07/23/2023
JOURNAL GAZETTE: Guest column from producer Nathan Gotsch on our public records request
—
As you may have read, on July 11 three student producers and I filed a formal records request with the Northwest Allen County Schools district for emails that discussed “Marian, Or the True Tale of Robin Hood,” its cancellation and any related conversation regarding requests for comment from media members.
The reason: For months, NACS Superintendent Wayne Barker told local, regional and national media outlets that the play was cancelled as a result of “student disruptions.” Before reporters started asking for comment, however, Carroll principal Cleve Million told the drama students who’d tried out for the play he canceled it because he worried community members who had called and complained would picket the production and heckle them during their performances.
Indeed, Barker himself told WBOI-FM for a March 1 story: “I know there were people who were upset that the play was being considered to be put on. I think there was worry about protests and things like that.”
Reasonable people can disagree about whether canceling the play was the right decision. As a former high school teacher, I sympathize with Million, who I truly believe thought he was doing what was best for the students he is charged with educating.
What I can’t understand, however, is the decision to shift blame onto those same students for that cancellation.
In all of the articles and news stories leading up to and immediately after the independent production of “Marian,” you won’t find one student who said anything negative about a NACS administrator. They chose to take the high road, focusing on the play they were putting on, not NACS’ unfounded claim that they were at fault for its being canceled.
And then, on June 7, weeks after “Marian” played to a nearly packed Foellinger Theater audience and everyone seemed ready to move on, Barker sat down for an interview with WANE-TV and was asked about the successful production.
He could have said, “No comment.” He could have said, “We stand by our decision, but we’re proud of those students for putting on the play themselves.” Instead, he said this:
“We canceled the play due to the disruptions that were happening with students, and I would do it again. I don’t regret the decision. I regret the incident and the situation, but I think the correct decision was made based upon the behaviors and issues that we were starting to see happen between students.”
His comments prompted several students and parents to reach out to me and ask whether there was any way we could get NACS to stop making these statements. One told me, “I just want them to leave my kid and their friends alone.”
That is why we filed the public records request, hoping the results would prove once and for all that it was not the students’ behavior that prompted the cancellation of “Marian.”
Most people are unaware that Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act allows any citizen to request public documents from any government agency, provided it meets some simple guidelines and the records are not confidential or otherwise non-disclosable by law.
It is we Indiana taxpayers who are funding the work of these government agencies, and our state legislators have rightly determined that we each have a right to see the work – including email messages – our public servants produce in the course of doing their jobs.
As I spoke with others more experienced in filing these public records requests, however, I learned that it was quite common for government agencies – particularly school districts – to reject them out of hand, often for specious reasons.
For example, many claim that a request for any emails must include the identities of both the sender and recipient, despite the fact that this is nearly impossible to know in most cases.
In fact, that is one of the reasons NACS gave in rejecting our request for emails, but its rationale centered on a small section of a non-binding opinion from Indiana’s public access counselor on a totally unrelated records request.
The public access counselor serves an important role, weighing in on whether a particular rejected records request was actually lawful and should have been honored. But his opinions are often selectively cherry-picked by others and used to justify turning down legitimate records requests such as ours.
In many cases, these denials include an offer to “work” with the records requester on a new, modified request.
But the Indiana law is not meant to create collaboration between individuals and government agencies to make things less uncomfortable for the agency; its purpose is transparency and accountability.
Those so-called compromises, rather than creating more transparency, preclude the Indiana public access counselor from weighing in on the appropriateness of the initial denial, and help codify those selectively narrowed parameters as the new accepted norm.
That is why, rather than accepting NACS’ offer to negotiate, we have appealed directly to Indiana Public Access Counselor Luke Britt. We don’t want any citizen, journalist or otherwise, to think they must automatically follow restrictive extralegal guidelines set by public agencies that might use them to obfuscate the truth.
After all, transparency isn’t a favor government agencies grant to us; it is a right enshrined in Indiana law. And as many of us have learned these past few years, just because something is a right doesn’t mean you don’t have to fight for it.
