The school district censored this comment during a Nov. 14 board meeting. Was it yours?

“News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress, all the rest is advertising.” 

Props to British journalist and newspaper publisher Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, who made this astute observation more than a century ago. It is as true today as it was then.

Reporters encounter this phenomenon on a daily basis. Officials duck questions, refuse interviews, insist on responding only to written questions, usually via email — sometimes only by way of public relations firms. The net result? Typically statements — author unknown — that don’t directly answer direct questions. 

It makes uncovering facts and getting at the truth very difficult, sometimes impossible. That’s no accident.  This behavior is all about control of information, especially when the powers-that-be think the information, if disclosed, will make them look bad. They’d much prefer reporters print only things that make them look good. But that’s not news. That’s advertising. 

And this behavior is common, despite laws that say the public has a right to know. 

But those laws have lots of exceptions and gray areas.  There’s no government entity with the power and duty to enforce them. It’s up to the public to sue to compel compliance. That’s expensive, time-consuming and generally out of reach for the vast majority of us. The outcome of any lawsuit is always uncertain. And there are no penalties for violation of the laws.

The upshot: Officials have no real incentive to comply with the laws that protect the public’s right to know. So, they often ignore them.

So, the most we, as a small news organization, can realistically do here is shine a light on officials’ failure to comply. Even doing that can be a full-time job, and we can’t seem to manage to do enough of it.

But something happened last week that reminded us of how important it is for us to shine that light regularly.

On April 25, the Riverhead Central School District responded to a Freedom of Information Law request we submitted on Nov. 15. 

More than five months after receiving that request, the district provided a document so heavily redacted that it’s practically meaningless. 

At the Nov. 14 school board meeting, during the public comment portion of the meeting, then-District Clerk Lisa Rheaume said she had two public comments submitted virtually. She named the sender of one of them and read it aloud. Then she said this:

“The second comment was sent in but it is not a permissible comment under board policy number 1230 and will not be read publicly.”

District policy number 1230, titled Public “Participation at Board Meetings,” says a lot of things. The specific provision the comment allegedly violated was not identified, but given the timing of the board meeting and the recent series of events involving high-level district administrators — resignations, administrative reassignments, contract buyouts, even the filing of a police report by one employee complaining of harassment by an administrator  — our hunch was that the comment the board didn’t want us to hear that night had something to do with this provision in policy number 1230:

“The Board will not permit in public session discussion involving individual District personnel or students. Persons wishing to discuss matters involving individual District personnel or students should present their comments and/or concerns to the Superintendent during regular business hours.”

We’ve seen this before, of course, multiple times over many years. The difference this time was the person seeking to address the board wasn’t at the podium, but sent their comment in virtually. So it was much easier to shut them up — and not even identify them, which, of course, prevented a reporter from contacting them.

The next day, Nov. 15, we filed a Freedom of Information Law request, seeking a copy of that letter.  On April 25, we received this:

We are publishing this today for two reasons. 

First, we believe it’s a matter of public interest for the public to know this is how the district regards state law governing public access to public records. (Heck, since the departure of former Deputy Superintendent Sam Schneider, who had been the district’s FOIL officer and always responded promptly to records access requests, some requests we’ve submitted have even been completely ignored.)

Second, we’d like to speak to whoever it is that sent the above letter to the school board as a public comment at the Nov. 14 meeting. We want to know what it said before so much of it was blacked out. We’d like to try and figure out why it was withheld during that meeting. What didn’t the district want the public to hear? We believe in free speech. And if the author whose speech was suppressed by the school board in the Nov. 14 public forum is willing, we’d be willing to publish the letter now. (One caveat that applies to all letters: it won’t be published anonymously and we won’t publish statements that are defamatory, because the law doesn’t protect either the author or publisher from liability for defamation.)

If you’re the author of this letter, we ask you to please reach out to us by email or leave a message at 631-282-8060, providing your name and contact number. We will call you. If you are no longer willing to speak out publicly about this and would like to have a conversation off the record, we’re all ears.

For anyone interested in more information about this topic, the full Riverhead Central School District Policy Number 1230 embedded below.