Ohio Board of Regents “Dropped the Ball” On Public Records Requests

Ohio Board of Regents

Chancellor Jim Petro leads Ohio’s state university system.

Nearly two months ago, we asked the Ohio Board of Regents for some information about rates at which Ohio high school graduates have to take remedial courses in college and Chancellor Jim Petro’s recommendations for improving those rates.

We’re still waiting.

On Dec. 28, we emailed Board of Regents Communications Director Kim Norris a public records request to see the remediation rates for 2010 graduates of each Ohio high school and school district. That’s the percentage of students who entered an Ohio public college or university and had to take a remedial English or math class — a class reviewing high school-level material — before they could take college freshman-level courses.

A little over a week later, on Jan. 9, we also asked for a copy of a report that University System of Ohio Chancellor Jim Petro had originally been set to release on Dec. 14. In that report, Petro and the state’s superintendent of public instruction were to outline recommendations to reduce remediation at Ohio colleges and universities.

The Board of Regents cancelled the report’s release on Dec. 13. because it wanted to “check the numbers,” Communications Director Kim Norris told us at the time. It has yet to be released.

Why Did We Ask?

We asked for this information because reducing the number of high school graduates who are ready for college-level work has been a focus of state and school district officials in recent years. School districts have changed what they teach and how classes are set up in attempts to fix the problem. Ohio public colleges and universities spent $147 million on remedial classes in 2010.

We wanted to know how Ohio high schools were performing in the face of this challenge, and what Chancellor Jim Petro wanted to do about it.

What Does the Law Say?

State law says that records responsive to a request like ours “shall be promptly prepared and made available for inspection to any person at all reasonable times during regular business hours.” If a person asks for copies, they must be made available in a “reasonable” time. If a state agency doesn’t have the records, they must tell the requestor. And if they have them but believe that state law allows them to be witheld, the agency has to tell the requestor that, and include the legal reasons for withholding any information.

(And, by the way, state public records laws apply equally to anyone who requests public information — not just reporters.)

Until today, the only response we got to the request for the remediation rate data — and to many follow-up phone calls, about half a dozen emails and an in-person scheduled visit to the Board of Regents’ Statehouse Square office — were two emails from Communications Director Kim Norris. She responded to emailed inquiries about when the Board of Regents would respond to our public records request for the data with: “Will let you know just as soon as we know” and “Not yet.”

The only response we received to the request for the copy of Petro’s report was what appeared to be a single section of a longer report. Communications Director Kim Norris did not respond to questions about whether she had sent the full report or withheld parts of it.

Cleveland public access and constitutional law attorney David Marburger said the board’s response prior to today was “not even close to being within the law:”

“They have dropped the ball completely,” he said. “While there is no fixed period of time that is ‘reasonable,’ there is a certain amount of obvious judgment that is involved and I can’t conceive that a court would say that, ‘Oh it’s perfectly reasonable for the Board of Regents to take some two months.’”

Finally, Some Progress

Today, after we told the Board of Regents that we were working on a story about this records request, Regents General Counsel Sloan Spalding said he was attempting to locate the requested data.

Spalding said he believed that the Board of Regents did have the draft of the report we requested in its possession but was “not ready” to release it today. Spalding said first he needed to consult with the Attorney General’s Office and the Office of Gov. John Kasich about legal reasons to withhold the draft.

Spalding said he would let us know what information the Board of Regents would release “in the next day or so.” He told us, “I think you’ve been more than reasonable.”

Board of Regents Communications Director Kim Norris was responsible for handling these public records request, he said. Norris has not responded to emails or phone messages. So we asked Spalding why it has taken this long to respond to these requests. His answer:

“I can’t even pretend I know the answer to that. It didn’t seem like a complicated request.”