Denver Post – by Alicia Caldwell
If you deal with government officials long enough, you come to recognize certain truisms.
They don’t like controversy. They don’t particularly want you to second-guess them. And they sometimes act as if the public records they create belong to them, not the taxpayers who finance their work.
A situation that began in 2010 and has unfolded in the Poudre School District over the last few years is all that and worse. Frankly, I’ve never seen anything like it.
Ephraim and Donna Starr are active — and, I would say, assertive — parents who have pushed hard to make sure their autistic child gets the right services from the district.
To parents of special-needs children, it will come as no surprise that such action is sometimes necessary. And surely those school district officials who work in special education understand how important it is to parents to make sure their children have appropriate instruction.
Yet, certain Poudre district officials treated the Starrs with disdain, even ordering the destruction of e-mails in anticipation of a potential public records request from the parents.
A school employee who obeyed orders to destroy electronic copies of e-mails yet saved printouts of them says she was fired for her actions.
A court later found the content of some of the e-mails in the case to be “unprofessional and perhaps unethical,” and the district apparently agrees.
Poudre schools “states in the strongest terms possible that the conduct was unacceptable, inappropriate and inconsistent with the district’s policies, practices and values.”
A judge found in 2011 that the records destruction did not violate Colorado open records laws since the destruction directive took place prior to the formal records request.
Yet, the judge ordered the district to pay more than $122,000 in attorneys’ fees to the family. Steven D. Zansberg, a First Amendment lawyer who represented the Starrs in the case, said his clients got that award because the judge found they were the prevailing applicant and the district had improperly withheld records.
That might seem like it would be the end of conflict between the Starrs and the district, but it was not.
The school district took the family to administrative court over their refusal to consent to all two dozen assessment tests school officials initially asked to perform on their child, Isaac, who is now 9 years old.
The family eventually agreed to most, with six in dispute, said Ephraim Starr, Isaac’s father. The Starrs wanted more information, including who would perform the evaluations and what they would entail.
The school district issued a written statement saying the proceedings involving the family were in “no way” connected to the open records litigation.
By Friday afternoon, the Starrs and the district had come to a mutually acceptable resolution of disputed issues, Ephraim Starr said.
He and his wife are hopeful it might be the start of a better relationship with the district.
That would be a good thing given how rocky it has been thus far.
The public records saga started three years ago, as the Starrs prepared to move from California to Larimer County. They contacted the Poudre district in order to get an Individualized Education Program in place before Isaac was to start school in Colorado.
Almost immediately, Ephraim Starr said, he became uneasy about the vague responses he was getting that he said were mostly “platitudes.”
They would later find out that during that timeframe, district employees were exchanging e-mails about the family that were flippant, disrespectful and unprofessional, as a judge would characterize them.
District officials called the Starrs “crazy people,” according to court records. They exchanged comments such as, “strap on your waders,” and, “This is going to be so much fun!!”
Before the Starrs enrolled their child, Integrated Services Director Sarah Belleau sent an e-mail telling another employee to ask all involved staff to “delete AND destroy any email or paper records related to this family.” Then, empty the trash. “The reason is to protect against an open records request.”
That is an astonishing statement from a public employee.
Zansberg said he was shocked by what he read. He calls it the “smoking gun” e-mail.
“I’ve never seen a document like that before or since,” said Zansberg, who has represented The Denver Post on First Amendment issues.
Belleau later testified that she wanted to eliminate “duplicate copies of information” since they might cause confusion, according to a judge’s ruling. And she wanted to ensure confidential California records were destroyed in the event the child did not enroll in the district. A judge found Belleau’s testimony “not credible” and said her primary intent was to prevent the family from getting the material.
Zansberg said the document would not have surfaced if it weren’t for the actions of Gloria Hohrein, integrated services coordinator for the district.
Hohrein made hard copies of e-mails she was told to delete. Later, those hard copies were produced and the “smoking gun” surfaced.
She told 7News she was later fired because even though she saved hard copies of the e-mails and never withheld anything from the district, she had taken the extra step of consulting the IT department to make sure she was permanently deleting the e-mails.
The Starrs felt they had to file a lawsuit to obtain information about how the district was handling their son’s education.
The material they got was eye-opening. As it turns out, there were many e-mails that talked about deleting e-mails and emptying electronic trash bins.
The district ended up spending tens of thousands of dollars to hire a Texas firm to retrieve deleted records, an action the court found to constitute a reasonable search.
Reasonable, yes. But was this all really necessary? The relationship between schools and parents should be cooperative, not one that involves mass deletion of records and conflict.
The Poudre situation should be an object lesson in how not to get along.
E-mail Denver Post editorial writer Alicia Caldwell at acaldwell@ denverpost.com. Follow her on Twitter: @AliciaMCaldwell
http://www.denverpost.com/caldwell/ci_25442499/caldwell-poudre-school-district-lesson-how-not-handle