School board members in Oshkosh, Wis., have admitted deleting eMail correspondence with stakeholders—an action the state's attorney general says violates Wisconsin's open-records laws.

The news comes less than a year after eSchool News reported on a similar controversy in nearby Madison, Wis., raising the question whether school officials nationwide understand the significance of electronic records in the digital era.

The Associated Press (AP) on Nov. 11 reported that every member of the Oshkosh School Board had deleted eMail messages sent to them by constituents.

The problem was revealed when the Oshkosh Northwestern, a regional newspaper, made an open-records request for all eMail messages between the board and its constituents regarding district boundary and consolidation plans. When the paper received only 470 messages, it asked the state attorney general's office whether eMail correspondence should be regarded as a matter of public record.

According to the AP report, the response from Attorney General Jim Doyle was unequivocally, yes. Failure to save all of the messages violated open-records laws, he said. Several school board members told eSchool News they deleted correspondence without knowing its significance under the statute.

"Being a nine-year board member and the chair of our policy and governance committee, I had no idea that personal eMail was considered a public record," said board member Mike Stratz.

Other school board members had similar explanations.

"I did not become aware of the fact that these eMails were public records until after the Oshkosh Northwestern requested we turn over all correspondence on the middle school consolidation plan to them," said board member Teresa Thiel. "Several times our policy and governance committee had discussions regarding what school board members needed to keep and for how long, and there were no definitive answers because this is really an untested area of the law."

Thiel, who said she received more than 200 messages on the consolidation plan alone, claims she did not intentionally delete any of the eMails. However, storage constraints imposed by her public eMail provider caused some of the messages to be erased inadvertently.

Since the open-records request was made, school board members say a system has been put in place for each board member to store messages concerning district-related affairs.

"The board has just set up an archive mailbox at the district office for each board member. [For] every piece of eMail regarding school district business we receive or send … we copy our archive mailbox before we delete it from our computers," Stratz said.

The Oshkosh case resembles another controversy eSchool News reported on last year in the Madison Metropolitan School District. There, district officials came under fire after local Republican fund raiser Phillip Prange filed an open-records request for eMail correspondence between the school board and its constituents regarding the board's decision to prohibit children from saying the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.