In October 2020 The Accelerated Schools Produced Five GB of Records In Response To My 2019 Requests — And In Response To The Lawsuit I Filed In December Over Their Refusal To Comply With The Law — The Production Was Huge But Seriously Deficient In A Number Of Ways — And Their Exemption Claims Were The Usual Implausible Nonsense — Through My Lawyer — The Incomparable Robert Skeels — I Begged Them To Be Sensible And Discuss — Pleaded Even — But They Unaccountably Refused — So We’re Going To Trial On March 23 2021 — Unless They Come To Their Damn Senses Before Then — Get A Copy Of The Trial Brief Here!

Today’s post is an update on my December 2019 lawsuit against The Accelerated Schools. As of now all settlements are off the table and we’re going to trial! Attorney Skeels filed the trial brief last week, and here’s some background from an earlier post:

… Which brings us to that shady criminal conspiracy known as I’ve written a lot about these folks and their cartoonishly wicked white supremacy but, you may have noted, none of it has been based on public records apart from this very first thing I did in April 2019.

So I sent them a few [CPRA] requests … and they made a few desultory stabs at answering me in compliance with the law and then stopped responding at all. But as you’re probably aware, the situation with this Klown Kar Krew has grown ever more urgent, more of public interest than ever before.

What, that is, with their retaliatory firing of long-time employee Hilda Guzman and subsequent unfair labor practices complaint by her union, with repeated community protests at their infernal board meetings, and the unexpected1 recent petulant rage quit by now thankfully former board chair Juli Quinn. We need to be able to understand what these folks are up to! Which is why their special variety of unhinged intransigence can’t go unanswered, not if we expect government of, by, and for the people to not perish from this earth.

Remember all the way back in December 2019 when I was forced to file yet another lawsuit seeking to enforce the California Public Records Act against yet another white supremacist gentrifying charter, this one known as The Accelerated Schools? Well, it happened. And after fooling around for almost a year, TAS2 produced a bunch records in October 2020.3 Exciting, of course, but they were up to their usual no-good nonsense and the production was deficient in a number of essential ways.

First, there was a bunch of material missing. In particular, at least 20 emails between TAS founder Johnathan Williams and those sleazy lobbyists at the California Charter Schools Association. These are essential, of course, and the public interest is huge, as you know if you read the blockbuster articles the LA Times’s Howard Blume based on similar material I obtained in 2019.4

Second, they did not sort the documents by request. They produced almost five gigabytes of records, which they claimed constituted all material responsive to my six pending requests. It’s not actually possible to tell which material is putatively responsive to which request. It appears that there’s a lot more missing than the emails I mentioned above, but it’s actually not possible to be sure.

And finally, as usual, they claimed a bunch of bullshit exemptions that obviously don’t apply, and then refused to discuss it further. For instance, they claimed the so-called “deliberative process” exemption.5 If that makes any sense, and I don’t necessarily agree that it does, it almost certainly doesn’t apply here.

The vast majority of the records I asked for were to or from correspondents who don’t work for TAS, whereas the point of the exemption is to somehow protect officials from being scrutinized while they’re discussing pending decisions internally. If they’re already sharing their private deliberations with outsiders, like e.g. the CCSA, they’ve waived the exemption, if it ever existed in the first place.

They also used the so-called Drafts Exemption,6 This, like the catch-all exemption, requires agencies claiming it to weigh the public interest in withholding the records against the competing public interest in release. Obviously TAS didn’t do this. They also refused to explain how, where, and why they applied the exemptions, which the law requires them to do.7

And as usual, we8 begged them to come to their senses, to discuss the exemptions, to give us an idea what they were talking about, to find the missing records, to use functional search methods, and so on. They refused. Now, unless they come to their goddamned senses, and there is certainly still time, we’re going to trial on March 23, 2021 before the Honorable Mary Strobel in Department 82, Stanley Mosk, at 9:30 A.M. Here’s a copy of Skeels’s masterful brief. Stay tuned!

  1. But not unwelcomed!
  2. This is what people in the know call The Accelerated Schools. It’s pronounced “tass”.
  3. There’s no question that TAS was fooling around. Of course the pandemic brought records production everywhere to a halt with many agencies, and I suppose conceivably TAS deserves the benefit of the doubt in this historical moment for this very common kind of violation. Or just as likely they’re taking advantage of the opportunity. In any case, we didn’t list that as a cause of action.
  4. Here are links:
    L.A. charter schools’ plans: Take back mayor’s office, sue district, battle teachers union
    Memo to charter leaders: ‘It’s better to be feared than loved. Right now we are neither’
  5. There’s not really any such thing, but some courts have ginned it up out of Section 6255(a)’s famous catch-all clause: The agency shall justify withholding any record by demonstrating that the record in question is exempt under express provisions of this chapter or that on the facts of the particular case the public interest served by not disclosing the record clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure of the record.
  6. See the CPRA at §6254(a), which exempts “Preliminary drafts, notes, or interagency or intra-agency memoranda that are not retained by the public agency in the ordinary course of business, if the public interest in withholding those records clearly outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
  7. At §6255(a) again: The agency shall justify withholding any record by demonstrating that the record in question is exempt under express provisions of this chapter…” It’s likely that refusing to explain their exemptions to me actually isn’t a violation of this language. But the language is well understood to mean that they’re required to explain their exemptions to a judge and that it’s their burden to convince the judge that they were properly applied. But why would any agency refuse to do this before a suit was filed? They’re gambling that I won’t file? It seems extraordinarily irresponsible.
  8. Me via Skeels, that is.
Share

One thought on “In October 2020 The Accelerated Schools Produced Five GB of Records In Response To My 2019 Requests — And In Response To The Lawsuit I Filed In December Over Their Refusal To Comply With The Law — The Production Was Huge But Seriously Deficient In A Number Of Ways — And Their Exemption Claims Were The Usual Implausible Nonsense — Through My Lawyer — The Incomparable Robert Skeels — I Begged Them To Be Sensible And Discuss — Pleaded Even — But They Unaccountably Refused — So We’re Going To Trial On March 23 2021 — Unless They Come To Their Damn Senses Before Then — Get A Copy Of The Trial Brief Here!”

  1. A few gems that your readers will likely enjoy:

    p11 ¶¶6–8 “It’s hard to imagine applicable exemptions under FERPA or deliberative processes where the correspondence is with outside, non-educational entities like tribunemedia.com, ccsa.org, or the lacity.org.”

    p13 ¶¶13–16 “Moreover, it is more than a little suspect that all of the currently known “omitted” records were to or from the CCSA trade association, most of them involving political activities aimed at pressuring LAUSD. These are specifically the sort of records that Petitioner is seeking.”

    Plus it’s always good to be able to take shots at the ghoulish Nick Melvoin in pleading documents.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *