Stevenson went too far censoring e-mails, AG says
Stevenson High School officials went too far in censoring the contents of archived e-mails following a Freedom of Information Act request from the Daily Herald this year, the Illinois attorney general's office has said.
As a result, some of those communiqués likely will be released, a spokesman for the Lincolnshire school said Wednesday.
"If we erred, we did so on the side of keeping students' privacy the No. 1 priority," spokesman Jim Conrey said.
In early January, the Daily Herald sought copies of e-mails between board members and top administrators regarding the Statesman student newspaper and a series of controversies that eventually led many teens to leave the staff.
Citing exceptions to the state's public documents law, Stevenson officials gave the Daily Herald hundreds of pages with large sections electronically censored. In many cases, entire messages were blacked out.
Many of the documents actually were duplicates because the same e-mail was sent to multiple people.
Some of the messages were edited to protect the privacy of the students at the heart of the dispute or the identities of residents who had e-mailed the school, an attorney for Stevenson explained at the time. Other e-mails were blacked out because they contained privileged conversations between school officials and their lawyers, the attorney said.
The attorney general's public access counselor's office, which oversees Freedom of Information Act disputes, later reviewed the request and the documents in question. In a July 1 letter sent to Stevenson's attorney and the Daily Herald, the office said the district overstepped its legal bounds by censoring the contents of some of those e-mails.
Stevenson officials were right to protect the identities of parents, students or other community members who had communicated electronically with the district, Assistant Public Access Counselor Amanda M. Lundeen said. However, "redaction of the entire content of communication... is overbroad," Lundeen wrote.
"Only those portions conveying information that would link the comments to a specific individual may be redacted," Lundeen wrote.
Additionally, school officials should not have entirely withheld the contents of e-mails between the school's attorneys and the lawyers representing students in the dispute.
Information identifying the student clients may be redacted, Lundeen wrote, "but the arguments and analyses contained in those communications do not implicate any personal privacy interests."
School officials will talk with their attorneys next week about fulfilling the six-month-old FOIA request, Conrey said.
"We'll release any and all correspondence that the public access counselor has determined should be released," Conrey said.
Lundeen's office also determined the district was legally justified in withholding the contents of some e-mails that included draft statements and internal communications. Some of those e-mails contained opinions and discussions of strategies for dealing with the Statesman controversies and for addressing the public on the matter, according to Lundeen's letter.
"The records at issue appear to fall within the scope of the exemption," she wrote.
The public access coordinator did not address whether any of the Stevenson e-mails are exempt from disclosure as student records. The office's review was limited to the exemptions for privacy, draft statements and internal communications, Lundeen wrote.