When mistakes are made, the public has a right to specifics

When mistakes are made, the public has a right to specifics

Sometimes, the line between the public’s right to know and an individual’s right to privacy is a close call.

But a recent incident in Niles is worth revisiting, because the public’s right to know wasn’t even a close call, and the initial reaction of the school district illustrates how even well-intentioned government officials and employees almost instinctively prefer to close doors to the public rather than open them.

Last week, Niles Superintendent Rocco Adduci described an item on the school board’s agenda in the kind of skeletal fashion that is bound to pique a reader’s curiosity. A veteran high school teacher had been suspended, but all that was provided was the teacher’s name, the length of the suspension and the information that the teacher had violated board policy.

Adduci explained that in talking with the teacher about the impending suspension, it was agreed that details would not be released.

So, the initial report in last Friday’s Vindicator simply stated that Kelly Newbrough, a math teacher at Niles McKinley High School, had been suspended for 10 days without pay by the board of education for “violating school policy.”

Over the weekend, the story got considerable attention on Vindy.com, with reader commentary ranging from an ardent defense of the teacher’s alleged right to privacy to speculation over what type of policy violation would result in a 10-day suspension.

It’s the law

When Vindicator editors assembled for a new work week on Monday, it didn’t take long to reach the proper legal conclusion that whatever it was the teacher did, the details had to be part of the teacher’s personnel file. That file, under Ohio public records law, is available to the public. Incidentally, contrary to some of Vindy.com’s chatroom legal experts, public bodies and their employee groups cannot negotiate an exception to the public records law — anymore than they could negotiate an exception to the state’s traffic laws or to Newton’s Law of Gravity. The law is the law.

At any rate, when Vindicator correspondent Jordan Cohen contacted Adduci and said he’d be coming in to look at Newbrough’s personnel file, Adduci cooperated fully, as he was bound to do. In the file was a letter that provided the particulars of Newbrough’s offense. It appears that a student’s incessant pen-tapping led to the teacher’s exceedingly bad choice of words — he told the student who was annoying him that he “wanted to take that pen and stab him in the neck with it.” The student complained, and the teacher compounded his error by confronting the student, the student’s sister, making a series of phone calls to the cell phone of the mother of the students and then taking sick time to attempt to visit the students’ father at his place of work. These actions interfered with the school’s investigation and were viewed as intimidating by the family, Adduci told the teacher.

We’ll leave it to the residents of Niles to decide whether these actions were more or less serious than what they imagined when all they were told was Newbrough violated board policy. They can decide for themselves as well as to whether the punishment was more severe than it should have been, less severe, or just about right.

As Ohio law wisely recognizes, the rights of citizens to have the information necessary to discuss what goes on in government trumps any imagined right of public employees to misbehave with anonymity or with the public being given only the fuzziest of explanations.