2nd email request goes to court

A second Right To Know request by a Lehighton Area School District board member has landed in Carbon County Court.

David Bradley Sr., on Sept. 4, requested all emails from five other board members and two administrators from Aug. 29 through Sept. 3. The board members are Wayne Wentz, Larry Stern, Andrew Yenser, Stephen Holland and Rita Spinelli, while the administrators are Superintendent Jonathan Cleaver and Assistant to the Superintendent Tim Tkach.

According to the district, it provided the emails for Cleaver, Tkach and Spinelli, but the remaining people don’t have email accounts with the district.

“Stern, Holland and Wentz declined to provide the district with their personal emails, while Yenser did not respond,” the district said in an affidavit provided to the court.

Two of the emails turned over to Bradley were redacted. The district said one email contained medical information, while the second contained personal identification information and the address of a minor.

Bradley appealed the district’s ruling to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records, which ruled the district did “not make a good faith search” for the records from the directors who did not turn over their personal emails, and did not prove that one of the redacted emails contained medical information. The Office of Open Records ordered the district to turn over that particular record, unredacted, and make a good faith search for the emails from Stern, Wentz, Holland and Yenser.

“The evidence provided by the district is conclusory and does not adequately describe how the record contains individually identifiable health information,” OOR Appeals Officer Josh Young wrote.

On Thursday, the district appealed that decision to Carbon County Court, asking it to overturn the decision.

“The Office of Open Records wrongly determined that the district had failed to conduct a good faith search with respect to the directors’ email accounts and failed to meet its burden on the medical information exemption, which are protected from disclosure by HIPAA and other privacy laws,” Lehighton district attorneys William Schwab and Eric Filer wrote in their appeal. “The final determination failed to allow the school district to redact in compliance with state and federal law.”

Bradley filed a Right To Know request earlier this year, seeking 7,700 emails from three Lehighton administrators, including Hauser, from May 25 to July 10.

A legal battle over the release of those emails is also currently before Carbon County Judge Roger Nanovic. During a court hearing, Bradley argued he is seeking “transparency in government.”