Editorial: Highlands has no right to hide public info

Highlands School District doesn’t want to release information that should be made public.

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is the kind of thing Highlands does regularly.

Over the last two years, the Tribune-Review has filed multiple Right to Know Law requests, asking that Highlands do the bare minimum the school board and the administration should do. That is, to put it simply, name names.

We have written this before. Multiple times. We write it again and again because Highlands has been told by higher authorities that the district isn’t allowed to conduct public business behind a veil of secrecy.

This time, it is because the board voted Dec. 7 to retroactively approve a resignation agreement with an employee facing disciplinary charges.

The employee was identified only by a number. The district would not release a name or job title or other information to go with that number.

The first RTK request was filed in October, when the charges first were noted with an employee identified by the same number. Highlands invoked the 30-day extension card it has played before. And when that 30 days was up, it denied the request. They cited personnel information and Constitutional privacy grounds.

Imagine our surprise when the district started the same game Tuesday, the day the RTK request for the Dec. 7 action came due. On that day, the district again claimed it needed 30 days to respond.

The Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association says the bare minimum of information — the employee’s name — should have been made public in October.

“If not before the charges vote, then certainly before the resignation agreement vote,” media law counsel Melissa Melewsky said.

School employees are public employees. While not all information can or should be released, some could.

“The resignation agreement sets out the rights and legal duties of the school district, and it is an employment contract. Its terms are public, and the law is very clear on this point,” Melewsky said.

Highlands is not a sovereign state. It is subject to the laws of Pennsylvania, and, more importantly, it is answerable to the people whose money it spends and whose children it educates.

Maybe this will be the last open records battle we have with Highlands. But history tells us to keep our Right to Know requests close.