More poor judgment shown by Nancy Sebring

By The Des Moines Register

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Former Des Moines School Superintendent Nancy Sebring freely admits she used exceedingly poor judgment when she used the school district's email system to carry on extensive email exchange with a male friend laden with explicit sexual references.

Using similarly poor judgment, Sebring now wants to punish Des Moines school officials for doing their jobs, following Iowa law and releasing the emails to the public when asked for them by The Des Moines Register and the Omaha World-Herald.

After Sebring's emails became public, she was forced out of her job in Des Moines and had to withdraw her acceptance of a new position as superintendent of schools in Omaha. She has since been unable to find a job, and she blames Des Moines school officials for her fate.

On Thursday, Sebring filed a lawsuit in Polk County District Court accusing a school board member, the district's spokesman and its attorney of conspiring with malicious intent to destroy her reputation by releasing personally humiliating emails. The lawsuit asks for unspecified actual financial damages and punitive damages against the three named officials.

Besides meeting the classic definition of chutzpah, this effort to punish the employer whose trust she betrayed could have far-reaching repercussions for all government bodies in Iowa.

If successful, Sebring's lawsuit would do more to shut off access to public information than any single lawsuit in many years.

Beyond punishing the Des Moines school officials, the open-ended punitive damages portion of Sebring's lawsuit is clearly intended to intimidate all public officials in Iowa. It sends the signal that they could pay a steep financial penalty if they release public records that prove embarrassing to someone, in or out of government.

That would be the case even if the embarrassing information is accurate. That would be the case even if the embarrassing information is in a public record that by law is open to public inspection. That would be the case even if the public official who releases a record containing the embarrassing information is following the law by releasing it.

Sebring's lawyers might want to look a little more closely at the Iowa public records law, in which the Legislature said that “free and open examination of public records is generally in the public interest even though such examination may cause inconvenience or embarrassment to public officials or others.”

Sebring's petition to the district court repeatedly uses the words “purely personal and private” to describe the nature of the emails. That is irrelevant, because the law does not make a distinction between the official and unofficial content of email messages.

In this case, those messages were produced by a public official on a government computer using a government email account, and many were written during official business hours.

It is curious that Sebring would ask the Polk County District Court to find that the emails should not have been released. This is the same district court that ruled against her on that point last June after the initial release of emails. When petitioning the court to prevent release of more emails at that time, she used the argument that the emails were not public records and, even if they were, there was no public interest in releasing them.

District Judge Robert Hanson rejected those arguments, ruling that the emails were public records and were not subject to any exceptions in the law that would prevent their release to the public. In fact, Judge Hanson said those emails revealed important information to the public about the conduct of a top government official.

The district court got it right then, and the judge assigned to Sebring's latest lawsuit should reiterate Hanson's decision in dismissing her effort to block public access to government records that by law are open to the public.