The Public’s Purse and the Vanishing Records

A Tale of Schoolboard Shenanigans

It was a fine morning in Douglas County when the good people awoke to find that their hard-earned tax dollars—intended for the noble pursuit of educating their young—had instead been repurposed for a more scholastic endeavor: the instruction of public officials in the art of obeying the law. The lesson, however, came at the princely sum of $166,081.16, a tuition fee extracted not from the pockets of the errant trustees but from the taxpayers who believed their funds might purchase books, desks, and the occasional qualified instructor.

District Judge Tom Gregory delivered the final ruling in this tale of bureaucratic hide-and-seek, finding that the Douglas County School District and four trustees—Susan Jansen, David Burns, Katherine Dickerson, and former trustee Doug Englekirk—had, through a series of mystifying maneuvers, misplaced, misremembered, or otherwise failed to disclose thousands of public records. The petitioners, Messrs. Miller, Swisher, Girdner, and Lehmann, armed with little more than an inquiring mind and a suspicion that the requests had something less than forthrightness, sought to unearth these elusive documents.

The saga began in 2023 when the petitioners filed requests for public records—requests which ought to have met with swift and cheerful compliance. Instead, the school district and its trustees responded in the time-honored fashion of government functionaries everywhere: they denied the existence of any such records.

But as with all good mysteries, the truth had a habit of clawing its way to the surface, and after much legal wrangling, a trove of 6,136 pages got miraculously unearthed—having been previously concealed on the personal devices of the trustees, perhaps to see if records, like fine wine, improve with age.

Judge Gregory, who seemed to possess little patience for bureaucratic conjuring tricks, observed that “one page is sufficient” to warrant attorney’s fees in such cases. Having produced 6,636 pages after a year of staunch denial, the trustees could hardly claim to have misplaced a scrap of paper. The judge, evidently unmoved by their newfound contrition, determined that responsibility for this “unacceptable and unreasonable delay” fell squarely on the shoulders of the district and its trustees.

Having exhausted every argument save for the ever-popular “Can’t we just forget this ever happened?” the defendants suggested a previously rejected settlement should suffice as their financial obligations. Judge Gregory, not given to such easy absolutions, dismissed this plea with a flourish, noting that the petitioners could hardly accept the assurance that “No other responsive documents exist, we really mean it this time, believe us.”

Thus, the school district—charged with shaping the young minds of Douglas County—now finds itself in the unenviable position of teaching a different kind of lesson–that transparency, though occasionally inconvenient, is less expensive when embraced at the outset. Whether the taxpayers, having footed the bill for this unintentional civics course, will find solace in the wisdom gained remains to be seen.

But one thing is for sure—somewhere in Douglas County, a schoolteacher is explaining to their students the value of honesty, perhaps without the faintest trace of irony.