Chair Seliga-Punyko sends her greetings:
Harry,
It has come to my attention that you have been publicly sharing private confidential data on your blog that was discussed in the 3/24/15 closed session. Releasing confidential questions and information about consequences is a violation of state law with regards to private data. As a representative of the public, having inappropriate information and language or violating laws about private data is unacceptable.
This was previously addressed through censure and needs to be removed from your blog immediately.
Judy
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I salute back:
Chair Seliga-Punyko,
You have been misinformed about my post of March 25th. The extent of my reporting on the closed meeting was to refer to a question asked by a member of the School Board. As you recall when we embarked on our investigation of Art Johnston we determined that School Board members were not subject to the same data privacy rules as our district’s employees and students.
This is the extent of my reporting on that closed hearing:
“Young Annie Harala asked one question of District officials at our closed meeting yesterday. Were the students subject to expulsion remorseful for their actions? I’ll only say that the response was what the person putting such a question might hope for.”
Excepting the question and the questioner everything else contained in these three sentences had already been aired publicly in Duluth’s newspaper of record, to wit: We held a closed meeting. We passed a resolution of expulsion directed at two students. All of this was public knowledge. Furthermore our resolution was public data. Only the identities and actions of the subjects of our resolution were covered by Minnesota’s data privacy law. These I did not reveal.
Yours cordially,
Harry
