That Dennis Leone...he's so anti-teacher!?

From John Curry, April 13, 2008
Subject: That Dennis Leone...he's so anti-teacher!

Not!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have heard some misled active educators question Dr. Leone's passion for educators as they have heard otherwise from some among the rank of the uninformed educators and/or educator organizations. This might help them understand a little more clearly. This really drives home the old saying, "ignorance is no excuse!"

Sensel v. Leone: On March 31, 1999, the State Supreme Court ruled 7-0 in Leone’s favor to reverse a 2-1 decision issued in 1997 by the Twelfth District Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. The high court supported a decision Leone made in 1995 to discard unsolicited and anonymous hate letters he received about a teacher/coach. The case involved a parent who wanted a basketball coach fired after he benched her son. She organized a hate letter campaign and Leone received about a dozen letters – half of them anonymous – that heavily criticized the coach. Leone decided it was inappropriate to put the letters in the teacher’s file, so he discarded them. The parent made a public records’ request for the letters she organized and filed a lawsuit for records’ destruction when she saw the letters were not in the teacher’s personnel file. The Common Pleas Court judge ruled in Leone’s favor saying that the parent was attempting to use the Open Records Law to cause a statutory fine for records’ destruction. The judge described this as “gamesmanship” on the parent’s part. The judge also determined it was the superinten-dent’s right to determine what was, and what wasn’t, a record for the teacher’s personnel file. The parent admitted at trial that she was hoping the letters would cause the district “to create a new file” on the teacher. Leone was asked at trial if he had ever previously discarded letters about a teacher (prior to this case). He said yes and explained how a year earlier a parent improperly accused a first-year teacher in writing of having a romance with a high school girl. Leone said he discarded the letter because he knew the parent had made a terrible mistake and did not realize that the first-year teacher actually was dating the high school girl’s 21-year-old sister (who was a senior at Miami University). Leone told the court he could not allow a potentially career-ruining letter like that to go in a teacher’s personnel file. What was interesting about this case is that the Appellate Court in Cincinnati ruled against Leone and reversed the Common Pleas Court decision, 2-1. This meant that until the State Supreme Court ruled 7-0 in Leone’s favor in 1999 (in support of the Common Pleas Court decision), there was a two-year period in Ohio (1997-1999) when school administrators were expected to file all letters received – whether or not they were anonymous. Leone’s school district spent a total of $100,000 on this case.

SENSEL v. LEONE FOOTNOTE: Following the court decision, Kimball Carey, the chief legal counsel for Buckeye Association of School Administrators (BASA), published the following in a BASA newsletter: “The good news in the Sensel v. Leone decision is that the parents’ unsolicited letters were found NOT to be “public records” because they were never actually used in any decision-making process…….clearly this is one of the most sensible decisions on public records that our State Supreme Court has ever issued.”

"Yeah, he sure is anti-educator, isn't he?"