On October 18, 2016, the PA Supreme Court settled a seven-year battle over the release of teachers’ home addresses under PA’s Right To Know Law.
The Court reached back in history to recall the “fundamental right to be left alone” in holding that the personal right to privacy is infused in the Right To Know Law. There is no automative right to school employees’ personal information under Right To Know.
The path to the PA Supreme Court began back in 2009, when the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) and fourteen of its members sued the Office of Open Records (OOR), its Executive Director, and the PA Department of Community and Economic Development for a preliminary injunction to stop the release of members’ home addresses. PSEA argued that several school districts had received requests for names and addresses of public school employees, and several districts had already released them without any notice to the employees and without any recourse for the employees.
Legal wrangling ensued, with initial issuance of the injunction and then subsequent dismissal of the case at the Commonwealth Court level. Commonwealth Court ruled that PSEA must sue the individual school districts, not the OOR, a merely quasi-judicial tribunal. That decision, however, was subsequently vacated in 2012, with the PA Supreme Court ruling for the teachers’ right to sue OOR, and sending the case back to the lower court.
That decision arguably should have ended the controversy, but the OOR brought the case back to court and in 2015, Commonwealth Court now ruled that OOR’s procedure in releasing employees’ addresses without notice and an opportunity to object violated the employees’ due process rights.
The Court ruled en banc, i.e., with all judges of the court participating in the deliberations, that before releasing employees’ personal information, OOR must give employees notice and an opportunity to object, and even to appeal an adverse decision by OOR in court.
Neither PSEA nor OOR were happy with that decision of Commonwealth Court. PSEA argued that any balancing test would fall on the side of public school employees’ rights to privacy; OOR argued that only threats to employees’ safety should prevent release of home addresses. The Supreme Court reached back to an 1890 Harvard Law Review article written by Samuel Warren and the noted jurist Louis Brandeis to ascertain the meaning of the “right to privacy,” a right not specifically mentioned in the Constitution or Bill of Rights, but that Warren and Brandeis dubbed, among other descriptions, the “right to be left alone.”
The Supreme Court reviewed several pronouncements of the U.S. Supreme Court on rights to informational privacy, and interpreted Article 1 Section 1 of the PA Constitution as conferring to individuals the “inherent and indefeasible rights” to pursue “their own happiness,” one happiness of which is privacy.
The Court quoted a 1966 decision in which the court stated that, “[t]he right to privacy is as much property of the individual as the land to which he holds title and the clothing he wears on his back.”
Bottom Line for Schools
After reviewing court cases treating the right to privacy under the old Right to Know Act (RTKA), repealed in 2009 and replaced by the current Right to Know Law (RTKL), the Court found that the RTKA protections of privacy transferred to the RTKL. The RTKL, the Court explained, was designed to promote public access to information pertaining to activities of their government and provides more access to official government records than the old RTKA did, but then ruled that “constitutionally protected privacy interests must be protected even if no provision of the RTKL speaks to protection of those interests.” A balancing test still applies. However, the Court summed up its analysis of that balance in a paean to public school employees:
As PSEA indicates, public school employees just want to work, and should not be required to forfeit their privacy merely as a precondition to, or by virtue of, their decision to be employed as public school employees . . . [and we] perceive no public benefit or interest in disclosure . . . of irrelevant personal information of these particular public employees who have undertaken the high calling of educating our children.
If you should have any questions regarding the Right To Know Law, please contact your legal counsel or an attorney from KingSpry’s Education Law Practice Group.
School Law Bullets are a publication of KingSpry’s Education Law Practice Group. It is meant to be informational and does not constitute legal advice. John E. Freund, III, is our editor.
