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No.

That’s what the Hawaii Department of Education told Civil Beat in response to a request for the number of teachers who have been fired over the last five years.

Why?

Because it says the law does not require it to meet a Freedom of Information Request “unless the information is readily retrievable by the agency in the form in which it is requested, an agency shall not be required to prepare a compilation or summary of its records.”

That’s about as bureaucratic as it can get. How could an agency not have such records? They’re fundamental. And by not trying to meet the request, they’re giving the impression that they want to stonewall.

Here’s what the introduction to Hawaii’s says:

In a democracy, the people are vested with the ultimate decision-making power. Government agencies exist to aid the people in the formation and conduct of public policy. Opening up the government processes to public scrutiny and participation is the only viable and reasonable method of protecting the public’s interest.

If the hiring and firing of teachers — essentially, how the state maintains the quality of the people working with its children — isn’t important public policy, it would be interesting to know what the department thinks is. The difficulty of firing teachers from Hawaii’s public schools is an issue that has come to the fore as principals argue that they need more hiring and firing authority to meet reform demands.

While you try to wrap your head around this, here’s a timeline of our request, with some images of the correspondence:

May 17: Civil Beat filed a formal request for a list of personnel actions — hirings, firings, transfers, etc — pertaining to teachers that would span the last five years.

May 20: Followed up with the department to ensure the request had been received. Department spokesman Sandy Goya responded that it had been forwarded on May 17 to the office that would handle the it. “Should the responding office require additional clarification about the info sought in your request, you will be contacted directly,” she said.

May 28: Civil Beat received a letter dated May 25, from Acting Deputy Superintendent Ronn Nozoe, informing us the department would need additional time to fulfill it.

June 8: Civil Beat called department to narrow the request to a) how many teachers have been fired and transferred to another school in the last five years and b) how many teachers have been fired from the department in the last five years. I also told the department that if it needed clarification or help focusing the search, please talk with me. The person I spoke with was Justin Takaki.

June 16: Civil Beat called the department to check on the status of the request and was told we would have a response from the department sometime in the next week.

June 25: Civil Beat followed up with the department again, offering to come pick up in person whatever response the department might have. We were informed the response had gone out in the morning mail.

June 28: Received a letter from Nozoe dated June 24 informing us “the items in your request do not exist in the form in which you requested it” and that because of this, “the DOE will not be providing you with information regarding teachers who have been fired.”

The department, and especially Nozoe, are generally very helpful when it comes to finding and providing the information we seek. So to be honest, I’m shocked about this latest response.

It seems like the department must have some summary of how many teachers it has fired. You would think it would have to share such information annually with the Board of Education and the union. You’d think that working cooperatively as we have, the department could have raised the possibility of providing some information in a different form. As it stands, how can the department not have such basic personnel information as how many teachers it has had to fire over the last five years?

The department’s response raises the question of how the public can trust it to establish effective personnel policies if it doesn’t track how its current ones are impacting the teaching workforce?

Share your thoughts about the Department’s position in our Open Records discussion.