Student members of school boards present a dangerous conflict of interest
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Read MoreAfter my Nov. 27 op-ed concerning the fraudulent claims made by AACPS and SBAC senior officials...
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Read MorePublic Testimony of J.H. Snider Before the Anne Arundel School Board Appointment Commission...
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Read MoreThis post is divided into two sections: Correspondence prior to the MSDE meeting on January 24,...
Read MoreThis post is divided into two sections: Correspondence prior to the MSDE meeting on January 24,...
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Read MoreTestimony Before the Anne Arundel Education Subcommittee of Maryland’s General Assembly
Read MoreA few years ago County Executive John Leopold was forced from office in part for using government...
Read MoreGov. Larry Hogan has appointed the 2016-17 school year student member of our school board. The...
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Read MoreAdditional J.H. Snider Public Information Act correspondence and testimony focusing solely on K12 compensation transparency issues can be found at K12Transparency.iSolon.org. Both sites together only cover a small fraction of J.H. Snider's PIA correspondence and testimony, partly because Snider began routinely making such requests in the late 2000s but only haphazardly posted them online until about a decade later. Articles that discuss this PIA correspondence include:
Testimony Before the Maryland General Assembly
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Read MoreAddendum: When I filed this complaint, I did not know that the Public Information Act ombudsman...
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Read MoreThe Board of Education has taken to using pseudo public meetings to discuss the public’s business. In this particular case, the meeting is technically open the public and there is a brief public presentation, but the rest...
Read MoreDuring the past week, the Capital reported the seven questions on this year’s ballot as though there was no controversy surrounding them. But the recommendations of the Capital, County Executive Steve Schuh, and County...
Read MoreIntroductory Note: It took approximately one-month for me to get the most politically...
Read More*The Capital has no such mottoes, let alone any formal ethics policy, published on its website.
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Report on
Howard County Public School System
violations of the Public Information Act
The foregoing history demonstrates multiple PIA compliance problems and incorrect or unsubstantiated responses by HCPSS. Among the areas of concern are: HCPSS’ failure to respond in writing to the September 2012 and April 2014 PIA requests for student records; HCPSS’ unsubstantiated assertion that the vast majority of records it produced to the requestor for the first time in February 2016 had been produced in 2014 and earlier; and the repetition of this unsubstantiated statement and concomitant representation later in 2016 by the Director of Communications that all disclosable records had been produced to the requestor. In fact, HCPSS’ own counsel demonstrated that the latter comment was not the case when an additional record was provided for the first time on November 28, 2016.... (pages 3-4)
HCPSS’ multiple failures in responding fully and accurately to this requestor have severely undermined the ability of this requestor to have any trust or confidence in the integrity and validity of HCPSS’ responses to her PIA requests. Likewise, failures of this magnitude, persisting for more than 4 years, have an obvious impact on the level of trust and confidence that HCPSS can expect in the wider community. Perhaps most troubling of all is that, even at this late date, HCPSS seems unwilling to give a candid accounting for these failures. Apart from the persistence of certain unanswered questions concerning the withholding of other records not yet produced, but which may be subject to disclosure in redacted form, HCPSS has taken no steps to acknowledge and take responsibility for the very real injury to this requestor.... (page 29)
--Maryland Public Access Ombudsman's Report Concerning the Howard County Public School System's Handling of Requests Under the Public Information Act, December 30, 2016.
A Survey of Journalists on the
Freedom of Information
Enforcement Problem
--National Freedom of Information Coalition's
2016 Open Government Survey, March 17, 2016
"He who controls the past controls the future."
--George Orwell,
1984
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
--George Santayana,
The Life of Reason, 1905
As applied to the Anne Arundel School Board Nominating Commission, see J.H. Snider's blog post from May 12, 2008 in light of his Washington Post op-ed from January 14, 2016 and the Capital's news story on January 27, 2016.
"What's past is prologue."
--William Shakespeare
"Only about two-in-ten Americans (22%) trust the information they get from local news organizations a lot, whether online or offline."
--The Modern News Consumer, Pew Charitable Trusts, July 7, 2016
"The public’s right to information about government activities
lies at the heart of a democratic government."
--Maryland Public Information Act Manual,
Preface (13th ed., October 2014)
"The Maryland Public Information Act establishes a public policy and a general presumption in favor of disclosure of government or public documents."
--Office of Governor v. Washington Post Co.,
360 Md. 520, 544 (2000)
"Education is the most important thing that county government does. This is reflected in the fact that education constitutes 51 percent of the county budget."
--Steve Schuh, Anne Arundel County Executive
Composition of school board unavoidably a political issue,
Capital, May 1, 2016