Portland school board adopts controversial public records agreement, with a slight tweak

The Portland school board approved a controversial agreement with its teachers’ union Tuesday, allowing educators more input on whether a public records that contain their names should be withheld in whole or in part from the public based on a privacy exemption.

The agreement drew the ire of an attorney who represented a reporter sued by the district to bar the release of a list of employees on paid leave and a trade group representing Oregon journalists. Those folks say a clause allowing teachers a seven-day window to apply for a personal privacy exemption would cause undue delay in the release of records and flies against the spirit of state law.

“I think there’s a real balancing act and there’s a tension inherent in our public records policy,” Julia Brim-Edwards, one of two board members to vote against the agreement, said. “We are a public institution and we need to do our business in public and the vast majority of our records are public records.”

Portland school board to vote Tuesday on whether to allow teachers to delay release of public records

Portland Public Schools may allow teachers to delay the release of certain records for up to seven days, according to a new agreement the district has negotiated with its teachers union.

Mike Rosen, in his final week as a board member, was the second no vote on allowing the seven-day delay.

The two board members who negotiated the agreement with the union and the state public records advocate say the seven-day window falls within state guidelines, characterizing the revision as a “minor change in protocols.”

“I think it’s very important to be clear that the proposed memorandum of agreement does not come with any change to our public records policy,” Board Chair Rita Moore said. She and Amy Kohnstamm were the two board members who worked out the deal.

The seven-day window for teachers to object to the inclusion of certain information would come in handy if, for example, Moore said, a person requested documents out of malice.

But both board members and district staff said the district’s public records office has never released documents that in fact qualify for personal privacy exemptions, such as medical information, names of minor children and private email addresses.

Final tally for Portland schools over public records disputes? Nearly $280,000

The school board authorized a $105,000 payment to legal reps for journalist Beth Slovic and The Portland Tribune, the final check cut in the aftermath of the district's refusal to hand over records.

Sharon Reese, the district’s chief human resources officer, said there was an instance in the last year where a teacher who was given a 24-hour notice of a records release was able to establish he or she had a genuine basis to withhold a record based on the state’s personal privacy exemption to its public records law.

Had such a bill been released, “That’s a bell that can’t be unrung,” she said.

Still, Moore concedes the district has at times dragged its feet on relinquishing records despite a lawful request to do so.

“I totally understand why people are skeptical,” she said. “Given PPS’s history of, how should I put it, non-responsiveness, bias toward lack of transparency in the past, I completely understand why somebody would leap to a conclusion that this is an attempt to hide the ball.”

Communications Director Stephanie Cameron said the district currently notifies teachers shortly before the public records officer releases a document that applies specifically to them. The agreement will change that system so the employee learns about the records request when it’s first submitted or it’s revealed their name is in a document that’s about to be released.

“That’s why we’re comfortable knowing it’s not going to tack it on at the end and delay it,” she said.

Scott Bailey was the lone board member to abstain from the final vote on the agreement. He said the public records protocol was an administrative issue, not for the board to decide for the district.

“We’re supposed to be flying at 30,000 feet,” he said. “We’re supposed to be setting policy and ensuring that it’s followed.”

The agreement passed with a 4-2 vote after Kohnstamm added an amendment to remove language allowing union members seven days to raise objections to the release of records containing “potentially sensitive information.”

She said such a change was necessary to bring the agreement in line with state law. Instead, the seven-day review would only kick in if the district’s public records steward flags a document as eligible for a personal privacy exemption under state law.

“I concur with the concern with the Society of Professional Journalists about the language,” she said, adding the term “potentially” “is not the language of the statute.”

Brim-Edwards and Rosen voted against the measure. Both said they wanted the agreement to be vetted by the public, rather than arranged solely with input from district officials and the teachers’ union.

“We set policy. We do it through a very public process. We’re undermining the work that we’ve already done and now we’re revisiting this issue in private,” Rosen said.

The board also approved a final amendment in its contract with the teachers’ union, which would change how and how long the district keeps records of complaints about educators’ conduct and subsequent findings about those complaints.

Investigators said the district’s longterm practices in that regard allowed longtime educator Mitch Whitehurst to dodge sexual misconduct allegations for decades.

Investigative files on district teachers will now be kept in the central offices rather than individual buildings, where certain documents were required to be purged when a new principal took over or an educator moved to a different school.

Bailey lauded the change but said he hoped the district would require principals to check personnel files when they take over a school. District officials said principals can decide whether to do so or not.

Teachers union, Portland Public Schools agree to change filing practices that allowed educator to dodge sexual misconduct allegations for years

The changes come one year after the release of a school board-commissioned report that laid out reforms to catch problem educators.

Consistently and thoroughly looking through dozens of files at the district headquarters can be a logistical stretch for principals. And it clearly did not happen with the half-dozen principals and assistant principals who supervised Whitehurst at Jefferson High and Fabion K-8 schools and fielded sexual misconduct complaints about him.

“If we have a practice of every time we have a new principal of a building, they do a file check to come up to speed, that should be part of our orientation process,” Bailey said. “It’s not something that we should do or do a lot of the time but that happens every time. I think it would be closing one last little loop.”

Board members also approved a $28 million plan to relocate Alliance at Meek, an alternative high school in Northeast Portland, to the Benson High campus and roll it into larger-scale renovations scheduled to happen there.

The district will likely propose to voters a multimillion-dollar bond in 2020 to fund the project and address nearly a quarter-million dollars in cost overruns from construction projects included in a 2017 bond.

The board also gave Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero a glowing review. Several members applauded the district’s top administrator and his work ethic and advised him to slow down.

“Dial it down a notch — this is a marathon, this isn’t a sprint,” Bailey said with a chuckle. “We all understand the urgency you’ve brought to the work and the hours you’ve put in. Now it’s time for a more sustainable pace.”