AACPS Superintendent Arlotto's Speech to the PR Association of America

Welcome. I’ve been following the recent front page coverage of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s so-called “email scandal” with a chuckle. Why a chuckle? Because compared to my school district, Ms. Clinton’s email system is a model of transparency and accountability.

Get this: she is being charged with choosing what emails should and shouldn’t be considered public records and thus copied to a public server—decisions made without independent oversight. How anyone who lives in the real world could bring such charges with a straight face is beyond me: what a joke!

At her March 10, 2012 press conference, Ms. Clinton said that “convenience” made her do it. She didn’t want to have to carry around two devices, one for personal email and one for public email.

Everything else followed from there. To avoid using multiple email devices, she combined her personal and public email into one account. Then, since the government doesn’t provide personal email accounts, she set up her own. Then, since it was her own personal email account, she had to make the determinations on behalf of the public concerning what emails to turn over.

To tell you the truth, I don’t buy Ms. Clinton’s premise that it is too difficult to carry around two devices, one with personal and one with public email. It’s not unusual for my staff to use three or four devices to manage their email; for example, work computer, home computer, laptop, and smartphone. My staffers with even minimal technical know-how can seamlessly switch back and forth from their personal to public email accounts. And get this: as U.S. Secretary of State, Ms. Clinton never went anywhere without support staff trailing behind her. My staff get no such support and our IT budget is a thousandth of hers. Yet my staff can run technological circles around hers; that is, when it comes to their own convenience.

Now it’s not my business to criticize the technological sophistication of Ms. Clinton’s staff. I only want to point out that, from a PR perspective, she could learn a lesson or two from the public school district I manage. Here is the way we do it:

Maryland’s right-to-know law doesn’t have an email or calendar entry retention policy. This provides us the opportunity to only keep email and calendar entry backups on our central server for 30 days. Why 30 days, you ask? Well, Maryland’s Public Information Act gives us 30 days to respond to any request for a public record. So presto, when a staffer gets a Public Information Act request, all that person has to do to prevent it from getting backed up to the central server is to delete it, archive it, or otherwise copy it to a different location than the one the central server searches for backup purposes.

In my district, we don’t even have a written email and calendar retention policy. If Maryland’s Public Information Act doesn’t have one, I’m certainly not going to be the sucker that ends up creating one at my own expense. We have plenty of communications, especially regarding politically sensitive subjects, that we don’t want made public. And don’t worry, whatever the politicians might claim about their commitment to open government, they couldn’t care less (indeed, our politicians like secrecy, too!).

To be fair, there is a big difference between the legal environment in which Ms. Clinton and we operate. She was operating in an environment where there was a clear written policy that emails pertaining to her official duties should be retained. I’ve even been told that a U.S. ambassador was once fired for deleting emails that he was required by law to keep.

So that is why it’s so appropriate for me to be speaking before the PR Association of America about email public record keeping. In my public school district, the email retention policy is all about managing PR.

This is the trick. On the one hand, we live in a democracy. In a democracy, you want citizens to believe they can track what public officials are doing with their money. The problem, of course, is that it’s your job as a PR official to make sure that doesn’t happen when the resulting information might be politically embarrassing.

We’ve thus developed some effective smoke & mirror routines to hide our email disappearing tricks. One is that we use tape backups to back up our centralized email system. Yes, you heard that correctly. It’s 2015, our employees use state-of-the-art smartphones with unlimited lifetime email backup for their personal email (for free in the case of Google’s Gmail), but as a school district we’re using a 30-day tape backup designed to circumvent the Public Information Act.

A beauty of the tape system is that it costs requesters a small fortune ($44/hour) to access information off a tape, which must be located in a closet, inserted into a machine, and laboriously and slowly accessed (no speedy random access for us!). After that process, it costs $74/hour to go over each responsive record to redact potentially non-disclosable information.

One result is that it costs requesters a small fortune to request information that, if it is controversial information, they are not going to get anyway. And here’s the kicker: we don’t even have to delete the information because it’s not rational to request it in the first place.

For the sake of preventing controversial information from being publicly exposed, I’m willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year extra for our email system rather than, say, moving to cloud-based Gmail for government (as former County Executive Laura Neuman did). What a delightfully archaic email backup system! And since we’ve been wasting this money for countless years, it shows up as part of the regular budget and no one can even tell. Indeed, we can even pretend to be saving money by not buying a new backup system. Sweet!

Now there is another option that requesters might choose. They can request that the email search be done directly on an employee’s work computer. That’s okay with us, too. It’s a simple matter for an employee to transfer responsive emails to a non-searchable, non-responsive device, such as an email program in the cloud or their smartphone or personal laptop: wink, wink; nod, nod. Not only that, but we can charge requesters even more because instead of all the emails being on a central server, we now must send an employee (the same $44/hour employee) to every employee who might have a responsive email. Kaching! That can cost a requester a small fortune and, at the end of the process, they’re still guaranteed not to get the information we really don’t want to give them. What a system!

Now, in truth, this system is not quite as good as I’ve suggested. Emails, by their nature, are sent to different people. Even worse, some emails may be sent to dozens or even hundreds of people. If the emails are already out there and accessible to a reporter, the smart PR choice may be to release them in response to a Public Information Act request because you don’t want to look like you might be hiding something.

I don’t want to suggest that our methods are perfect. There is still room for us to fine tune our email system for better PR. But I think you’ll agree that we have done a remarkably good job with our email PR—at least better than Hillary Clinton.

--J.H. Snider, a political scientist, writes frequently about open government policy. An archive of his related articles can be found at http://elighthouse.info.

(Author’s note: A non-satirical critique of AACPS’s email PR practices, The Clinton Email Scandal: A Double Standard?, was published in the April 2, 2015 print edition of the Baltimore Sun and widely read by open government reformers throughout the United States; another related op-ed, Maryland’s Fake Open Government, was published in the April 18, 2010 print edition of the Washington Post.)