Saturday, March 23, 2019

School Board emails - Big Problem?

Since November 13, 2018 Richland 2 School Board has presented two people as members of the Board when, in fact, they are not.

Here's one more piece of the puzzle called Problems.

These two people were elected by Richland 2 School District voters on November 6. Then they took the oath of office on November, but they took the oath on November 13 in violation of S.C. Code of Laws 8-13-1110(A). Since taking the oath was illegal, they are not yet legitimate Board members.

Amelia McKee was re-elected; Teresa Holmes was elected for the first time.

Each has an email address posted on the Richland 2 website under School Board members. McKie's email address is ameliamckie@richland2.org. Since she has not been a legal school board member since November 13, 2018, she should not have a District 2 email address. The District should suspend that email address and remove her from the Member listing on its website, until she takes the oath of office legally.

Holmes doesn't use a Richland 2 School District email address. For some reason, the District is allowing her to use a private email account, "docholmesschoolboard2@gmail.com".

There is a serious problem facing Richland 2 for allowing her to use an off-server email address. The Hillary Clinton private email server scandal provides a clear reason why all official email should be only on the official email platform.

Should a member of the community, a media service or even a law-enforcement agency submit a FOIA request all for official emails to and from Teresa Holmes, could he or it have a reason to suspect the quantity in the FOIA response? Could there be off-server emails (sent or received) that were not included? Who would know?

Remember how some people wanted to believe that Clinton hadn't done anything wrong? Even today more emails are surfacing that should have been provided long ago. And, legally, there never should have been any there in the first place. Everything should have been right in Clinton's secure .gov email account.

Does Holmes know the FOIA rules? Did the District explain that all official emails, received and sent, at her private email address are subject to FOIA? Would Holmes have any problem if every one of the emails on that account was inspected, even the private messages?

Has she ever deleted any email from that gmail.com account? Did she ever delete official-District email from that account, even one as innocuous as "Are you going to the meeting?" NO official business email is to be deleted. Does District 2 have a signed statement from her that the FOIA email rules have been explained to her?

What happens when she is not re-elected in 2022? What happens to all the official District 2 emails in that account? Will she just dump them? How would District 2 respond to a FOIA request in 2023 for official email to and from her? Would she say,"Nobody told me anything", as she did in regard to the late filing of her Statement of Economic Interest Report?

Holmes should not even be receiving any official District email or documents, since she hasn't yet legally taken the oath of office. When she does take it, the District should set up an official email account for her and post it on the website.