School districts, like all government agencies, are required by law to preserve emails so they can be accessed by the public. But at San Diego Unified School District, officials devised a way to make their emails disappear permanently, according to interviews and documents obtained by Voice of San Diego.
Technology personnel trained top-level district officials on a three-step procedure to permanently delete sensitive emails from the district server, an official who took part in the training told Voice of San Diego. The training took place two months after San Diego Unified entered into a court-approved agreement to keep emails for at least two years, as part of a lawsuit with Voice of San Diego.
“It seemed like the reason we were being trained to do this is because records requests were coming in and it was becoming a problem. And so we needed to understand how – when we sent things that we didn’t want the average Joe to see – to get rid of those emails,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
“I saw it as a training on how to protect the district,” the official said.
The official also said that top district officials frequently chatted in Google Docs in order to avoid communicating by email — a strategy commonly used among students to chat with one another without leaving a paper trail.
Records retention law in the state of California can be murky. Most documents are supposed to be retained for at least two years. Others that are considered of lesser importance can be deleted sooner, said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, when he was a state Assembly member last year, passed a law specifying that emails are among the types of communications that must be preserved for two CONTINUE READING: Official: San Diego Unified Trained Employees to Delete Emails From Public Record — Voice of San Diego