Hinsdale D86 Defends Removal Of Online Records

DARIEN, IL – Hinsdale High School District 86 board members on Thursday defended the district's removal of nine years of online public records.

At the same time, the board's president apologized for failing to better communicate the move to residents.

Last New Year's Eve, a district employee removed the records from 2013 to 2021 from an online portal, apparently at the direction of higher-ups.

The portal is where the district posts many of the responses to the public's Freedom of Information Act requests.

The district is a rare government body that provides this much openness. In 2022, a board majority rejected its then-attorney's recommendation to do away with the portal for liability reasons.

At Thursday's board meeting, board members rejected words such as "erased" and "deleted" when referring to the removal of the records.

They said the documents were "archived," though the online portal itself is listed as the "Public Records Request Archive." (Hinsdale School District 181's records log goes back a decade.)

During the meeting, officials gave "broken links" as the reason for the removal of records. Those links were broken with changes in the district's website over the years. But many of the documents were PDFs, not links.

Board member Heather Kartsounes said student privacy laws over the years had changed. And she said the log contained more than 400 broken links.

"To go back and review over 400 links and the amount of work is astronomical and probably would drive the administrative offices to a halt with this project," she said.

At the same time, officials said they had received no complaints about broken links.

As for student privacy laws, Kartsounes did not specify how they changed. Like other schools, District 86 has long been careful to remove students' names and any other personally identifying information from records. Other board members mentioned district policies that have changed over the years.

Kartsounes' defense involving broken links did not explain why the district planned to continue the policy of deleting another year of older files every Dec. 31. The district said it would only keep the current year of files online, plus the previous two calendar years.

Kartsounes and others said all the records were available, either through meeting agenda files or filing public records requests.

"There is nothing that has been deleted or hidden or anything nefarious going on," Kartsounes said. "To the contrary, it seems to me Deb Kedrowski (Freedom of Information Act officer) has been overly transparent and overly available to the point of even providing her cellphone number to those who are struggling to access and find things."

Board President Catherine Greenspon said she was "shocked" at the allegations regarding the "archiving" of the online records. She said it was discussed at an August 2023 meeting of the board's policy committee. (One member offhandedly referred to the "archiving" of records during the 2023 meeting, but no one else mentioned it or stated that online records should be removed.)

Still, Greenspon said the board could have done a better job at communicating the change.

"For that, I apologize," she said. "This is not a nefarious plot to somehow limit information to the community. It's unfortunate that that is the narrative that is unfolding."

During public comments, Yvonne Mayer, a critic of the board, called the log a "wonderfully useful tool" to find records involving overall test results.

"The beauty of the FOIA log is you could put in search terms and see if those public records had been FOIA'ed and were available on the public log," Mayer said. "No one in this room complained about broken links. We complained about the removal of the requests and the answers to the extent that they were produced in PDF form that can no longer be searched."

If residents found broken links, they could ask the district for the information, she said.

She said Kartsounes displayed "false outrage" about the 400 broken links and the legal fees.

"It's ridiculous, this circuitous false narrative that you have created at this table," Mayer said.

In a meeting earlier this month, usual board allies Linda Burke and Kim Notaro asked for a return of the old online files in some form.