District acknowledges law did not prevent it from naming resigning teacher; IDs released 300 other times in 2016

Lawrence USD 497 school board

The Lawrence school district has now acknowledged that it chose not to identify the employee whose resignation was accepted last week because of confidentiality concerns and not because it was prohibited by law from publicly identifying the employee.

Since the beginning of 2016, the district has named more than 300 people who resigned, but has so far declined to name the employee whose resignation the school board publicly accepted and announced at its Nov. 28 meeting.

In a recent email exchange with the Journal-World, the district’s executive director of human resources and legal counsel, David Cunningham, told the newspaper that exceptions within the Kansas Open Records Act “do not prohibit us from releasing documents, but gives us the discretion not to.”

That explanation is a departure from what he told the Journal-World on Nov. 29, when Cunningham indicated that his and others’ hands were tied, so to speak, by unspecified statutes.

“The fact is that statutes protect the confidentiality of staff and students, and I can’t share that information. Sometimes that puts me at a disadvantage. It leaves people wondering, ‘What exactly happened here?'” Cunningham said at the time. “But I can’t overcome that challenge simply because I’m a public entity. I’m still bound by confidentiality rules.”

Cunningham later clarified his position in an email to the Journal-World, saying that the district “makes its best efforts not to release personnel information except as required by the law.” Thus, his use of the term “statutes,” he wrote, was not meant to “cite a specific statute that prevented me from sharing the information, rather, it was a statement that the district intends to protect the privacy of its employees to the extent of the law.”

The district has never directly confirmed whether the employee whose resignation was accepted last week by the school board and the teacher at South Middle School who had been under investigation this semester for allegedly making racist remarks in class are in fact the same person. Speculation within the South community, along with an administration-issued email provided to the Journal-World, indicate that the South teacher was the resigning employee in question, however.

Virtually no details — including what is alleged to have been said, and whether the now-completed investigation found those allegations to be true or not — have been provided by the district since announcing its investigation Oct. 19.

Parents and other community members, including leaders of Lawrence’s NAACP chapter, have continued to criticize the district and school board over what has been perceived as a lack of transparency surrounding the South incident and its aftermath.

The unanimous decision to accept a resignation without releasing the name of the resigning employee, it should be noted, is a break from the school board’s standard practice. School board members regularly list names of employees who have retired, resigned or had their employment terminated, within personnel reports included in semimonthly school board agendas.

Since January, the district has made note of approximately 330 resignations, not including retirements, in its personnel reports. Each is listed by the name of the employee, though some names are repeated from one month to the next in reports. The reports customarily include the name of the employee, that person’s title and the building in which he or she works; not included is any reason why that staff member is no longer employed by Lawrence Public Schools.

The district also identifies by name employees who have been terminated, listing nine terminations since January. Again, a handful of these terminations come from individual employees whose names show up in personnel reports more than once, but the practice of publicly identifying employees who have left the district — either by resignation or termination — is routine.

When asked, Cunningham said he was not aware of any provision “related to the release of confidential employee information” in the district’s master agreement with the Lawrence Education Association, the local teachers union.

It’s still unclear why the district chose not to release the name of the employee whose resignation was accepted Nov. 28 instead of merely including the individual’s name in that day’s personnel report along with the 19 other resignations mentioned.

In a letter addressed to the Journal-World’s editorial board on Dec. 2, Superintendent Kyle Hayden explained that administration decided at the outset of the investigation (Hayden did not mention South Middle School in the letter specifically) to not publicly name the teacher as a matter of protecting that employee’s privacy until the investigation had been completed and a determination had been made about the allegations.

“Upon the conclusion of the investigation and before the school board made its decision, the teacher chose to resign, effective at the end of the school year,” Hayden wrote. “We again decided, in consultation with legal counsel, that it was appropriate that the teacher not be named in order to protect the employee’s privacy.”