At tonight's Lower Merion School Board meeting proposed amendments to School Board Policy 800 will be presented. The changes would establish a new policy for the archiving of school district employee email correspondence.
But amazingly, the changes do not establish a more firm policy on the archival of emails. Instead they create new ways for employees to remove all trace of their email from the archive system. If employees wish to remove email correspondence from the system they would have up to 72 hours to delete it, otherwise only then would it become archived. Essentially it would be left up to each individual employee to determine which of his or her correspondence could be available for possible future examination.
Now bear in mind that there have been two recent important cases involving archived email discovery. One is Judge Baylson's memo of finding of fact in the Doe v. LMSD case, and the other is Special counsel Hank Hockeimer's report on the investigation into the laptop camera (so-called "spycam") issue. In both cases, archived email of school district employees proves essential in establishing the facts reconstructing what happened. A move now -- toward relying on individuals to determine what of their official work is meaningful for archive -- seems not only unwarranted but contraindicated.
I hope that there will be at least a some discussion about this policy among the board members at tonight's meeting, and with specific reference to how the discovery and investigations into Doe and Spycam might have been different had there been no archived email to discover.
UPDATE: Link added to proposed changes School Board Policy 800, with corresponding Administrative policy.
Monday, May 17, 2010
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Jim - there is so much more in policy 800! Administrators are allowed to delete from the archives without leaving a record of such deletion. Users can request emails that have been archived to be deleted at any time if they contain "inappropriate or inaccurate references to student, parent, staff member or other person"
ReplyDeleteAmazing. And then these deleted emails are not available for any subsequent legal discovery? Aren't "inappropriate emails" exactly what we want discovered in order to uncover inappropriate behavior?
ReplyDeleteIf a school district employee is emailing inappropriately with a student, is this now completely unknowable?
This raises so many questions. If an LMSD employee has made an inappropriate or inaccurate reference to me - a parent - can I demand that the email be erased?