Norwin School Board members critical of removal of archived YouTube videos

A Norwin School Board member and several residents are questioning the removal of archived school board meeting videos from the district’s official YouTube page.

Administrators were not able to provide a specific reason at this week’s school board meeting why several livestreamed recordings of 2024 school board meetings — and eventually all livestreamed pre-2025 meetings — have disappeared from the district’s YouTube page.

“Who made the decision to remove them and when?” school board member Shawna Ilagan asked administrators. “Because it’s nothing that we voted on, I know that.”

Norwin Superintendent Natalie McCracken said she did not recall who had made the decision to remove the archived videos.

“I know it was discussed, and the board policy last spring said that notations and any audio or video recordings are not the official record, which is identified as the minutes,” McCracken said.

“I believe this is a big issue, and I think the state would have the same opinion,” said district resident Dustin Logue. “There are plenty of Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases and an opinion from the state’s Office of Open Records characterizing meeting recordings as a public record.”

Logue was referencing a March 27 advisory opinion issued by the Office of Open Records, which addressed whether recordings of public meetings constitute a public record.

“Unquestionably, due to the broad definition of ‘record’ in the Right-To-Know Law, an agency video recording may qualify as a record, so long as it ‘documents a transaction or activity of an agency and … is created, received or retained pursuant to law or in connection with a transaction, business or activity of an agency,” open records officials wrote, referencing state law.

“In a majority of situations, it appears that a video recording of a public hearing or meeting would indeed meet the definition of ‘record,’ ” the advisory opinion reads.

School Director Alex Detschelt said that prior to the school board’s meeting Monday night, the district’s YouTube page also included videos dating back to 2020. Those were also not on the website as of Tuesday morning.

“Their argument that this is just ‘housekeeping’ isn’t legitimate,” Detschelt said in an email to TribLive. “There was selective and purposeful removal of videos of the ‘old board,’ leaving only 2025 ‘new board’ videos.”

Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, said that while a district-created meeting video is a public record, the school board “has a lot of flexibility with what they can do.”

“Removing them from YouTube is one thing,” Melewsky said. “But if someone is hitting the ‘delete’ button, that’s a different story.”

District Solicitor Russell Lucas said the district is under no legal obligation to keep the videos online.

“There’s a difference between saying a meeting recording is a public record, and saying the district has to maintain it,” Lucas said. “Obviously, if the district received an RTK request for these, and then deleted them, that would be in bad faith. But if they were deleted in the normal course of events before an RTK request was received, there’s no wrongdoing here.”

Lucas said school districts and other public entities regularly purge older records as part of their records retention policies.

“Emails between school officials are public record,” Lucas said. “But if part of your routine record maintenance includes deleting those every so often, and you’re not doing it to evade a Right-To-Know request, there’s no violation there.”

Detschelt disagreed.

“The Office of Open Records is saying a record is anything that documents the activity of an agency — what is more connected to the business of this agency than the exact record of what transpired?” he said.

Melewsky agreed with Lucas to the extent that school records are subject to the district’s records retention policy, but also advised against getting rid of them in the case of school board meeting videos.

“It gives the appearance of impropriety, which no school board should want to create,” she said. “They should be taking the wishes of their constituents into account.”

District resident Nicholas Carrozza, who manages the “Accountability Now: Norwin” Facebook page, criticized the decision.

“Videos of meetings covering (recent) controversial projects were pulled offline,” Carrozza said. “Deleting videos of public meetings, especially discussions of construction projects costing millions of dollars, is poor practice.”

Ilagan said she regularly sought out the archived meeting recordings to prepare for upcoming school board business.

“There’s a whole lot of discussion that takes place on those recordings that is not in the minutes or in the attachments,” she said. “Someone asked me about the April 2024 meeting where our fiscal auditor was here, and I was shocked when it (the YouTube video) wasn’t there. I’ve advocated for fiscal transparency and transparency in all our governance, and that’s why I was disheartened to find that the prior meetings were deleted.”

McCracken said district administrators will look into the decision to remove the meeting recordings, and board President Bill Bojalad said the topic will be revisited when the school board updates its records retention policy.

“Regardless of whether we’re legally obligated,” Ilagan said,”I think we should keep them, and I think we should reinstate any that have been deleted.”

School Director Ray Kocak said the district should consider ending the practice of livestreaming meetings.

“Nobody comes to the meetings; they just say they’ll watch it on YouTube,” Kocak said. “I think it was important during covid, but I think we should just end it.”

Detschelt said three pending Right-To-Know requests related to the videos will require a response from the district before the end of June.

“We will then see what the district’s response is and what their appeal position is, if any,” he said.