By Lori Carlson, Correspondent

In the wake of a state Commissioner of Administration ruling that a letter from School Board Member Chris Lind regarding possible litigation against the Prior Lake-Savage Area School District should remain classified as private personnel data, Lind announced he will not sue the district.

The district received the notice of claim letter from Lind’s attorney, David Thompson, on Dec. 19, 2007. The letter sought mediation relating to a monetary settlement for Lind’s termination from employment as a Prior Lake High School campus supervisor.

However, Lind wrote in a letter to the editor of the Savage Pacer this week that he does not plan to sue the district, despite his attorney’s advice to move forward with a lawsuit.

“I choose to forgive those who have wronged me and move on. My family and the community have been through enough,” Lind wrote. (See the full letter on page 4 of today’s paper.)

Lind’s attorney, David Thompson, said in a news release that he advised Lind to sue but Lind opted not to pursue a lawsuit.

Commissioner ruling

The commissioner upheld earlier decisions on private personnel data, citing Section 13.43 of the state statute, which classifies data on current or former employees of a government entity as private personnel data, with few exceptions.

Lind was terminated from his position in June 2007. According to the district, Lind was fired after making a comment about a student’s sexual orientation, and he had been given previous warnings about his interaction with students. Lind then ran for and was elected to the School Board in November. Following his election, some residents started a petition asking for Lind to release his personnel file and/or resign from the board. To date, 584 people have signed the online petition.

In her opinion, Commissioner Dana Badgerow also determined that a small portion of another document the district received regarding Lind should be classified as public data. The document, a letter to the School Board, contains the following statements that the commissioner deemed public: “… a parent group has started a petition drive with the intent to force Mr. Lind from the board. The petition can be found at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/719cares/.”

The opinion states that “the commissioner believes those statements relate solely to Mr. Lind’s status as a School Board member, and as such are public data.”

Since the school district has no policy regarding data about School Board members, the commissioner interpreted that to mean the district does not consider board members to be public employees. Therefore, the data collected on Lind as a board member is considered public.

However, the remainder of the second letter – the one relating to the petition drive – is unclear, as the commissioner deemed the rest of that letter private. Also, the writer or writers of the letter remain unknown, because that information was redacted from the public copy.

The school district’s attorney requested the advisory opinion in January to determine the classification of data collected on Lind. Attorneys for the Prior Lake American and the Star Tribune also submitted comments in support of an opinion from the commissioner.

Mark Anfinson, attorney for the Prior Lake American, said he's not surprised by the commissioner's decision.“I assumed they’d hold that to be private personnel data because they’d done that in previous opinions,” Anfinson said. “Everything is presumed to be private, unless it’s explicitly listed in the statute as public.” Lori Carlson can be reached at editor@plamerican.com. 

Online

What do you think about the commissioner’s opinion and Chris Lind’s decision to drop his lawsuit? Talk about it!