School board kept in dark

Members read of legal action against newspaper only in the newspaper

No one told some Broward school board members they were filing a contempt-ofcourt case against the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

No one except the Sun Sentinel, that is.

The district’s chief lawyer, Barbara Myrick, asked a judge this week to hold the newspaper and two reporters in contempt of court for publishing an uncensored report about the Parkland school shooter. She said she never consulted the school board despite filing the action on the board’s behalf.

Several board members said at a tense meeting Tuesday that they found out about the case only by reading it in the Sun Sentinel.

“The decision was made without my con-

“The decision was made without my consultation, and I would like to have a say in what’s going on right now.”

Robin Bartleman, school board member

sultation, and I would like to have a say in what’s going on right now,” board member Robin Bartleman said.

The newspaper wrote Friday night about a longawaited report regarding the education of Marjory Stoneman Douglas gunman Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people Feb. 14 at Stoneman Douglas.

After a judge’s order, the district released the report with nearly two-thirds of its content blacked out to protect Cruz’s privacy rights — a move that also concealed much about how the district mishandled Cruz’s education.

Reporters Brittany Wallman and Paula McMahon, acting on a Facebook tip from a reader at 7:30 p.m., discovered that the district had erred in how it redacted the report. Anyone could copy and paste the report into a Microsoft Word document to make all of the text visible.

The reporters quickly rewrote the story reflecting the entire report, providing the first detailed account about the shooter’s years in the school system, what the district knew about him and what mistakes were made.

Tracy Clark, the district’s public information officer, emailed the School Board and staff on Sunday with suggestions on how to spin the news if the public complained.

“The District did not release redacted information; that was a decision and act taken by [the media/the Sun Sentinel],” she wrote. “The District has complied with two court orders ruling that the redacted content is protected by state and federal statute. [I am/We are] troubled by the media’s decision.”

In its filing with the court Monday, the School Board alleged that the newspaper intentionally published information that it knew a judge had ordered to be secret.

Myrick said the decision to file a contempt request “was made in somewhat of an emergency basis … to notify the court the Sun Sentinel had defied a court order.”

Myrick said Superintendent Robert Runcie was not part of the decision.

“If you have anyone to blame, it’s me. I take full responsibility,” Myrick said.

Several board members said administrators need to take responsibility for the failed redaction.

“We have to look at how this information is being released, and the potential that we, as a district, have a level of responsibility,” board member Donna Korn said.

Several other board members criticized Myrick for not informing them and allowing them to weigh in on the decision.

Board member Rosalind Osgood said she thinks lawyers may not want to inconvenience board members by contacting them on legal moves. But “we can’t operate as business as usual,” she said. “This is not business as usual.”

Sun Sentinel Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson said the events surrounding the mass shooting are of “the utmost importance to our community,” and it is the paper’s duty to provide that information to its readers.

“I don’t understand how the School Board can sue the Sun Sentinel and the board members didn’t approve that,” Anderson said. “Regardless, we will defend our reporters and the Sun Sentinel’s right to publish an important story based on a lawfully obtained report.

“We feel strongly that we didn’t break the law and have no regrets for publishing the school district’s history with the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooter.”

Myrick argued that the school district’s mistake didn’t give the Sun Sentinel a right to publish the information. She compared the district’s actions to “leaving cars unlocked and someone comes and steals it and saying it’s not the thief’s problem that you left the door unlocked.”

Lawyer Tom Julin, who is not involved in the case but has represented the Miami Herald and others in his four decades practicing media law, told the Sun Sentinel on Monday that the School Board’s claim had no merit.

“The problem is the School Board’s problem and not the Sun Sentinel’s,” Julin said. “The Sun Sentinel is entitled to publish the information that it lawfully obtained even if that information should have been redacted from the document that was released.”

“It looks like the School Board just made a mistake and is trying to deal with its own mistake by asking that the Sun Sentinel be held in contempt,” he said. “But the School Board has absolutely no basis to make that request.”