AG: Somerset ISD can withhold ‘intimate or embarrassing’ incident documents

By Jennifer Peebles | Saturday, November 15th, 2008

Attention, people of Somerset, Texas: You’ve sure piqued our curiosity.

Now, I don’t know what’s going on down there in the Somerset Independent School District, just a little ways south of San Antonio, but here’s what I can piece together from the public record:

There was an incident on school property that involved a school district employee and local police. Whatever happened, whenever it happened, whoever it involved, the school district has some documentation on it that the state attorney general’s office has reviewed and has deemed it to “contain intimate or embarrassing information.”

How do I know this? Because someone has asked to see those records, and the school system is refusing to turn them over.

As is the law here in Texas, the school system has asked the state attorney general’s office to weigh in on whether it can keep these records confidential. The attorney general’s office has looked at the material and written a letter back to the school system’s lawyer, and that letter is now posted on the AG’s Web site.

You won’t get many details about the incident from reading the letter. But we can piece together a few little items:

At least one person involved in the situation, as best I can tell, was a teacher — the AG’s office writes that some of the material it reviewed is a teacher’s personnel evaluation.

Someone — either that teacher or some other school employee, I can’t tell — had been suspended and fired at some point — the AG’s office says the material in question also included suspension and termination notices.

Now, here’s a curveball: The person who requested this information from the school system is an investigator from the Texas Education Agency, who is looking into whether the employee in question needs to have their teaching certificate revoked.

That creates a problem, the AG’s office says, one that is hard for me to get my head around.

The AG’s final answer is no, the school district should not release the records to the TEA investigator — because the law that allows school districts to sit on certain information trumps another state law intended to give TEA broader access to education records so it can do things like, you know, maybe, get rid of bad teachers.

That makes my head hurt. Has the state of Texas has built so many exemptions and rights to privacy into its open records laws that state regulators are denied the tools they need to take away the license of a teacher who maybe shouldn’t be around kids?

(Anyone in Somerset want to point us to just what on earth this “intimate or embarrassing” incident was? E-mail me at jennifer@texaswatchdog.org.)