Continuing to wonder why the procedures changed from the technology department fulfilling opens records requests that involve email searching and retrieval to offloading it to every teacher. Doing this is apparently not a policy, not anything that has been discussed openly at school board meetings or where the public would know about the changes. I've said before that any moves regarding this should have been talked about on the school board agenda, because it involves the public's legal right to know about via Texas Open Records Act. 

So, I want to talk about some aspects of this in this post. First, why are the teachers being made to do this versus the servers which are running server-based email, Groupwise? How is the school ensuring that the searches are being done in the same sophisticated way that an email program on a server would be? Is there a technological reason why having the teachers and staff do it instead is more problematic than a computer? What training,then, is being given to the teachers to ensure they comply with the requirements of the open records act? How is the school making sure that every single teacher has complied with any given open records request and within a timely manner? (ie, are they keeping a *nag* list where they check off the names as the answers or non-answers come back in?) And what about the process itself (I say process, again, because it is apparently not a policy that has been voted on or discussed by the school board with the attention of the public).

I put in an open records request the other day that had 3 parts to it.  When, in this new procedure, there is an open records request, the IT department is changing permissions on the emails, which are stored not on local computers,but on the server, and preventing any teacher from any deletions of any email. Good idea, in that that would stop any staff from deliberately or accidentally deleting a mail while a request is going on, which is against the law. Each staff person received an email that contains the request and what is looked for. In my case, the #2 item I am asking about concerns Chet Edward's appearance last Monday at a teacher's inservice training day as a keynote speaker. (Mind you, no one has to know *why* any opens records request is being made and actually it is against the law to even ask.) -Here is a poster version of the Public Information Act  and here's the statute on public information.

Only the #2 request that I made was actually sent out to the teachers. Since GRISD has 10 business days to respond to requests, this leads me to assume that the other 2 are being run past the school attorney(s) or the Attorney General. If GRISD has a reason they don't want to comply with my other 2 requests, they have to ask the Texas AG for an opinion and state their reasons.

The other 2 requests were, first, to find out about this deletion procedure and when it was made, to include any emails by any staff that reference it (including, of course, Wayne Rotan, etc). The second request had to do with the extra "Prep Time" period included on the teaching schedule at the high school level and where this originated and also requests emails searches from administration and teachers. I would guess that GRISD is reluctant to have people know about why they changed their policy regarding using computers for searches to having the teachers be responsible; I don't know what the reason would be for not wanting to show why there is an extra prep time at the high school, who originated it, and whether it is a written policy that has some guidelines. But, again, I do assume since only my request about Edwards has been sent out yesterday, that the administration is pondering their options within the 10 business day limit they have to respond to me.

On the technological side of it. When you do a search on Google with the parameters "Groupwise open records requests", there are quite a few examples that come up, including schools using Groupwise to satisfy public records requests.As I put in a few of these, keep in mind that the email is ON THE SERVER-thus avaiable in message stores for an IT person to search. What I'm saying is that this is technologically possible-if GRISD chooses not to do this, the reason CANNOT be that it is more efficient to have every dang teacher go look than having a computer program do targeted searches, pull up the information and save it out to soft copy, such as a file or on a CD or PDF, whatever.  ( I should say there that I'm not trying to plug Groupwise, I used to be a Novell Netware Certified Engineer and taught Netware at a community college and also was in charge of an email server system at one company I worked for).

South San Antonio ISD uses Groupwise and GWArchive to do email retention and archiving IN ORDER TO comply with open records requests.In fact the title of this is "South San Antonio ISD Prepares for Legal Discover and Open Records Requests"

In October 2006, South San Antonio ISD made the decision to adopt a centralized email retention policy and deploy an email archiving solution. To be on the safe side and to eliminate the need to rely on end user intervention, they opted to retain 100% of the email messages going through the school district's email system for a period of 7 years.

But GRISD wants to lessen the retention period by having teachers delete their emails??

"Even though we hadn't been mandated by law to introduce email retention, we decided to be proactive and implement this project as we undertook the consolidation of our GroupWise Post Offices," continues Mary Welch. "There had been several occasions already when I was asked to produce old emails and the process of restoring them from backup was a nightmare. It would take me half a day to finish restoring one account, not to mention the time spent looking for the email in question. Besides, relying on backup for electronic discovery purposes is a bad idea. Not only is it extremely time-consuming, but a backup is only good for a shorter period of time; then it gets overwritten. What happens if an older email is requested?"

Yes, I've done that before today, restoring or looking for something from tape backup. To give you an idea what a pain THAT type of thing is, first you have to find the tape backups and hope you have them. One company I worked for would take the tapes weekly offsite to a bank vault, to protect in case of fire or other disaster. But when you restore from a tape, as opposed to digital equipment, you have to play the tape, which is a serial operation, and takes a whole lot of time. I have no idea if GRISD does tape backup, but I assume not, that their backups are done digitally, perhaps to a different drive or using RAID.

Once again, South San Antonio ISD turned to Messaging Architects for help. They were able to solve their need to be able to access and restore messages easily and quickly with a deployment of GWArchive. The GWArchive Policy engine allowed the school district to set the respective archiving policy that automatically provides 100% retention, thus enabling the organization to be prepared for any eventuality.

Initially, the main driver for the deployment of GWArchive was being able to comply with open records requests and cases of electronic discovery. However, GWArchive's integration with the native GroupWise WebAccess interface, with which the school district's teachers and staff are already familiar, will allow Welch to take advantage of GWArchive's full capabilities and further reduce the overhead on her GroupWise message store. As a next phase of the archiving project, users will be able to review their archives directly from the archive repository keeping the school district's email server highly available.

"By deploying GWArchive for our email retention management, we have certainty that we will be able to fulfill any open record request quickly and painlessly, as well as to produce email in cases of legal discovery without having to incur high costs or loss of time. GWArchive's advanced configurations give me a lot of flexibility that I will be taking advantage of in the coming months" concludes Welch.

Let me emphasize that again. QUICKLY, PAINLESSLY and WITHOUT HIGH COSTS OR LOSS OF TIME. Why? Because you're having a computer do the searches instead of people!

Now let's look at another one, also involving Groupwise and M+Archive, in the East Grand Rapids, MI school district.  Look at this requirement.

Having gathered the preliminary information, they designed an email retention policy for the school system, using as basis the guidelines of the state of Michigan, which recommend that relevant information stored in the school’s email system be preserved for a period of 7 years. Another important requirement was to capture the email that had to be retained in an automated way that would not require retention management on the part of the end users.

And, um, retention management is what GRISD is having the TEACHERS do.  More...

Once M+Archive was deployed in the school system, all GroupWise users were notified of the new retention policy. The archiving process makes use of M+Archive’s policy engine which allowed Crawford to set up a selective retention policy for automatic classification of the messages based on content. This approach allows him to preserve the relevant information, while discarding transient email messages that have no value to be kept in the archive repository. The archiving solution addresses multiple issues, such as fast discovery of email records, easy recovery of accidentally deleted emails, compliance with open records requests, readiness in cases of litigation, as well as a reduction of the GroupWise message store. Another benefit of having M+Archive according to Crawford is that it enables the IT Department to provide exiting employees with an export of their email on portable media.

Get that? the software figures out which are transient messages (the "Let's go to lunch") and discards them. The teachers are not making those decisions.

Here's another-Loyola College.

A third reason highlighting the benefits of M+Archive is that it makes search and retrieval of archived email records much faster. “We are a private college, not a financial institution, so we aren’t as heavily regulated. We don’t get too many e-discovery requests, maybe a couple or so a year,” Manko concedes. “Still, when we do get them, M+Archive does a great job for us. In the past, we would have to restore the entire Post Office to find them and at times we wouldn’t because of our purge-and-delete policy. But with M+Archive we’re able to meet these requests quite efficiently.”

The question, to me, is, if this is not a procedure, and it's actually something that attorneys recommended, without board involvement and implemented on fhe fly (which is what I"m attempting to verify in my #1 request), why would attorneys want teachers to go delete their emails every day and for teachers to be the ones responsible for what doesn't get saved? On a daily basis. Seems to me that the answer is that the attorneys are attempting to mitigate risk by not creating full-bodied archives that the public could access. But consider even innocous email. What if you, as a teacher, needed some additional proof that you were doing so and so on such and such day? Even a silly email like "Let's go to lunch" could be proof of where you were or act as a memory jog. Why *should* such emails be deleted every day? It is NOT because of a lack of disk space-storage is cheap and plentiful. Instead, seems like a smarter idea to remind teachers and staff that email is open record and just to watch what you say-don't do anything or say anything that you wouldn't want the taxpaying public to know. But don't delete the emails or tell people they have to do it when there isn't even a policy in place concerning it!

Finally, I am sure if I was a teacher, I might be cursing the one that opened a request, and added to the list of activities that I must do BESIDES TEACHING. But that emphasis, in my opinion, and not merely because I'm a requestor, is misplaced. The taxpaying public has a right to know how our dollars are being spent and in what fashion-if Texas didn't want school districts and administrators held accountable to the public, there would BE no public records act. The question, rather, ought to be why did the procedure change from what is technologically possible (and even desirable), that is, for the technology department to fulfill requests to requiring every teacher to have to think about  and police their emails? I would wonder this if I were a teacher and I would be asking questions.