CHESTER COUNTY, Penn. – The growing use of chat apps like Google Chat by school districts across the U.S. is raising concerns about transparency and public access to government meetings and records. 

First reported by the Delaware Valley Journal, concern is rapidly emerging in Pennsylvania as school districts, including the Pennsbury School District in Chester County, are increasingly relying on ephemeral messaging apps to conduct official business. These chat platforms automatically delete messages after 24 hours, opening their potential to violate state open record and meeting laws.

Legal professionals emphasize that these practices could violate the Sunshine Act, which mandates that discussions about public business be conducted in the open and that records of those discussions be made available. 

“Using an ephemeral messaging app raises not only Right-to-Know Law issues but Sunshine Act compliance issues as well,” said Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association. “At a minimum, this conduct harms the public trust, and depending on how the app is used, it may also violate the law.” 

The Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials recommends that emails and correspondence be saved for three years. 

Pennsbury Board President Joanne Steere declined to respond to inquiries from the  Delaware Valley Journal regarding the use of Google Chat by board members conducting official business.

”Government officials have been using online technology to evade transparency for decades, starting with basic email, and the proliferation of more apps just accelerates that,” said David Cuillier, director of the Brechner Freedom of Information Project. 

Susan Dente Ross, an alum of the Brechner program and retired professor from Washington State University (and Cuillier’s doctoral adviser), conducted a state inventory of open meeting laws in 1998 to illustrate the problem of information technologies empowering secrecy. She found that half the states failed to address the use of email and other online tech in conducting secret meetings. More recent research, published in 2019 in the Journal of Civic Information, also noted the problem of officials using social media to evade scrutiny. 

“Show me new technology and I’ll show you a new way to thwart freedom of information laws,” Cuillier said. “We should embrace technology, but quickly address the negative unintended consequences.”

Posted: December 17, 2024
Category: Brechner News
Tagged as: Brechner FOI Project, Brechner Freedom of Information Project, open records laws, Pennsylvania Right-to-Know Law, public records