I shouldn’t have been surprised School Board member Jackie Rosario didn’t answer my emailed questions.
She also didn’t reply to follow-up text and phone messages regarding the thousands of pages of documents she received in response to her inquiry into the school district’s donation of $70 worth of bottled water to a local charity that provided 700 Thanksgiving meals to the needy.
Really, what was she going to say?
That she wasted three full workdays of district staffers’ time and effort on a search for evidence of a scandal that existed only in her mind?
That she spitefully pushed on with her extensive request for emails, receipts and other documents, even after Schools Superintendent David Moore explained to her the water came from the supply the district kept in storage because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its expiration date was approaching?
That she was merely throwing a tantrum because Moore and other School Board members supported the charitable venture of TeamSuccess and its president, Michael Marsh, who as a private citizen had been pummeling her with relentless social-media attacks?
There’s no way Rosario, who last week filed to run for re-election to her District 2 seat, was going to say anything that might undermine her campaign, even though she was still unopposed earlier this week.
She must know that publicly complaining about our school district giving to charity a few cases of soon-to-be-stale bottled water and a collection of canned foods donated by district employees won’t win her many votes.
So unless I’m missing something obvious, her wrongheaded and self-serving pursuit of this matter is indefensible.
According to Ron Fagan, the district’s chief financial officer, staffers spent a total of 25 hours at a cost of more than $1,200 in salary alone to search for and produce the requested information.
Moore described those numbers as “generous” – because they didn’t include the time and expense of processing the data collected.
But what’s most troubling is that a staffer in the district’s already-overworked Information Technology Department, which juggles as many as 20 projects at any one time, was forced to conduct a frivolous search that Fagan said produced 15,000 to 20,000 emails.
There were so many emails, in fact, they couldn’t simply be forwarded to Rosario. They needed to be loaded onto a thumb drive delivered to her and the other board members earlier this month.
So, instead of working on meaningful projects that actually helped educate our students, this IT staffer spent the better part of a week chasing a bogeyman.
That’s cause for concern.
Still – in the interest of fairness, now that she has had an opportunity to review the materials she requested – I wanted to give Rosario a chance to tell her side of the story.
In addition, I wanted to know if there was anything in the emails and other documents that she found troubling, and whether they included problems or issues she’d like to discuss for publication.
Finally, I wanted her to explain why she believed the time spent addressing her request was an appropriate and worthwhile use of the district staff’s time, and how our school children benefited from her inquiry.
Certainly, county voters have a right to know why this matter was so important to her, given the urgent tone of the Dec. 3 email in which she requested from the superintendent:
- All emails sent between board members and Moore, his cabinet or district staffers in connection with Marsh and/or the Thanksgiving donations made to the charity.
- All policies, procedures and statutes governing school district donations to outside organizations.
- All email conversations regarding any donations made by the district in November, as well as all relevant tax forms, itemized lists of what was donated, donation letters and receipts, sources of funding for the purchase of donated items, departments the donations came from, who delivered the items, where they were delivered and how much did the deliveries cost.
Just so you know: If you or I had requested the exact same information, it would’ve cost us as much as $50,000 – because district staffers would’ve been required to read each email and redact any names, addresses, phone numbers or other information not accessible under Florida’s public-records law.
“We’re talking about 20,000 emails, so the number of hours required to do all that would be astronomical,” Fagan said.
“I couldn’t even begin to tell you exactly how many, but if you allow 3 minutes to read each email, that’s 60,000 minutes, which is 1,000 hours. And at $50 per hour …”
School Board members don’t pay for such information, of course, and unless documents contain student records, redactions aren’t necessary.
The district staffers dutifully did their job. We don’t know if Rosario did hers.
“My understanding is that she got everything she requested,” Moore said. “It’s a lot of information and maybe she’s still reviewing it. There have been no additional requests.”
It’s difficult, though, to see any value or pressing need for the data she requested.
The other School Board members – all four of them took my calls and spoke frankly last week – said they had received the thumb drives containing the information Rosario requested, hadn’t read what’s on them and probably won’t bother to do so.
“It’s not high on my list of priorities,” School Board Chairman Teri Barenborg said.
Previous chairman Brian Barefoot took a stronger position, reiterating the words of disgust he exhibited during the superintendent’s workshop earlier this month, describing Rosario’s request as “ridiculous” and saying it “borders on harassing the staff.”
Barefoot added that he hadn’t taken the thumb drive out of the envelope in which the information was delivered.
School Board Vice Chairman Peggy Jones said she doubts she’ll “ever look at those emails” because she has “no interest” in their contents.
“I’m upset because it was a waste of the district staff’s time,” Jones said.
“What’s the point here?” she added. “Our superintendent has the authority over purchases and expenditures up to $50,000. This was $72 worth of bottled water.”
Mara Schiff, who is in the final year of her School Board term and hasn’t yet announced whether she’ll seek re-election, said it was a “shame” that Rosario’s request took time away from the mission of the district.
“I agree with my fellow board members that our job is to work in collaboration with our superintendent, district staff and the community,” Schiff said, “and not as adversaries.”
As for Marsh, who continues to target Rosario in a barrage of social-media posts, he said his attacks were prompted by her fierce alliance to what he believes is a “politically partisan” group of mothers who have organized, locally and nationally, in an attempt to influence school policy.
In an interview last month, however, Rosario denied that her questioning of the district’s donations to TeamSuccess was motivated by Marsh’s torment and antagonism. Nor does she want to be perceived as being opposed to feeding the needy.
But she said she was unaware of any other such donations by the district during her time on the board, and she wanted to make sure the charities are properly vetted and policies are followed.
Perhaps so, but within days of her filing her request, Moore told her all she needed to know about the donations. Yet she persisted.
Why?
