Larry Murray, self-stated “Fiscal Watchdog and Citizen Advocate,” as well as former school district committee member and unsuccessful school board candidate, yesterday afternoon (Nov. 17) made public his letter to Superintendent Mark Porter reiterating his plea that the district play nicely with those who request information from them and revealing that the previous fee, stated to be between $550 and $4,000-plus, had been reduced to $230. The copies of emails were requested in support of his charge that Porter illegally awarded raises to a number of employees when by law such decisions belong to the school board.
Of primary interest was Christina McPherson, wife of former Mayor Morgan McPherson, who was awarded a $10,000 raise when she took on the job of principal of Poinciana Elementary School in addition to her administrative duties as Director of Assessment and Accountability.
The precipitous drop was due to Murray’s clarification that, by requesting “all” emails, his did not want “flotsam and jetsam” such as calendar appointments and distribution list emails that the subject is a member of such as memos to all district personnel, all principals, etc.
“On November 13, 2013,” Murray wrote to Porter, “Karen Hladik, district ‘point person’ for PRR’s, informed me that the District had taken my request for ‘all emails’ between Christina McPherson and Mark Porter . . . to the logical extreme. Since your request asked for ‘all emails, the database query produced exactly that.’ . . . Lesson learned. When dealing with the District, one must be precise, precise to the extreme when making” records requests, he noted.
At a gathering billed as a benefit for the First Amendment at Sippin’ last Wednesday evening (Nov. 13), Murray quietly excoriated the school district for its failure to cooperate to make available school records at the request of members of the public. He calmly laid out his criticisms of the district’s record-keeping and its willingness, or lack thereof, to make those records public, expressing dismay and puzzlement as to why the district was insisting on taking issue with the simple request for the emailed correspondences between administrators. The controversy is grounded in principle, he made clear, saying that he had no problem with McPherson’s additional pay for taking on the principal’s position. The problems were the illegality and the district’s attitude.
Wrote Murray to the superintendent: “Let’s all be accurate, truthful, if you will, in our public statements. During an interview on ‘Morning Magazine’ with Bill Becker on November 1, 2013, you told the listening audience that when the District receives an especially extensive public records request, it reaches out to the user to assist in refining the request. . . . The reason for the outreach, you said, is to assist the requestor with the objective of narrowing or better targeting the request. Doing so reduces the work of the District in complying while simultaneously reducing the costs passed on to the requestor. Very laudable.
“While the District may reach out to other requestors, it has not done so with me. . . . All of this has taken a month when it could have been easily and congenially resolved in a few days.”
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