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Hubbard schools get restraining order
HUBBARD
The Hubbard School District won a temporary restraining order to keep a company it hired to store records from destroying hard drives that contain copies of those records.
Trumbull County Common Pleas Judge Ronald J. Rice granted the order Monday against V.B. Confidential LLC of Columbus.
The owner of the company, Ira Shakeri, had indicated the hard drives would be destroyed Monday, and he told The Vindicator on Tuesday he was unaware of the court action. He would not say whether the hard drives still exist.
The district entered into a contract with the company Oct. 21, 2013, for a “hosted document management system” to convert all the district’s documents from paper and compact discs to a Web-based system for ease of use and security, the suit says.
But the system never functioned properly, the suit contends, if at all, and was consistently down, inaccessible for district users, and the printing function never worked.
The district stopped using V.B. Confidential’s system and “returned to its previous document-retention system,” the suit says.
The suit says the district told the company about the problems, but the company never tried to fix any of them.
In March, the district told Shakeri it was using a clause in the three-year contract to terminate it because the company could not fix the problems.
It requested return of all its records.
The suit contends that Shakeri has not returned the district’s records and has demanded payment for $7,200 despite the district’s “constant communication” regarding problems with the system.
The TRO request was filed after the district’s lawyer got an email from Shakeri saying that the company was scheduled to shred hard drives containing district records Monday.
The district feared the loss of records in their entirety, the suit says.
The schools superintendent and the board of education president could not be reached for further comment Tuesday afternoon.
Shakeri said that he destroys hard drives periodically to protect client information.
He said he has not seen a copy of the suit and was not given a copy of the restraining order Monday, and he would not say if the hard drives were destroyed. He said that other clients are using the company’s system without problems.
“We tried over and over to work with them [the district] and they refused,” he said. “We responded to them, we requested to meet with them, they would not.”
The district has also asked the judge to order the company to give back its records.
Shakeri said that he does not have the district’s records, having already returned them all.
A preliminary injunction hearing is set for 10 a.m. Tuesday in Judge Rice’s court.
Staff writer Ed Runyan contributed to this report.