The Supreme Court of Ohio has ruled that staff surveys Crestwood Local Schools distributed are public records and must be provided to anyone who wants to see them.
Randolph Township resident Brian Ames, who is also a candidate for Portage County Clerk of Courts, sued Crestwood school officials last year in the Eleventh District Court of Appeals for not providing results of a mental health and well-being survey the district’s athletic director had distributed to its staff members in the spring of 2022.
The appellate court ruled in the school district’s favor on Dec. 4, 2023, prompting Ames to seek vindication at the Supreme Court of Ohio. The state’s highest court ruled on Oct. 11, 2024, that the surveys are indeed public records and that Ames is entitled to them.
“The survey results are not merely about the employees’ general mental health; they document employees’ responses to inquiries about how their mental health is negatively affected by the workplace and how well the school district or individual schools support the employees,” the Supreme Court ruling concluded. “The survey results also shed light on the school district’s performance, at least to some degree.”
Ames’ case will now wind its way back to the Eleventh District Court of Appeals, with orders to reverse its earlier judgment and provide the requested public records. The Supreme Court of Ohio also instructed the appellate court to consider whether Ames is entitled to statutory damages and court costs.
Ames characterized the Supreme Court win as more far-reaching than a single school district, and that his lawsuit really was about whether a public entity can censor what the media sees.
Motivated by what he said is massive disregard for Sunshine Laws, Ames said he has made it his mission to require public entities to allow proper access to public records. He has filed hundreds of legal actions in local and appellate courts, and some have reached the Ohio Supreme Court.
He said he heard about the Crestwood documents from district parents he knows who had tried to obtain the survey results, but were turned away.
“Crestwood argued that the results of a survey are not public records because the district didn’t use them,” he said. “If the Supreme Court of Ohio had let that argument stand, then police departments could have used the same argument to deny access to body cam footage. The public’s right to know why the Crestwood Board of Education does what it does has been upheld.”
Ames stated that the survey results “will now become known.”
Crestwood Superintendent Aireane Curtis, who was not superintendent at the time Ames filed his legal action, did not return The Portager’s request for comment.
Ames had filed a public records request with Crestwood on April 3, 2023, requesting records documenting the results of the survey, only to be told the next day that the survey results did not constitute public records.
“The survey results you requested are personal to the individual responding to the survey and were not relied upon by the Board [of Education] in taking any action; therefore they ‘reveal little or nothing’ to the district’s own conduct and do not document the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the district,” Crestwood Treasurer Kathryn C. Hoffmeister told Ames, according to court records.
He filed in the Eleventh District Court of Appeals April 5, 2023, alleging that Hoffmeister and the Crestwood schools Board of Education had failed in their legal duty to provide public records, and requesting the appellate court to order Crestwood schools to produce the documents.
According to documents filed with the Eleventh District, the online survey contained an introduction indicating that the survey was meant to “establish a baseline for how well Crestwood Local Schools is doing with recognizing, acknowledging, and implementing strategies to address mental health-wellbeing/burnout feeling.”
The district intended to use the data to recognize areas of concern and improvement, acknowledge individual’s anonymous statements and/or opinions, and implement strategies staff and students could use to reduce feelings of being burned out and increase mental health and well being, court records state.
However, since only 60 out of 210 district employees responded to the survey, Hoffmeister told the appellate court that she did not use the survey or rely on any of its results.
That being the case, “She claimed that the survey results are personal to the surveyed individuals, and ‘were not relied upon by the board in taking any action.’ Hoffmeister thus declined to produce the survey results,” stating that they did not constitute a public record, court documents state.
David Toth, Crestwood’s superintendent at the time, and Karen Schulz, then president of the district’s Board of Education, also told the appellate court that neither the school board nor any district employee took any action based on the survey results.
Ames contended that since school officials had seen the survey results and could not “unsee them,” the school district could not say it had not “used” them, the appellate court record indicates.
“The important thing is that the treasurer took it upon herself to deny access to public records,” he told The Portager.
Ames said he intends to examine the documents to determine “what the survey results were and why they were so intent on keeping them from the public.”
He has filed numerous other legal actions against area judges, law firms, the Ohio Secretary of State, school boards, township trustees, county commissioners, village and city councils, and public boards and commissions.
Most of the cases involve alleged violations of Ohio’s public records and open meetings laws. Seventeen have reached the Supreme Court of Ohio since the year 2000; court records indicate he prevailed or partially prevailed in nine cases, lost six cases and had two dismissed.
Wendy DiAlesandro is a former Record Publishing Co. reporter and contributing writer for The Portager.