Thank goodness for freedom of information laws. Without them, there's all kinds of stuff we wouldn't know.

Without them, folks in Detroit wouldn't know about all the shady deals their (now-former) mayor was doing. Americans wouldn't know much of what they know about what's going on at Guantanamo Bay. And here at home, Texans wouldn't know that the renovations to the Texas state House lounge have cost $140,000

Those are all big things. But freedom of information laws have bearing on lower-profile controversies as well -- they're lower profile to the rest of the world, but they're probably a huge deal to the people directly involved.

Here's an excellent example in the Watchdog column (no relation to Texas Watchdog) in this morning's Star-Telegram, about a beloved Fort Worth-area school softball coach who quit coaching suddenly. Watchdog columnist Dave Leiber writes:

Several parents asked The Watchdog what happened to (Coach Maureen) Fritz. I filed an open-records request with the Keller school district and received access to a foot-high stack of documents. But the district had other records that it didn’t want to release and asked the Texas attorney general’s office to rule that they were exempt from the Texas Public Information Act.

But the office said that the records — e-mails and memos — were public information. It also scolded the school district for missing the legal deadline to file its appeal.

The e-mails show that in her final days as head coach, Fritz, once a top collegiate player, ran into one opponent she couldn’t beat: the Keller school district bureaucracy.

The e-mails detail a strained relationship with her boss, longtime district Athletic Director Bob DeJonge.

I'm going to stop here and tell a story related by my mentor, a former editor of mine who taught me to share his passion for open government.

Several years ago, my boss had a neighbor who really didn't like us press folks -- we're too this, we're too that. He didn't care for us. Didn't like us poking into people's private matters. We should keep our noses out of everyone's business. Yada, yada, yada.

Then one day the neighbor related his frustration with his high-school daughter's math teacher. His daughter was a smart girl who made really good grades, but she was making bad grades in math class. She was convinced she was putting down correct answers on her tests, but the teacher marked them wrong. What was going on?

My former editor remarked that most of a teacher's personnel file was public in that state, and the math teacher's file would probably include his college transcript.

The neighbor took the advice and went to see the math teacher's records -- he'd made Ds in math classes in college. The neighbor's suspicions were confirmed, and he had the ammunition he needed to complain to the school.

One more real-world example from right here in Texas before I close. Thanks to public records, folks in Fort Worth learned that the city schools' lunchroom workers were shorting the amount of lettuce they were putting in the chef's salad recipe. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but they were shorting the lettuce by 1/2 cup and then doctoring their records to say they'd put in the full 1 and 3/4 cups, which is the federal nutrition standard. The Star-Telegram explained it all in a story back in October -- the story's not on the newspaper's site any more, but you can read Google's cached version here.

Corruption. Wasteful spending. Gitmo. Lettuce. Softball. No matter what issue is important to you, public records and open government laws benefit you.


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