Hello!

I work for a large public school district in Florida.  We have currently 12 charter schools in our district.  When the charter schools were being set up, I worked with the attorney's office to discuss expectations about the handling of school records, especially student records.

This month, the charter was not renewed for one school.  The agreement was terminated effective June 30.  I soon discovered a big hole in our charter agreement.  No plans or procedures for closing the charter school had been worked out.

When I visited the closing school, I was met by disgruntled employees who were not obstructive, but made it clear that any work concerning the records would be done by my staff.  And the work had to be done in four days.

Plus, in this particular situation, the charter school was managed by a parent corporation.  The parent corporation stated that our charter agreement was with the school and did not pertain to it.

Six district employees participated in a marathon of packing and moving records storage boxes, recovering about 160 cubic feet of student records. 

We are currently discussing how we can verify that no records were abandoned of inappropriately put in a dumpster.

I am sharing this because the charter school closing process did not have to be such a crisis.  We could have developed a process and incorporated that process into the charter agreement.  In the absence of that process, the closing school had little or no responsibility to participate or cooperate.

Things I would like to see in future charter agreements might include:

--specifying which records will stay with the parent corp, managing board, etc., and which records will stay with the school district;

--specifying who is responsible for preparing, boxing, delivering records that are to be returned (I have no problem with this being me);

--specifying the condition of the records returned (in a logical order, separated in by fiscal year, etc.);

--specifying a reasonable turnaround time for the return of the records, (or a reasonable amount time when the facility is available for us to get the records ready for return);

--identifying a required retention for any records kept by the parent organization, managing board, etc.;

--requiring the appropriate disposition of any confidential records kept by the parent, board, etc., that have met their required retention;

--identifying required audits that the parent or board will need to cooperate with, and who will conduct these audits.

This is just an "off the top of my head" list, but you get the idea. 

Robin Tew
Supervisor, Records Management
Pinellas County Schools

. . . . spending as much time in the pool as possible this summer, in sunny Florida! 


      

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
To unsubscribe from this list, click the below link. If not already present, place UNSUBSCRIBE RECMGMT-L or UNSUB RECMGMT-L in the body of the message.
mailto:[log in to unmask]