I submitted an OPRA request to provide the last 30 days of emails, where either the board president OR the board vice president OR the longest-serving member on the board has used their PRIVATE email and copied someone/anyone within the school district. I got over 340 hits where these three board members have used their PRIVATE email accounts – and that’s just in a small 30 days period.
Many of these emails have confidential /personnel/executive session related subjects that are highly confidential in nature and should not be used on the private email server.
Two board members seem to be ORIGINATING most of their emails to their colleagues from the PRIVATE email server.
Some school district employees, including the superintendent, are also “sending’ emails to these private email accounts (not just responding, but originating new emails). They should be aware that more than 38 employees were recently cited for violations for Hillary email issues. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/18/hillary-clinton-email-probe-people-cited-but-no-evidence-deliberate-mishandling/4027787002/
Attached is the spreadsheet and screenshot of the OPRA request.
Also, here is the text link for entire file
Thank you
Anonymous NJ Citizen
And noone from varios departments want to enforce law when it comes to these board members?
Didn’t you know that the Ridgewood Board of Education is above the law? Legends in their own minds.
Use of private email by a board member for for board business is not illegal. Nice try.
I don’t know the details of what the Board has been doing, so I won’t comment on that, but I think its important to understand exactly what a “private” email address is. If you set up and maintain a server yourself in your office or the Cloud (or whatever), that’s a Private server. Unless you are doing it, there are no backups or archives, and it’s very easy to destroy or hide should the need arise. That’s what HRC did and it is blatantly illegal for people who need to preserve their emails.
The other thing that people are calling a “private” email address is when somebody uses Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail for example. That’s not private, its Public. Google, or whomever the provider is, most likely does preserve the emails in one way or another. Law Enforcement and other groups can get these emails if necessary.
Oliver – Law Enforcement can get these emails, but the business administrator and district IT staff (custodian of records) cannot answer PRA requests. They need to rely on these board members to provide emails themselves and they can always say “oops I deleted it”.
Also, once a board member retires or leaves the board position, they should not have the ability to retain confidential information which is being transmitted to them in the capacity of board member. If they exclusively use work email, then the district IT administrator can disable their account when they retire.
So, use of personal email accounts for confidential district emails may not be illegal, it does not sound 100% ethical.
100% ethical? What is legal and what is ethical are polar opposites all too often.
I think the words “legal” and “ethical” are thrown around a lot above. Legal assumes that you are legally required to behave in a certain way. Federal law sets certain rules that must be followed by Federal officials. Dont know but would be surprised if anyone had ever thought of drafting similar laws for school board. Ethical presumes you have done something wrong. That is more a gray area, as what is wrong to me might not be wrong to you – that’s why people get elected or tossed out. I think the operative phrase here that should be followed is ” Best Practices”. Which I dont think requires a law as much as a board resolution stating that official business must be either done thru official email server, or since this is not always convenient for people who are basically private citizens who volunteer to serve, ok to use GMail, etc but cc the official address so everything is on record.