is unusual to type full names into informal emails, after zooming in are you just seeing the first name? c) Are you deducing the child's last name from the last name of the parent who emailed the board? d) Are you deducing the last name from the other parent listed in the student directory?

6. Since I was not given information that I could use to confirm the complaints myself, I immediately forwarded them to Sylvia Eggert for her knowledge and confirmation. I had not done a detailed study of the case law around what needs to be redacted. The right person to know the law is Sylvia Eggert, who has been doing this for over a decade, for the school district, who again is responsible for performing the redactions. As reported by Superintendent Booker, the school district fulfills CPRA requests on a weekly basis. PUSD also has access to the Alameda County Department of Education (DOE) lawyer who is consulted for CPRA edge cases and provides the official legal advice to all school districts in the county.

7. After speaking with the Superintendent (and possibly school board members), Randy Booker asked Sylvia to "recall" the data and "re-redact" the information digitally using Adobe Acrobat software. During this re-redaction, Sylvia would be in the position to either confirm or deny the validity of the complaints. I received an email from Sylvia to delete and stop sharing the information. No admission of any mistakes being made. Just for the purpose of re-redacting due to complaints.

8. Immediately after reading that email (a couple of hours after it was sent), I deleted the files from my server and deleted the Facebook thread with links to it. The latter was required to remove any file caching that Facebook might be doing behind the scenes.

9. A parent demanded I not wait for confirmation from Sylvia and stop sharing the CPRA response with others. This would have blocked the legal rights of the interested recipients without proper official determination. I apologized to that parent for deferring to local government officials and for not anticipating the variety of complaints arising from sharing such a large volume of information.

10. A week later I received the "re-redacted" emails from Sylvia but chose not to share those with the public. The alternative for anyone (and to this day) is merely to ask Sylvia to forward the amended CPRA response given to Hari in 2020.

Thought experiment: What is the difference between a parent A) asking Sylvia to forward an email she sent to me from her Sent folder and B) asking me to forward the same email from my Inbox? Am I responsible for the content of the email in either case?

11. I asked Sylvia if she could confirm redactions were incompletely done the first time. She said no. This lack of confirmation of any errors is likely why the district did not apologize for making a mistake.

12. Most of the heat I got for this request was a character assassination attempt by "the powers that be" (Piedmont Exedra - CEO Mary Ireland - lifetime organizer of PEF and one of the largest donors/investors in PEF) with an article titled "Titan roiled the community". The article laid the blame for the student name data leak on me instead of on the office of the Superintendent who had the actual burden of performing the redactions by law. It exaggerated the number of people who had seen and complained about the contents of the CPRA response prior to their article itself roiling "the community". Their article also scares parents into imagining their public emails were searchable by search engines crawling my website. This fear was entirely unfounded.

Going to any website's "https: //XXX/robots.txt" will show how website owners prevent specific files or subfolders from being crawled by search engine (ro)bots. Major search engines (like Google, Bing, Yahoo) also provide an administrator interface to confirm whether or not a web link will be crawled by that search engine. I used both these techniques to ensure PDFs in the private area of my website remained private unless someone had a web link to download those files. This is analogous to a Google Doc that exists on a web server, is shared with anyone who has a link, but is hidden from anyone without the link.

Note: Doug Ireland (Mary's husband) was on the school board the year Randy Booker was promoted to Superintendent and Booker was good friends with the Irelands, often attending events at their home and various PEF events.

Here is a PDF of the email I sent to Randy Booker regarding complaints both he and I received about the release of information under the CPRA:

https://harititan.com/Complaints_about_Public_Records.pdf

I requested Superintendent Booker inform parents that emails to the school board are a matter of public record. The district website did not make that clear. Booker refused saying he doesn't know how to word it without reducing the number of emails sent to the district.

Since one complaint was about IEP, I also asked the PRAISE board to inform their membership that their emails to the board are a matter of public record. They also rejected my request to do so.

Special Ed students were the first to be brought back to the school sites. I recommended this option to Randy Booker as a way for doing a trial run of school reopening, see https://HariTitan.com/Safety_Summit_Primer.pdf. Many of the emails with redactions were complaining about distance learning not working for their child and I suspected students labelled "high-need", by definition, would need more help. Help that could only be provided in person.