Mark Treinen
By Mark Treinen
Your Right to Know
In a 2007 ruling known as Zellner v. Cedarburg School District, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared that because public school teachers “are entrusted with the responsibility of teaching children,” the public has a clear right to know about allegations of misconduct against educators.
I wonder what the justices would think of a school district trying to charge $5,600 for this information. Or $40,000. Or $245,000.
Those were among the actual cost estimates that Wisconsin school districts provided when my paper, the Cap Times, asked for public records about teachers accused of sexual misconduct.
Such misconduct is a more pervasive problem in schools than you might think. An estimated one in 10 students experiences sexual harassment or assault from an educator during their K-12 schooling, according to one comprehensive case study in 2004. In Wisconsin, that rate would amount to more than 93,000 school children based on last year’s private and public school statewide enrollment.
But there is no statewide comprehensive data tracking of such allegations, so the Cap Times set out to determine how often educators are investigated for sexual misconduct toward students, and how allegations to this effect are handled.
For a report to be published later this month, the Cap Times sought employee investigation records, reprimands and resignation agreements over the last eight years from districts across Wisconsin.
The responses took the newspaper by surprise. I’m not referring to the actual records — which, when the Cap Times eventually received them, were shocking in other ways. What first stunned us were the amounts the districts demanded just to look for these documents.
The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District outside of Madison put the upfront cost of locating these records at $40,000. Sheboygan wanted $18,000, Oshkosh wanted $6,600, Appleton wanted $5,600, and Madison wanted $4,500.
Leading the pack was the Janesville School District, which asked for $245,000. The district has 9,400 students and roughly 1,500 employees, making it the ninth largest district in the state.
Milwaukee Public Schools, the largest school district in the state at 66,000 students, quoted the Cap Times about $1,100 for the exact same records request. MPS also has six times more employees, meaning more records to search.
After a Cap Times reporter spoke on the phone with Janesville assistant superintendent Scott Garner, this charge disappeared. For some of the districts, the newspaper had to identify names of specific teachers and narrow the scope of its requests to get a reasonable cost estimate. For others, including Madison, we still have not received records despite our attempts to make their searches easier.
The suspicion remains that the initial price tags from some of these districts were not based on the “actual, necessary and direct cost” of locating these records, as the Open Records Law allows, but on a desire to make these requests go away.
Then there were school districts, including Racine and Waukesha, where officials said they couldn’t fulfill the request at all because it would be too burdensome.
Refusing to provide this information, or charging prohibitive fees for such records, is antithetical to school districts’ legal duty — and moral obligation — of transparency.
Educators have unique access to children and an enormous amount of responsibility for their safety at school. By far the majority can be trusted with those responsibilities. But in some cases that trust is violated — as in the state Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling, involving an educator who was viewing adult websites on his school computer.
As the court said in its decision, “The public has an interest in knowing about such allegations of teacher misconduct and how they are handled.”
And, I would add, members of the public shouldn’t have to take out a loan to get this information.
Your Right to Know is a monthly column distributed by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council (wisfoic.org), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to open government. Council secretary Mark Treinen (mtreinen@captimes.com) is editor of the Cap Times in Madison.