Court Update

I've dug through quite a few of the publicly available affidavits and court orders on the request for public data by Joe Shoult from the District. I also talked with Joe today to find out whether the District provided the documents.

How much did Joe receive? Was it provided to Joe in a reasonable fashion?

First, a few facts from the June 3, 2008 affidavit:

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57,000 potentially responsive emails were gathered.

"As part of the School District's attorneys' review, it was discovered today (June 3, 2008) that as a result of a software glitch, only 43,000 of these documents have been printed. The consultant has been contacted and has informed the School District's attorneys that the printing of the remaining 14,000 emails will begin today."

This appears to mean that all of the emails are being printed and then hand reviewed rather than reviewed electronicly -- a huge, huge waste of money not to mention paper resources. Given that emails are approximately 2.5 pages on average, the total number of pages for the 57,000 emails would be around 142,500. A standard box of paper is around 2,500 pages. So, this would be 57 BOXES of paper. Electronically, this would fit on a thumb drive! I work in the legal discovery world and know that these can be reviewed and redacted electronically, saving a significant amount of time and money.

Of the 43,000 printed, 34% were determined to be unresponsive and will not be provided.

No indication as to how the emails were determined to be unresponsive.

"Subsequent to the initial review, this office began a more exhaustive review of the documents. As of this date, the School District's attorneys have reviewed approximately an additional eight percent (8%) of the pages representing the 43,000 printed emails. During this review it has been established that approximately fifty percent (50%) of these documents are responsive."

Let me take a stab at this: The law firm reviewed 3,440 emails (8% of the printed population), of which 1,720 emails (50%) are responsive.

What is not clear is that if the 34% were removed before the 8% were reviewed or not -- the law firm indicated that it was "subsequent to the initial review", which was what? Oh well, that is my best guess.

The District has a very broad definition of any private data. "Many of the emails were sent by parents with children in the School District. Data that identifies the parent is classified as non public private educational data under Minnesota Statutes Section 13.32, subd. 2(c). Any data maintained by a school district that relates to a student, which would include email documents, constitutes non public private educational data under Minnesota Statutes Section 13.32, subd. 1(a). Consequently this data must be redacted from any responsive email documents."

This definition means that nearly 99% of the responsive data has information that the District believes must be redacted.

Here are some facts from subsequent affidavits and court orders:

The judge ordered all data to be given to Joe by 5 p.m. today, June 15, 2008.

On Friday, June 13, 2008, the District subsequently requested a conference call with the judge and explained how they are working on the request and their progress to-date, but could not meet the timeline. They requested an extension and also indicated that the District would put off a vote on the 2008-09 budget until July 1. The District would turn over all materials on June 28. However, the District would provide the materials that they had compiled already by 5 p.m. today (June 15).

The District will provide the materials on June 28, which leaves 2 days for review before the final budget vote on July 1. The District had months to review the documents and Joe gets 2 days.

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So, that brings us to the original questions: How many emails were turned over today? The District and Knutson (the District law firm) indicated on June 3, 2008 that they had reviewed 1,720 emails that were responsive. Given an additional week or two they probably reviewed more, right? So, let's say an even 2,000 just to be very, very conservative.

A DVD was delivered to Joe Shoult today. 25 PDFs were on the DVD. Only 25 emails/PowerPoints total were delivered today!

So, did the District provide it in a reasonable manner? The PDFs are not searchable, which is a rather reasonable item to request. The District through Knutson uses NightOwl for producing the responsive documents. NightOwl could have OCRed the images going into the PDFs and made them searchable. Remember, as it stands right now, Joe gets 2 days to review unsearchable PDFs prior to the July 1 vote.

If there is nothing to hide, why is the District working so hard not to provide anything to Joe? I was really, really hoping to build up confidence in the District again by them simply saying, "We have nothing to hide and although this is laborious, we would be more than happy to turn over the documents in a reasonable format."?

If there is nothing wrong here, one must wonder: why take on these tactics?