Transparency News, 11/10/2022

 

Thursday
November 10, 2022

There was no newsletter yesterday, Nov. 9.

 

state & local news stories

 

Did you know?
We now take Venmo.
Hit us up!
@vaco4opgo

 

The topic of a marathon 6-hour closed session of the Patrick County School Board Tuesday night remains a mystery. The meeting took place from 5-11 p.m. at the school board office at 104 Rucker St. in the lower-level meeting room. People not privy to the closed session were seated in an upper-level meeting room and the front lobby. The board members remained sequestered the entire time except bathroom breaks and the 3 minutes the meeting opened back up to the public right before adjourning. More information may be available after the board's next meeting, which will be held at 5 p.m. Thursday at the school board office.
Martinsville Bulletin

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) continued to ask questions about how the Richmond School Board is functioning at a meeting on Wednesday. The meeting is held twice a year to review the 2017 memorandum of understanding or MOU Agreement between the state and the school system. The MOU is an agreement the VDOE said can be implemented when they identify a "division-level failure" to meet state standards. VDOE's Board President Dan Gecker said he brought up questions about how the board is governing in light of concerns that have been discussed before. He added the department found across the state, it's helpful when boards move in the same direction as the administration and align goals. In October, CBS 6 reported that parents raised school board governance to the VDOE, taking issue with long-running meetings and board votes often ending in a 5-4 bloc with a majority voting against recommendations from the superintendent. RPS' School Board Chair Dr. Shonda Harris-Muhammed was the first to respond to Gecker's questions during Wednesday's meeting. She said at this point, the board is not unified with a 9-0 vote for what the superintendent requests. She added that a 5-4 vote doesn't dictate good or bad governance.
WTVR

At the Gloucester School Board meeting Tuesday night, a video that board member Darren Post posted on his Facebook page the previous Friday was at the forefront, resulting in both public outrage against and support of the video as well as board action to remove Post from his committee assignments. The video contained an audio recording featuring three current board members, as well as some previous board members, purportedly from the Dec. 14, 2021 closed meeting. It also included a snippet of a conversation that Post and board chair Troy Andersen allegedly had June 23 of this year.
Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal
 

stories of national interest

"The decision to kill Lennon was 'my big answer to everything. I wasn’t going to be a nobody, anymore.'"

The man who gunned down John Lennon outside his New York City apartment building in 1980 told a parole board that he knew it was wrong to kill the beloved former Beatle, but that he was seeking fame and had “evil in my heart.” Mark David Chapman made the comments in August to a board that denied him parole for a 12th time, citing his “selfish disregard for human life of global consequence.” Chapman, in a transcript released by state officials Monday under a freedom of information request, said the decision to kill Lennon was “my big answer to everything. I wasn’t going to be a nobody, anymore.”
Associated Press

The endorsement of political candidates by religious leaders from the pulpit has grown increasingly brazen, aggressive and sophisticated in recent years. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have found 20 apparent violations in the past two years of the Johnson Amendment, a law that prohibits church leaders from intervening in political campaigns. Two occurred in the last two weeks as candidates crisscross Texas vying for votes. The number of potential violations found by the news outlets is greater than the total number of churches the IRS has investigated for intervening in political campaigns in the past decade, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Texas Tribune

The Freedom of Information Act community is developing new technology standards to help improve FOIA processes and standardize common services like case management tools across government. The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy and the Office of Government Information Services at the National Archives are working with the General Services Administration’s Office of Shared Services and Performance Improvement to advance shared FOIA business standards, according to Lindsay Steel, chief of FOIA compliance staff at OIP.
Federal News Network

His first request for U.S. government records was drafted on a portable typewriter in the 1970s. Then over more than four decades — and 9,000-plus letters — the archive built by a reclusive former California civil servant, 1970s disco maven and tireless document sleuth named Ernie Lazar grew to over 600,000 pages from the FBI and other agencies. The world of Mr. Lazar’s trove is full of suspicions, double-dealings and opportunists. There are references to informants and surveillance, groups on watch lists and Americans viewed as “un-American,” far-right propagandists and suspected leftist “rabble rousers” in an FBI dossier. Bit by bit, Mr. Lazar also helped shed light on some fundamental questions — essentially who was doing what to whom — including much of the 37 years of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI spanning the 1950s Cold War paranoia, the civil rights showdowns and the rise of nativist groups such as the John Birch Society. Through sheer perseverance and patience, Mr. Lazar became a kind of Zen master of the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA,
The Washington Post

 

editorials & columns

"Government, on any level, should not be doing its business in the dark. That was the whole point of FOIA to begin with."

The Supreme Court of Virginia has done the commonwealth’s citizens a favor. Recently, two court rulings made public access to court hearings and government employee information easier to obtain. One decision barred the state from closing documents to the press and the public concerning an incident in Newport News when a former city police officer shot and killed a man. The court, in reversing a circuit court ruling, stated that, “In the context of criminal proceedings, the doctrine imposes a presumption of transparency on one of the most basic functions of government.” Government, on any level, should not be doing its business in the dark. That was the whole point of FOIA to begin with. It’s our business that’s being done, and we applaud the Supreme Court for making that more clear. The state court has distinguished itself on at least one more occasion in the recent past.
The Free Lance-Star

 


 

Categories: