When are public records not public?
Lee school officials stand in our way
News-Press is trying to get a look at the public records of 710 school bus drivers.
[Verna Jungferman] is the driver who, on March 30, ran her bus off the road, rumbled through a grassy field and then asked her middle school passengers to keep the misadventure hush-hush. Some were hurt and when they started showing up at the school nurse�s office, the bus driver was found out.
The News-Press reporter Charles Runnells studied Jungferman�s school personnel record the next day, discovering and reporting that she had violated school policy 20 times before, had been fired and then rehired.
This news came after a series of other serious bus-driver mistakes: One ran a stop sign and crashed; two others had left young children on the bus after running their routes.
News-Press wants to see if drivers with bad records are the exception or the norm. Lee County School District administrators and Superintendent James Browder seem to be doing their part to stop access to the records. Private information has been included in these public records and the school system will only show them with that information stricken.
They were going to charge $25 per hour � a random fee � to review each record and mark out information that the law allows to be excluded. Social Security numbers of school employees, for example, are exempt from the state Sunshine Law.
Each record, they reasoned, would take about an hour for a trained district employee to review and take out private information.
So the answer to this post’s title question is “When it costs 18 thousand dollars to access them”.
Maybe child protective services should be called, (since kids were hurt) as well as the county district attorney, the governor’s office, local officials, state officials, every newspaper in the state, etc.
Then maybe the parents should bring a suit and let the district attorney subpoena the records. I bet he won’t have to pay $25 an hour to gain access to them.
I hereby volunteer to go through the records myself for *one* dollar an hour. How’s that?
Idiots.
I hate bus companies with a passion. All of the ones that have done busing here have been what I would call negligent in regards to the safety of their passengers.
An example that sticks out in my mind is the week in middle school I spent sick as hell because the back of the bus I rode was covered in a sticky blue toxic fluid. It was even on the heaters, so the fumes were terrible. Even though we reported it to the driver and to the principal, it took days for them to get rid of it. As far as I know, the bus company was never penalized at all.
This is an example of personal privacy verses public safety. You can’t have both. Society has to choose.
Excuse me Jed but that is the most STUPID thing I have EVER heard!
Actually that particular issue was decided in Florida courts. The result was the Sunshine Law that makes certain information public and certain other information private. The problem in this particular instance is that the records are supposed to be public but they may contain private information.
The school system is using the possible private information as a method to prevent exposure of the public records.
The school system does not want to expose the fact that they contract with bus companies that have the lowest possible employment and maintanance standards. When you want to pay people 6.00/hr or less and ignore any background issues with the exception of a felony conviction, you are going to have these kinds of incidents.