I heard about an event entitled "E Discovery" that was presented yesterday at the Glen Rose High School, which apparently was mandatory for all staff. E Discovery sounds very lawyerly, doesn't it and in fact the disclaimer at at least one of the presentations was that deleting email has not been approved by the board, is not a school policy, not board policy but instead is because of the advice of school attorneys. The idea is that teachers would go delete emails from their inbox, sent items or the wastecan as soon as they are done (or a task seems finished) and then, on a daily basis, the wastecans will be emptied. Does that prevent a person from making a new folder and putting all the inbox stuff into that as a place to svae emails? No.
The reason given for deleting the emails was so that if a parent, say, or a taxpayer, did an open records request for email, IF the teacher deleted it before the request, it would not exist anymore (again, not backed up or a copy saved?) . Of course, if an open records request exists and a teacher then deletes email relevant to that query, he or she is breaking the law.
Seems foolish to me. For one thing, aren't teachers told that since they are public employees and accountable to the taxpaying public that they should not put derogatory statements, say, about students or other teachers in their emails? They surely must know that if their comments relate to school business, they can't do it, say, on yahoo, but on the other hand, if it's personal , they *ought* to use a yahoo, gmail, etc account. But not using a school email in order to hide school business (say, parent teacher communications) can't be done. Hopefully that was stressed in the seminar. But why in the world would one delete emails? In my opinion, it can't be for lack of disk space or other media to back up the email. GRISD has one of the most advanced technology departments in Texas and money to boot... plus disk space is cheap. Seems to me you would want to keep your emails so that you have a paper trail in case, say, you end up needing to be jogged, for whatever reason, about what happened on a particular date? Even something as simple as having a lunch date I would want to keep-after all, suppose, for example, you were accused of something by a student and there was an innocuous email that proved to be your alibi?
The real questoin is, why should this be done at all, if it's not even approved by the school board and isn't an actual written policy? Makes me want to know what the government and attorney general say about retention policies for email. One of the links that was given out as a place to look is on theTexas State Library and Archives Commission website-the link I was given did not work. But of course school districts fall in under the same area as local government. Here's an example of an email retention policy.
in fact, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission is calling for input.
Overall, I wonder, why would you NOT keep emails? Schools, again, are accountable to the public. Teachers are presumed to be mature enough to know what to use email for and realize it is subject to open records requests. Instead of deleting the emails on a daily basis, which makes it look like teachers (and GRISD) have something to hide, I believe they ought to be working to set a clear board policy for email retention and accountability.
Because GRISD is not a private institution or island in it's own right, but the taxpayers, who may also be parents have a right to have transparency and accountability.
I plan to look some more into this next week.
