Eliza Schleifstein is a 20-year resident of Randolph Township and has had children in the school district for 17 years.

Our school districts across the state act as in loco parentis for our children for seven to eight hours a day over 180 days per year.  They assume responsibility for our children during this time.  In many towns, the vast majority of what we pay in property taxes goes to fund our schools.  As an example, in my town, Randolph, more than 70 cents of every dollar we pay in property taxes is allocated to the revenue needed for the school district to operate.

So, when we taxpayers ask questions about how our tax dollars are being spent, the district should turn over the information with no hesitation, right?  We should be entitled to see invoices showing how those funds are spent, contracts that bind the district financially and documents that support statements made by our school boards and administrations, right?  Well, not so fast.

The Open Public Records Act (OPRA) states that we are entitled to many of these and sets the timeframe for providing them as a maximum of seven business days without valid excuse by the custodian of records, and in the case of  budgets, invoices and contracts, essentially on demand. And the OPRA statute makes it somewhat easy to request these documents – in an email to the custodian of records that states exactly what is being sought, a relevant time period and the word “OPRA.”  Easy, right?  You send an email and seven business days later everything you want to see appears.  Well, that depends upon whether your school district wants you to see the documents.  If they do not, don’t bet on getting what you want.

So, what happens if the school district, or better yet the custodian of records, who in many districts is the same business administrator responsible for approving invoices, managing contracts and how every tax dollar is spent, doesn’t want a bunch of parents sniffing around?

In my approximately $100 million annual budget school district with its six schools and 4,300 students, a group of parents started to dig deep into the financials of the district because we wanted to see where our money was going.  This was during COVID and what we were seeing in the Board meeting agendas made us scratch our heads.  Parents reviewing the check registers attached to Board meeting agendas saw a number of odd payments that the school district made.  We submitted OPRA requests to secure those invoices and contracts.  What did we find?  

That over $137,000 had been spent on redecorating our 14-year-old Central Office building with new luxury vinyl flooring and buying our superintendent and business administrator (who is also the records custodian) brand new office and conference room furniture during the pandemic.  We found over $60,000 in invoices for professional camera equipment – including three different camera bodies each one more expensive than the previous one, a $10,000 lens, six additional lenses (each costing in excess of $1,000 apiece), six backdrop stands, several designer camera equipment bags and other expensive camera accessories –  purchased, not for our students’ use, but for the sole use of the district’s director of communications.  An employee we later found out was in a relationship with our then-assistant business administrator and later business administrator, who approved the purchase orders and whose name appeared on them along with the director of communications. We found ESSER funds used not to address learning loss, but instead to repave parking lots.  We found that our new logo had been designed by a professional marketing firm, when we have graphics and mass media students and staff, at a cost of several thousand dollars.  And we found that our assistant business administrator had increased his salary from $92,000 when he arrived as assistant business administrator in February 2019 to $132,000 as of December 2021 – a $40,000 increase in less than two years.  And this was just the tip of the iceberg.

As time continued, we found large sums of monies originally budgeted for  rising healthcare insurance expenses, and which had caused our Board to have to increase taxes to raise funds above the 2% cap, being transferred out of the healthcare expenses budget line and into a variety of unrelated and questionable budget lines, like Business Administrator Salary and Business Office Travel Expenses. 

Fast forward to October 2023.  The then-assistant business administrator who approved the cameras and related equipment for his partner was now the head business administrator and his salary is now $191,000 (that’s right in less than five years, his salary more than doubled). He was furious with parents for questioning his actions, including charging parents $25 per child for a mandatory  “device insurance program”  (as most students were prohibited from using their own devices at school and instead assigned devices that the district had purchased for them) for which no insurance policy existed. He made a defamatory speech at a Board meeting, viciously attacking the parents for digging into invoices, contracts, and other documents,  that the Board president and superintendent clearly knew in advance would be delivered.  So, what do we do?

We submitted OPRA requests for emails he sent or received about the speech in the three to five days before he delivered what has become known as the “Seven Minute Manifesto.”  Not hundreds of OPRA requests, which would have been abusive (and is in part why our legislature proposed amending the OPRA statute earlier this year), but a total of no more than a dozen over a five-month period.  And what happened because the business administrator was the subject of the very emails we were requesting?  

Th Business Administrator used a loosely worded portion of the OPRA statute to prevent us from obtaining these documents.  OPRA requests were denied because, in his subjective view, they were “overbroad.”  So, we resubmitted the requests and instead asked for logs of emails received and sent by him over a month related to the speech, split up into several OPRA requests  sent by different people.  But that didn’t work either.

The OPRA statute allows  a custodian of records to “request” an extension, but the law does not define or provide any guidance as to what types of  reasons for such a request, or the length of the proposed extension, are considered to be reasonable.  Thus, our Business Administrator’s vague reason of his “workload,” despite having two Assistant Business Administrators and a total staff of more than five employees, became the routine reason for extension after extension (typically one full month apiece at a time), delaying the production of the documents – or, indeed, even a response as to whether the request was proper and would eventually be filled – for almost five months.  But it didn’t end there.

In February, the Business Administrator gave notice that he would be leaving Randolph for Tenafly.  He couldn’t block those open OPRA requests beyond his departure at the end of April, right?  Wrong.

On his last day in the office, to make sure that his replacement did not decide to provide us with any documents that likely showed his malfeasance, he used another trick in the OPRA statute to deny the open OPRA requests once and for all – a special services fee.  Almost a $1,000 per OPRA request fee, just for email logs over less than a month and on a specific topic.  His justification for the charge?  That it would take an assistant business administrator 30 hours to review the emails in the logs before two OPRA reponses were ready to be sent.  Let’s say it takes a minute on average to read a half page, that would mean that more than 1,800 emails over a twenty business day period satisfied the criteria of the OPRA, or on average 90 emails a day.  And the two time periods in the OPRA request didn’t even cover the three days before, three days after or the day of the speech (those days were covered in an earlier OPRA).  Something smell fishy here, it gets better.

Other OPRA requests sought discrete documents, other than email logs, including one for documents supporting a statement by our business administrate that our turf fields, which are several years past their usefulness, and which he had stated a year ago it was imperative that they be replaced within that year, had now been inspected by an expert who opined that it was no longer an emergency to replace them.   Seems a bit petty, vindictive, and attempting to hide information just because it makes him look bad?  Sure is.

In his goal to prevent parents from seeing any documents that cast him in a bad light on his way out the door, our business administrator  subjected the district to liability.  Clearly, he never intended to fill any of these OPRA requests while he was still employed, and so he scheduled emails to go out automatically for either the special services fee (for the email logs) or for yet another extension, this time due to “staff turnover” (for the turf expert report).  How did that go for him? Not well.

Either due to a computer glitch or his own sloppiness, the emails he sent to the two parents who had made the requests were not received until after midnight on the day after his most recent self-imposed deadline for responding.  He also sent an email to extend the OPRA request for the turf expert documents.  Or he thought he did.  Instead of sending the parent the email for the extension, he sent it only to himself, and thus it was not received by the parent within the time period of the last extension.  So, because the Business Administrator missed his own self-imposed deadlines by programming emails that did not go, or sending one to himself, the three requests are automatically deemed denied under the OPRA statute, and the parents who submitted them can now file a complaint in Superior State Court. If they win, the school district has to pay their attorneys’ fees and costs.  As they say, no good deed goes unpunished, nor does a nefarious one, either.  

The OPRA statute was created to promote transparency in government.  While there are some who abuse the process, particularly commercial entities seeking to use the process to generate mailing or call lists for solicitation purposes, school district parents and taxpayers are not the problem here.  Those requestors are not profiting from their efforts, nor are they doing anything beyond seeking information about how their local school district is being run and how money is being spent.  This becomes even more important when school boards and  administrations are less than open in their public communications.  

If abuses of the OPRA process are occurring, then  the legislature should narrowly revise the OPRA statute to specifically target the offensive behavior and reign in the bad actors. But it is also important to appreciate that the bad actors are not limited to  corporate entitles or people who file hundreds of OPRA requests per month.  The bad actors can also be custodians of records who seek to shield themselves or their employers from embarrassment by exploiting overbroad or poorly-defined OPRA exemptions (the concept of “deliberative process privilege” in particular comes to mind), lax standards that permit seemingly endless extensions of response times and other vagueness in wording and loopholes in the statute to deny citizens – and especially parents and taxpayers – a better understanding of the day-to-day, behind the scenes actions of school districts and other local government entities.

Removing many of the elements of the OPRA statute that are currently  very weak deterrents to custodians of records from abusing the process to shield information is not the solution, however.  Instead, the legislature should provide clear and legitimate grounds for seeking an extension of the response time, should place strict limits on the number of extensions and the overall additional total time to respond that will be allowed, and require a meaningful burden of proof before an extension will be deemed permissible.  In addition, financial penalties for statutory violations and other punitive actions against bad faith acts by records custodians should be greatly strengthened.  Hopefully, these are initial first steps that might deter a rogue custodian of records from trying to hide documents for his own benefit .

At least in my town, the person who appears to be the worst actor has thankfully departed, but the citizens in his new school district should be concerned that their rights under the OPRA statute will be violated next.