Mission Statement:
** To keep the taxpayers of Jasper County, Georgia informed as to where and how their tax dollars are being spent.
** To keep the taxpayers abreast of local policies and laws being discussed and enacted.
** We advocate more open government, less government spending, and lower property taxes.
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Green Book signals ‘go’ for access to schools
By Tom Bennett—Georgia FOI Access, Winter 2007

Our country got started once we wrote a constitution that worked. It’s elastic, dynamic and growing. The way we change is called “amending” it. The very first amendment gives us freedom of speech and the press. All this is taught to children in the K-12 public schools. Yet school systems flunked a 1999 survey of open government in Georgia, bringing up the rear behind other government agencies.

There are school superintendents, boards and attorneys who think up ways to STOP citizens and reporters from getting public records. It sounds crazy, but it happens all the time.

Attorney General Thurbert Baker and the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, Georgia PTA and Georgia Press Association now have combined to build a tool for confronting this dysfunction of Georgia public life. It is the 32-page booklet with a green cover entitled, “Georgia Public Schools and the Open Records Act: A Citizen’s Guide to Accessing School Records.”

“Public school records lie at the critical intersection of an individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know,” Baker writes in the foreword. It is the law, he says, that public-school records “must be made available for public inspection absent a clear legal requirement preventing disclosure or requiring the redaction of certain confidential information.” This is his strongest statement in any of the Hollie Manheimer books about Georgia FOI.

The Green Book highlights public and private information. It also is the clearest road map yet produced for traveling on the privacy-versus-access landscape of the largest state east of the Mississippi River in the 21st Century. Just the table of contents of this booklet alone is a heartbreaker for any denial-minded Georgia school superintendent. Here he and his staff – who are ready to take whatever position he favors, iron obduracy or modern cooperation – can find in two pages the guidelines for how to proceed in FOI.

Here are the boldfaced headings of this table of contents: Overview of Georgia’s Open Records Act; the Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act (FERPA); Inter-relationship between Georgia’s Open Records Act and FERPA; Campus courts; School personnel records; Administration records; the Open Records Act process; and Appendices.

“Public officials really aren’t left much recourse, because they can find everything fast,” said Kathryn Allen of Decatur. She is the retired senior Assistant Attorney General of Georgia and Emory Law graduate who ended her career in the Attorney General’s office in a historic role. She was the first coordinator of A.G. Baker’s Open Government Mediation Program in 2003-05. Before concentrating on open government, she was Georgians’ lawyer before our Supreme Court in a host of cases. In Georgia Hospital Association v. Ledbetter, Allen led the state’s highest court to establish that accreditation records of hospitals, public and private, are open.

Since retiring, Allen has assisted Hollie Manheimer in the editing of this new guide to public school FOI. The venerable practices in Georgia school districts of dogged reliance upon, and very spirited interpretation of, the U.S. Department of Education’s FERPA law will suffer now that the “Green Book” is being distributed around the state. “My personal opinion is that the Family Compliance Office, which enforces FERPA, does it much more broadly than Congress intended,” Allen said. “But we’re kind of stuck with the way they interpret it, because schools don’t want to lose any chances they have of getting their federal money. It also gives schools not happy about turning loose their records an excuse.”

However, the person who served as day-to-day coordinator of open government in the Law Department has strong views about the importance of privacy of certain Georgia school records. “I personally think an individual student’s grades should not be public,” Allen said. The foreword of this new booklet, which she signed off on, also stresses the privacy of “academic performance, medical or financial information and Social Security numbers.” The individual student grades and these other facts are protected. They “must be redacted from the documents prior to disclosure absent the consent of the student or his guardian,” according to the foreword.

If you are prepared to dismiss the “Green Book” as unqualified work of advocacy of openness, think again. Sad but true for pro-openness types, this book’s pages 22-26
define 32 types of “Information exempt from public disclosure.” These range from AIDS/HIV information to confidential records concerning reports to child abuse to
confidential juvenile records to wiretap records.

As in the other Manheimer books, this one also explodes the myth, dear to its legislative authors, that Title 50 of the Georgia Code has all the open government law. If only that were true, but it is not. The exemptions list in the Green Book also names other laws that prevent disclosure and that can be found in Titles 15, 25, 31, 35, 37, 40, 45 and 48. “The reason I like the list of exemptions (in the book) is that we want this to be helpful to the schools,” Allen said. “If it’s a helpful tool for them, they’ll rely on it.” Society’s ills fall to teachers to heal and they band together in a kind of bunker mentality. The legislator or governor who crosses them does so at his or her peril.

“I was a teacher, you know,” Allen recalled. “I know how important teachers’ jobs are. But I also remember how there are people with no other motivation in life except to just make a living, and so they decided to teach school. The ‘bunker mentality’ you refer to produces those bad teachers. For the school system to get rid of them, they have to do something almost morally reprehensible. I don’t know what percentage of teachers are good, or what percentage are bad. I know it is a place where some people come out and try their wings and decide it’s not for them. I was one of them. “I’ve had cases where we took teacher certificates away; my point of view may be a bit tarnished by that. In terms of openness, I think, yes indeed, parents and the general public need to know how teachers are performing. That’s the way to excellence, I’m convinced of that.”