Only a few minor details were reported in the Morning Call’s article:

The contract provides for annual raises of 1 percent, plus salary step increments, which translates into average yearly pay increases of 2.9 percent. Under the pact, the teachers’ health care coverage remains the same.

Want to know more about the specific details?…you’ll probably have to file a Right to Know request with the district. The Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board (PRLB) does not release a copy of the fact finder’s report to the public, unless one party votes to reject it.

The Pennsylvania Right to Know Act says that public agencies, including school districts, bear the burden of proof in keeping almost any “record” secret — even if their authors intended for them to be read by only a few people. Although the law makes exceptions for several classes of “predecisional” documents — e.g., memos relating to pending lawsuits — the OOR has been whittling away at these exceptions.

Consider, for example, background data on a proposed budget. In the Unionville-Chadds Ford SD, a former school board member, Keith Knauss, wanted to see the current version of a budget briefing book he’d received when he was a board member. The district denied his request, arguing that the briefing book was predecisional. (Mr. Knauss’s disagreements with his local board, for which he is now a candidate, were the subject of an earlier post on this blog.)

The OOR rejected the district’s argument, partly because board members had mentioned the briefing book in a public meeting in support of the proposed budget — which no one doubted was a public document. The OOR added that the district could withhold specific material dealing solely with “strategy,” as distinct from factual data. (Knauss v. Unionville Chadds Ford SD, AP 2009 0443, 07/13/09.)

That logic could well apply to contract negotiations, which set in concrete at least half of districts’ annual budgets. Strategy memos preceding an actual offer are self-evidently “predecisional,” as are tentative, “what-if?” proposals made during negotiations. But giving a union a formal, potentially binding offer means that the board has already made a decision. If the union says, “OK, we accept,” the board can’t reply, “Hey! That offer we made to you was just a little predecisional noodling. How about we now offer you something less?”

Of course, the real point is that citizens shouldn’t have to ask the OOR for help in seeing for these kinds of contract offers in the first place. Boards should be posting them voluntarily on their websites.

Given the current laws, can school boards or other government agencies charge for a request to put information online (at a publicly accessible URL)? After all, no toner or paper need be consumed in that process.

This may be a good time to repeat a caveat in my top-line page, “Disclaimers and Disclosures”: I am not a lawyer. A definitive answer would have to come from the new Office of Open Records. However, in this case the law seems clear to me. School boards can’t be compelled to provide information in a form that doesn’t already exist (e.g., as a web page). If they do post information online, however, that’s a public service, not chargeable to any single individual. (The pertinent sections of the Right to Know Law are Sections 704 & 705.)

When my school board (Carlisle Area SD) discussed photocopying fees, some board members suggested charging nothing at all on the grounds that keeping the public informed should be considered a normal cost of doing business. Most members (including me) worried about the occasional crank (or lazy graduate student): “I demand copies of your board minutes, budgets, and check registers for the past 25 years.” We agreed to what I think is a reasonable policy: Any requester gets the first 40 pages per year for free, paying 25 cents per page after that. (The actual fee schedule is slightly more complicated, but that’s the gist of it.) We intend to put most kinds of current information online, playing catch-up as needed. Our bias is toward openness, tempered by a conviction that the public won’t be well served if we encourage frivolous requests. We even hope to save a little money by not handling lot of nickle-and-dime cash transactions.

If the public asks often enough for current copies of the handful of documents that matter — test-score data, board minutes, budgets, check registers, and union contracts — I think most boards will post them to avoid hassles. But if boards are to get the transparency religion, their constituents must learn to rely on the promise of Matthew 7:7: “Ask, and it will be given to you (electronically); seek and ye shall find (online)…”