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ACLU Files Lawsuit over Records Requests Denied by Collier County Public Schools
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2011 Press Releases
ACLU Files Lawsuit over Records Requests Denied by Collier County Public Schools
ORGANIZATION SEEKS PUBLIC INFORMATION ABOUT HOW THE DISTRICT HANDLED INCIDENT STUDENTS CALLED “KICK-A-JEW DAY”
April 22, 2011
CONTACT: ACLU of Florida Media Office, (786) 363-2737 or media@aclufl.org
NAPLES, FL – Earlier this week, the ACLU of Florida filed suit against the Collier County School Board after the Board failed to comply with repeated requests for public information. The school board repeatedly denied and ignored multiple legal requests from the Collier County Chapter of the ACLU of Florida. The lawsuit brought this week asks a judge to order the district to make the requested public records available to the ACLU.
"At issue here is the duty of government agencies, including school boards, to comply with Florida’s open records laws that ensure transparency for the public,” stated ACLU Legal Director Randall Marshall. “This is about accountability. Floridians should be able to trust that their public schools are safe places for students. This lawsuit asks that the Collier County Schools fulfill their legal obligation to provide information to sustain that trust."
The documents requested by the organization are related to an event which took place on November 19, 2009 at North Naples Middle School, when ten students participated in what they called “Kick a Jew Day."
As part of the ACLU of Florida’s work to protect the Florida Constitution’s guarantee that all Florida public school students have a safe, secure and high quality education, Douglas Wilson, President of the ACLU of Florida Collier County Chapter, sent a letter on November 25, 2009 to the School District’s General Counsel requesting all records “which constitute or describe the offensive conduct of the students in question, including all documents involved in any investigation of the incident."
Some documents were provided following this request, but none of them described what happened during the incident. In addition, the records produced did not include reports of the discipline imposed on the students involved, how that discipline was arrived at, nor correspondence between school officials regarding the incident. While it was not known whether such records existed, the District declined to make that clear, despite several requests. The ACLU of Florida’s Collier County Chapter also requested that the district redact potential personally-identifiable information about the students involved. These requests were ignored until February 23, 2011, when the district sent a letter to Wilson stating that they would not produce disciplinary records, even with student-identifying information redacted.
"We are not interested in who the students are. We are interested in how the District handled this incident,” stated Wilson, who, along with Marshall, is representing the ACLU in the case. “In fact, the actual discipline was positive and consistent with ACLU's opposition to zero-tolerance policies that result in automatic expulsion. But the complete lack of administrative documentation thus far concerns us about how other incidents will be handled in the future."
The lawsuit was filed on April 19, 2011 in the Twentieth Judicial Circuit Court for Collier County. A copy of the complaint is available online here: http://www.aclufl.org/pdfs/2011-04-CollierOpenRecComplaint.pdf
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