Court to public: Butt out of student abuse probes

You’d think the Legislature and courts had poked enough holes in the state’s public disclosure law. But the Washington Supreme Court has punched yet another.

By a 6-3 vote, the court held Thursday that school districts can conceal the identities of most teachers alleged to have sexually abused students. The law, it ruled, requires disclosure only when such an allegation is formally substantiated or the teacher has been disciplined. Unsubstantiated allegations remain confidential.

On the face of it, that sounds reasonable. The problem is that unsubstantiated allegations are not always false.

Time and time again, school administrators have failed to discipline teachers despite highly credible charges of misconduct – quietly allowing them to resign and get a job in another community.

As Justice Barbara Madsen pointed out in her dissent, “A school district can effectively control whether an accused teacher’s identity must be released by reaching an agreement with the teacher exchanging resignation for silence.”

Public access to the identities of accused teachers is important. Without knowing who the teachers are, it is harder to independently judge whether the accusations might be credible. And some victims may never come forward if they can’t learn of other victims’ allegations.

To some extent, the court is expecting the public to trust districts to handle allegations properly – in the face of real-world evidence that districts often don’t. The point of disclosure is to let citizens scrutinize the performance of school administrators. The court ruling will inevitably limit public scrutiny.

Of course teachers are often victims themselves. Vindictive students do target them with baseless charges of misconduct. But this is obvious, and the public understands it. One virtue of disclosure is that parents and others will get the actual evidence, not just rumors. They know that some kids carry grudges against teachers, and they can figure out when a teacher has been falsely maligned.

Perhaps the most annoying part of Justice Mary Fairhurst’s majority opinion is her blithe confidence in the fealty of public agencies to the state’s public disclosure act.

Fairhust says provisions of the law, such as fines and legal costs, “make it unlikely that an agency will routinely make self-serving determinations of whether a public record must be disclosed.”

This is breathtakingly disconnected from reality. Anyone who has struggled to tease potentially embarrassing documents out of government agencies knows that many of them regularly try to bend the law to serve their interest in secrecy.

The public disclosure act – which was enacted by citizens initiative – specifies that its broad mandate for openness “shall be liberally construed and its exemptions narrowly construed.”

Some public agencies, including school districts, do the opposite whenever they think they can get away with it. They seem to have found an enabler in the state supreme court.