Richland School Board has new phones. Text messages no longer being deleted, attorney says
Richland School Board members have new cell phones — courtesy of district taxpayers.
Starting this year, the district will pay about $3,600 total annually for the five school board members to have their own Android smartphones to conduct business on.
The district also retained a private forensic firm at $275 an hour to recover text messages that were deleted by one of its school board members.
District spokesperson Ty Beaver said discussions about getting the board their own phone plans go back as far as January, when Rick Jansons and other board members voiced support for them.
But this also comes after the Herald reported last month that board member Audra Byrd had deleted several months’ worth of text messages with fellow board members, a potential felony under Washington’s public records law. She said at the time it was because of limited storage space on her personal phone.
Byrd told the Herald she didn’t plan on changing that practice because the board was due to get new phones.
Shortly after the story published, a lawyer retained by the Tri-City Herald sent a letter to the school district demanding it and its school board cease destroying any public records.
Washington state’s leading open government advocacy group, WashCOG, also chimed in and requested the Richland School District turn over a pile of documents after growing concerned that public records were not being retained correctly.
Galt Pettett, Richland School District legal counsel, said Byrd has since stopped deleting text messages and that they’re still working to recover missing messages.
“It’s a process and we have a forensic firm that’s going to be working on that,” he told the Herald in an April 21 phone call.
It’s unclear yet how much that will cost the district.
Beaver said the district is paying Spokane-based Roloff Digital Forensics $275 per hour, plus an $1,100 retainer fee as well as travel and accommodation costs to recover the deleted messages.
A certificate provided to the Herald by the school district shows Byrd completed required training on the state’s Public Records Act and Open Public Records Act at the annual Washington State School Directors’ Association (WSSDA) conference on Nov. 18.
Publicly elected officials are required under state law to retain public records, including any digitally or physically documented communications, that are made either on personal or district-paid devices.
That extends to text messages, too, but the retention period of those depends on the content and function of the communication — some may need to be saved forever, while others may need to be saved only 6 or 10 years.
“We want to make sure we maintain the public records for their retention length, and that those records are destroyed only when they reach that retention length,” Pettett said.
New phone numbers for the elected officials have been posted on the district’s website.
Other districts
Richland appears to be the only school district in the Tri-Cities currently paying for cell phones for its school board.
Jennie Richardson, executive assistant to the superintendent at Pasco School District, said their school board members communicate largely on district-provided email accounts and they make an effort to limit communication to that.
“It just keeps it cleaner for public records requests, which we get several,” she said.
Generally, the district only receives about one or two records requests a year for board communications.
Pasco’s school board members can request a laptop or a cellphone for business use.
No members are currently using district cellphones and only two laptops have been checked out, though district computers are used during school board meetings.
Robyn Chastain, Kennewick School District’s executive director of communications and public relations, said in an email that school board members there are assigned a district laptop at no cost, but not a cellphone.
