One of our most basic rights is our right to access public records. It goes back all the way to the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 and has been revised throughout the years in different states. California even incorporated the notion in its State Constitution in 2004, opening all information concerning public officials and agencies to public scrutiny.

Given this right’s long history and widespread prevalence, it never occurred to us that our school leaders would not produce what should be public information in response to our inquiries.

For the Sept. 26 issue of the newspaper, two Falcon staffers, junior Vibha Seshadri and sophomore Stefanie Ting (one of the writers of this story), contacted Jane Marashian, administrative assistant to district superintendent Bob Mistele, for information about our story on students who transferred from Saratoga High to Los Gatos High.

In our email, we inquired about the previously instituted transfer policy that was enforced in 2011-12 school year and repealed last year, which prohibited Saratoga students from switching into LGHS.  In addition, we asked about the number of transfers that Los Gatos received from SHS last year.

Marashian responded to the first question regarding the transfer policy but refused to disclose the number of transfers.

Determined to receive these details, we sent another email to Marashian, stressing that the data would strengthen our story by making it as accurate as possible.

In her email response, Marashian wrote, “I’m not able to provide the data you’re requesting,” giving no further explanation.

From the district’s responses (or lack of), it is apparent that our rights under the State Open Record Law to free information were disregarded. Since the school is obviously a public agency, these numbers held in the school’s records are no more confidential than the number of students attending either Los Gatos or Saratoga High School.

Students and their parents and any other member of the community should be able to freely access public information, even if it’s inconvenient or doesn’t present the district in the best possible light.

Student journalists like us run into roadblocks to information that they deserve to know about on an almost daily basis in public schools. What we have experienced is sadly common.

Fighting for the right to public information often requires legal help, and not many school newspapers have attorneys working for them the way major newspapers do.

We were, however, able to contact Adam Goldstein, student attorney advocate of the Student Press Law Center (SPLC), for more advice regarding this situation. We asked him whether the number or demographics of the transfers were private and whether the district’s failure to disclose such information violated any of our rights.

His response: “That information [number of transfers] should be made public. The only way [the administration] can withhold information is if they think an average person in the community would be able to identify which individuals they were talking about.”

Because we sought mere numbers in order to investigate a trend rather than hunt down individuals, there would have been no way for us to determine which students had transferred.

Moreover, through other means, we discovered and talked to a number of these transfers, who were sources in our story, without this data from the administration. If we could identify individuals using traditional reporting practices, what is the danger of disclosing numbers?

“White Flight” controversy
The district’s refusal to hand over information was not a one-time-only situation. More recently, we tried to pursue a story on how many white students are transferring out of highly competitive districts, specifically the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District (LGSUHSD) and Fremont Union High School District (FUHSD).

This phenomenon, known as “White Flight,” gained attention in a 2011 Wall Street Journal article titled “The New White Flight.” Focusing on Monta Vista High School, the paper interviewed administrators and many white parents who were pulling their children out of the school, some even moving out of the community, due to the rising academic standards set by the growing Asian-American student population.

In order to analyze this trend and investigate “White Flight” at our own school and in the local community, we emailed principals Paul Robinson from SHS, Bryan Emmert from Fremont High School and April Scott from MVHS, and again contacted Marashian and Mistele.

We asked the administrations for numbers disclosing the demographics of the transfers between schools in each of the districts. Within a day, Robinson and Emmert replied to our questions. 

Although Emmert confirmed that there were large percentages of whites, Hispanics and Asians who attend  Fremont High School, he found our emails offensive, even though Goldstein approved them before they were sent. He accused us of framing the question to imply that Fremont is not an academically strong school and “[took] umbrage at the underlying and [supposedly] faulty assumptions of the question that schools and [FUHSD] have students actively moving away from them.”

Even if he was justified in this reaction, it seems that Emmert is simply avoiding the question by forcing allegations upon us in order to defend his school’s reputation.

Similarly, Robinson emailed us with a terse reply: “I really can't answer your questions because I don't know if your assumptions are even close to factual. Sorry.”

The whole point of the inquiry, however, was to determine whether the trend is factual at Saratoga. We never meant to assume that this claim was true and were only basing the questions on the story by the Wall Street Journal, a respectable publication.

Goldstein said that the administration’s actions violated the State Open Record Law, in which “every public institution has an obligation to turn over records that talk about how public officials are doing their jobs.”

“If they have the numbers [of Caucasian transfers], then they have to turn them over,” Goldstein added.

Goldstein said that the fact that the administrators were unwilling to reveal such numbers implies that there is something they are hiding. In fact, the enrollment and demographics of Saratoga High can easily be found on DataQuest on the LGSUHSD website — why should the number or demographics of transfers be any more confidential?

Unjust omission of information 
There are several possible reasons the administration took such strong offense to our inquiries.

It could have been a product of confusion. The administration may not have known that they were allowed to disclose the statistics and may have mistaken it as private data.

This is, to say the least, unsettling; how secure can students feel knowing that the people running the school are not aware of the law?

The administration may have also suspected ulterior motives or racist intentions in our request for transfer demographics, while our actual intentions were to do research on and get accurate information for our story.

The administration could have also been embarrassed, especially if such information would hurt Saratoga’s affluent reputation of being an academically balanced school.

Publicizing the information we were asking for could make Saratoga appear so academically rigorous to the point where it drives away families, which would understandably make the school look bad.

Nevertheless, citizens, whatever age or occupation, have a right to public information, no matter how damaging it is to a school’s reputation. If indeed “White Flight” is a reality, the issue could bring about discussions of school culture and ways to improve imbalances. And if the numbers reveal no such trend, that ought to be known too.

Lack of public accountability on the part of leaders skews the truth and hides facts. Even though its actions may appear trivial at first glance, the school district should thoroughly understand the public’s rights under the State Open Record Law and not withhold information suited for the public domain.