Here is the response:
Thank you for writing to Mt. Lebanon School District with your request for information pursuant to the Pennsylvania Right-To-Know Law.
On August 20, 2013, we received your request for the August 12 and August 19 Janney presentation to the Board on the second bond issue. Your request is granted. Partial documents responsive to your request can be found on the District’s website at
http://www.mtlsd.org/district/HeadlineArticle.asp?HLP_ID=1342&HL_ID=1450#1450.
The complete documents are not available in an electronic format. The cost for duplicating the records which are responsive to your request is $10.00. Please make your check payable to Mt. Lebanon School District, and provide enough advance notice so that we can have the copies made and ready for you to pick up. If you would like the copies mailed, please add $1.50 for a total of $11.50.
Sincerely,
Jeanine R. Szalinski
Open Records Officer
Mt. Lebanon School District
7 Horsman Drive Pittsburgh PA 15228
412.344.2077
pc: Thomas P. Peterson, Solicitor
The resident was not happy to hear that public information had a price tag. It should be on the website for the community to see. The resident refused to pay the amount and added:
Also you could post this on the website and tell the community what you did unless you are ashamed go yourselves for squandering $7.6 million in extra debt service.This is not an isolated incident. I have had to pay for information, came home, scanned it, and shared it on my blog. This is a sin!
At any rate after what Jan Klein did to that bond issue I am NOT paying you $10.
33 comments:
Only "Partial documents.." are available on the website ? Why not the entire, complete documents ? Who made the decision to make only partial and not entire documentation available on the website, and for what rational, justifiable reason ?
Submit a RTK ? Is it time to run these people out of town ?
August is almost over and STILL no final budget has been posted on the website. http://www.mtlsd.org/district/finance.asp
Look at the 2011-12 budget. Timmy's letter is dated July 2011. The board approved the budget May 23 that year.
Elaine
Sad to see the underbelly of this school district as a parent of kids still in this system. Why is there so much hostility and lack of respect for residents?
A $10 charge, at 25 cents per page would indicate 40 pages were given to the Board yet only 2 pages of the presentation were made available from the August 12 meeting. No pages were posted on the website for the actual sale of the bonds on August 19.
You have to file a suit against them. You all keep complaining about the RTK issue. Just accept that the school board is lawless and they wont change. The only way to fix the issue is to get an attorney involved. If they understood the actual RTK law, they wouldnt pull this crap. But until someone holds them legally accountable the games will continue. Keep in mind the school board solicitor can be held personally and financially responsible for providing bad legal advice. Each school board member can also be held personally and financially responsible of a court determines they've committed a crime or engaged in malfeasance. So I hope they enjoy the ride because it ends at some point. To quote the Doors (because I actually cite my sources), " when the music's over, turn out the lights".
9:01 AM, you're right. I cannot possibly take on anything else. How about giving me a hand in that regard?
Elaine
9:01, maybe Carolyn C. Dumaresq will step up to the plate and oversee our District.
It is her job.
Exactly right 10:22.
Why do taxpayers and residents have to pursue the district legal.
We have a Dept. Of Education, AGs, Governor that we pay good money to, that supposedily are obligsted to oversee the district operations.
11:16, keep living in denial. I'm telling you, the only way you'll get any kind of reaction is by getting an attorney to file against the school board.
3:06 who had to hire an attorney to file against Nick Trombetta?
4:35. What did Nick Trombetta have to do with public information? You want to argue about this using unrelated stories? Go ahead. It won't change the fact that a RTK violation won't be investigated and the only way to remedy it is by filing suit. Do some research and let me know how many cases you find out there where investigations have resulted in some kind of adverse action.
The trouble with a lawsuit is you put more money in the solicitor's pocket and he is a source of the problem.
Let's face facts the public got big-time screwed in this bond deal, the Board knows it, and now they are not telling us just how bad things really are. This should have been posted on the website.
Why would anyone give this Board $10 for anything?
Why would anyone give this Board $10 for anything?
Scott Goldman told us we were cheating taxpayers (parents included) out of $760,000 in additional debt service over the life of the new bonds based on the August 12 presentation from Janney Montgomery Scott. If that is the best Jan Klein can do she should resign and give back the $1,000 bonus and the 6.9% salary increase and get on with her life.
If she won't resign, Tim should call her into his office with an Assistant Superintendent present, fire her, and give her 15 minutes to clean out her desk, turn over her health insurance card, keys to the office, the passwords to her computer files, and any other district property in her possession. Then she should get off school property forever - and take Janney with her.
This bond deal smells like the mortgage bond deals that Wall Street sold before the housing crash and the stench will last just about as long.
John Ewing
Former Finance Chair MLSB
Again, John is right on the money. It is crazy that Jan and JMS get away with kind of fiscal ridiculousness and the Board sits there and doesn't ask any good questions (except for Scott).
Do you all realize that the school board members cannot ask questions of the bonds to anyone EXCEPT for Jan and JMS?
That's right, they have a policy in place that disallows them from asking questions outside the central office. Otherwise they would be sharing pre-deliberational material.
It is insane.
John, Jan moved out Mt. Lebanon in 2009, the same year as the first bond issue. I think she is going out in a blaze of glory with the second one.
Elaine
John,
I'll pay the ten bucks, just to put it on the blog. I'd reimburse the resident, just to expose Jan. She won't post the final budget either.
Elaine
10:29 said, "Do you all realize that the school board members cannot ask questions of the bonds to anyone EXCEPT for Jan and JMS?
That's right, they have a policy in place that disallows them from asking questions outside the central office."
That is an interesting comment, 10:29, because we had the same “ask only Jan questions” policy in place when I served on the Tax Commission in 2006. The Committee members were only to ask questions of Jan and no other administrators.
When I questioned this, the policy changed to directing all questions of Jan through the Tax Commission Chair who was also a member of the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials.
If your statement is true, the board has cut off questions of anyone except the Finance Officer/Treasurer of the District and the investment advisor she has used in the past.
How many businesses with budgets of over $80,000,000 and outstanding debts of over $100,000,000, including the second bond issue, would prohibit the Board of Director to ask legitimate questions about the organization’s finances?
At best, 10:29: your allegations raise questions about why this policy exists as well as questions about who is in charge of the District? Is the Finance Officer or the Superintendent in charge?
Think about this a minute: when securities (municipal bonds) are sold, the full disclosure of financial information is important, yet only 2 pages about the bond issue were disclosed on our website. However when I RTKed for the information I was being charged for 40 pages of information ($10 divided by 25 cents per page = 40 pages). Why wasn’t there a disclaimer on the website that stated only part of the information was on the website?
Remember, when you ask Mrs. Cappucci a question one of her responses is, “It is on the website.” I guess 38 pages were not on the website this time. Now, the transparency of Mrs. Cappucci’s answers is also in question. But then I’m not the first person to question Mrs. Cappucci’s transparency.
John Ewing
John , thank you for disclosing that you filed the RTK. Now I can tell the readers of this blog how this was your livelihood and you were very good at it. In addition, you worked with Jan for many years.
It is sickening that the district is pulling this stunt. The entire school board has laptops. The solicitor has a laptop. Administrators have laptops. They were supposed to be going paperless. It is difficult to believe that the information you requested was not available in electronic form. It should be online in its entirety. This is a sin.
Elaine
12:25 asks an interesting question. Everyone in the district knows the answer. Nothing new here. Take a confidential poll among staff members for verification. Now what?
Elaine is right, everybody has a laptop computer so it is difficult to believe the information is not in electronic form.
The interesting question referred to by 8:19 is,
"Is the Finance Officer or the Superintendent in charge?
If the Superintendent is not in charge, the District's disclosure policy of putting 2 of 38 pages on the website has involved the employees in the disclosure mess and put the employees in the uncomfortable position of not being able to tell the truth if the information was indeed in electronic form. That is really unfair to the employees and the Superintendent needs to take control of the District before he begins to lose effective talented people.
John Ewing
Anonymous said...
9:01, maybe Carolyn C. Dumaresq will step up to the plate and oversee our District. It is her job.
August 27, 2013 at 10:22 AM
Don’t hold your breath 10:22
A former superintendent at Central Dauphin and Steelton-Highspire school districts, Dumaresq began her education career as a math teacher. Later, Dumaresq taught on a college level at the Harrisburg campuses of Temple and Penn State universities. She also served as executive director of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state's largest teachers union. (Source Pa Dept of Ed website Patroit News)
I'm buying lunch for the first person who can show me where, in the right-to-know law, the school board is precluded from providing most of the documents people request during public meetings. That information should be available at the meetings so there is no doubt as to the basis of the Board's decisions. Oh, but apparenlty we're different in Mt. Lebanon. And whil ei understand there might be documents "on the website", the members of the Board should be able to readily respond to questions by providing information. I mean, unless they really don't know the asnwers in which case they shouldn't be allowed to make financial decisions.
https://www.dced.state.pa.us/public/oor/pa_righttoknowlaw.pdf
There is also the Office of Open Records available. here is how to file an appeal:
http://openrecords.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/open_records/4434/appeals_process_-_how_to_file_an_appeal/573841
12:37, Under RTK the board can answer any question they know the answer to, but how many of them do you think actually ask questions of administrators and prepare themselves to answer the public's questions? My opinion is that many are more hung-up on revealing pre-decisional information than they are on doing their homework.
Unfortunately, this leaves the Board being more loyal to each other and the administrators than being considerate and appreciative of those who voted to elect them. They act as if the administrators are employing them rather than realizing they employ the administrators. If you want to test my thoughts, ask yourself if you think the board actually evaluated their administrators or their own policy results? As far as I know, the board only evaluates the superintendent and allows the superintendent to evaluate everyone else.
In my opinion there is a pattern to make it difficult to obtain district financial information. This post shows one instance, another was when a resident was given the budget without page numbers.
I think that the school district is embarrassed... very, very embarrassed.
There is very little that we can do right now, except to plan for a future of unraveling the mess that the current leadership is creating.
With a little luck, and perhaps the lord's blessing, we may be able to rebuild most of what was once a great community.
6:13 think you're right, but the way to rebuild isn't thru voting in the infumbents.
Elaine, The final budget and the bond information are not posted on the website because the board and administrators are thumbing their noses at folks.
There are just two instances that show Dr. Steinhauer does not have proper control over the District. For me, that is Dr. Steinhauer's problem.
John Ewing
They all think they're so great. If they only knew what people in other communities are saying (and laughing about).
A once respected municipality has turned into an expensive joke. Sadly, it will be the kids who suffer, as well as real estate values that are in for a tumble.
John,
The only problem is that Dr Steinhauser's problem has become John Ewing's, John Kendrick's and the whole world's problem!
John David Kendrick
Not the whole world's problem. Some people in the Pittsburgh area need a muse, and bankers need interest on the money they have available to loan. To them, the township and district often provide both humor and income. There are of course those that have their head in the sand (trying to be nice) and are unaware of reality: hence there is nothing wrong with life in their special world.
Its really sad to see where the district's priorities lie. Need proof?
Look up the salary for a teacher with 10 years experience, then look at the salary and benefits they're paying a panhandler to drum up donations.
Look at the PIO salary well. Their job consist of nothing more than spinning info to make the district look good... not do good.
Which PIO? Both PIO's are enhance the perception of the SD, and both are most admirably paid.
12:45 take your choice, but the 11:32 cmment concerned the district only.
Although the necessary public information be handled by one PIO. I believe that is how they do it out at USC.
There is absolutely no reason for the municipality to be in the magazine business. Privatize MTL magazine and lets see how it competes with INMTL.
Why should a government publication (mtl) compete with a private enterprise (INMTL)? Duplication of services is a waste of tax dollars. Let the ML manager handle the press and dump the salaries and pensions in the PIO's office. Put the savings into recreation.
Maybe the PIO should donate her salary to charity and her or another volunteer can oversee the responsibilities of MtL? Why does the PIO need to be a paid position?
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