Request for Emails - Where's the beef?

I have spoken with several of the parents reviewing emails from the District concerning the way the emails were delivered. Here is what I found out:

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Question: What was the timing on receiving the emails?

The emails were requested from the District on or around February 15, 2008. The parents involved followed up with the District every 3 to 5 days from then until they filed a lawsuit in April. There is a date/time stamp on some of the documents that indicate that they were printed on April 11 – two full months after the request. On June 6 in an affidavit, the District attorneys indicated that they had only completely 6 to 8% of the review.

Question: How many actual emails did you receive?

It is difficult to tell. The documents were delivered as large PDFs with thousands of pages in each PDF. Determining where page breaks are is very difficult. We know we received around 20,000 to 21,000 pages.

Question: Did you receive everything?

Well, as you know the affidavit filed by the District on June 3 states that there were 57,000 emails to review. It also stated that half of them were responsive putting the total number at around 28,500 emails. Even if every email was only one page, we could not have received everything.

Question: Were public emails collected from all email accounts?

Evidently quite a few board members used personal email accounts to reply to the community and to conduct business with the District. The School Board Members did not turn over those emails. We are not sure that those should be public record or not. We know that as an employee of a business if we use a personal email account on our home computer to conduct business that information is the property of our employer and is discoverable [can be requested as evidence] if our employer was sued. In this case, the District is not being sued. This is completely under the MN Data Practices Act, which may not compel the District to gather that information. Still, if a School Board member insists on using their personal email account (as several have) then one would think that those emails were available as part of the public record -- as long as the email concerns their role as a School Board Member. Certainly personal emails, outside of their School Board dealings, are private.

Question: One of the consistency checks that can be performed is to check and see that the same email is received by all board members. Are you able to find consistency between School Board Members?

Unfortunately, we are finding inconsistent archives of emails. For example, Susan may have sent an email to all board members, but it only shows up in two of the board members' sets of documents. Furthermore, just to make sure that our own emails had made it through in January, February and March, the parents are checking for the emails they know they sent. So far, they are reporting spotty results -- some emails made it through to one or two people and some emails did not make it through to anyone. This would indicate that the emails may have been deleted or perhaps the District or the law firm did not do a good job turning over everything -- after all the numbers do not appear to add up.

Question: You indicated in our previous discussions that the quality and organization of the emails may be less than ideal as well. What did you find and why is this important?

The overall quality of the scanned images is poor in general. As well, the images are completely out of order. For example, you may have an email that references an attachment, but the attachment might not appear until several documents later -- or seemingly not at all. This makes it difficult to match up documents that might be similar. The documents are completely out of date order as well, which makes it difficult to review the documents and follow the conversations.

[From a legal background, when documents are turned over, they are turned over in what is considered the “normal course”, which loosely means that you turn documents over in the same manner that they would be found in the normal course of business. This is obviously not the case and it appears to be making the review of documents very difficult. Disclaimer: I am NOT an attorney.]

Question: We saw from some of the first documents released that the redactions were inconsistent. How are documents redacted?

When the same email is sent to all of the board members, the redactions (the blacked out portion of the emails) are completely inconsistent. In fact, it is difficult to find the redactions that were applied consistently within duplicate documents. Another area of redactions that is inconsistent is when Teamworks is mentioned. The name Teamworks is not redacted out in the proposals or in quite a few of the documents, but in some cases they redacted out Teamworks. In one document it is redacted and in the duplicate under a different School Board member the name is not redacted.