McHenry County Blog

Huntley resident Aileen Seedorf is really disgusted with the way the Huntley School Board is running the district.

She attends meetings regularly.

When she heard that the outside auditor had passed out a management letter to Financial Advisory Committee members in which he described the letter as “an integral part of the audit,” she decided she wanted to read it.

Seedorf filed a Freedom of Information request for it.

Soon-to-be-gone temporary Superintendent Robert Hammon rejected her request, of course. If you could push this bad publicity off onto a successor, you probably would, too.

Seedorf was not satisfied with the rejection, so she prepared a quite complex appeal to the head of the tax district’s governing body—Mike Skala, the school board president. She presented the document to Skala in the public comment portion of last Wednesday’s meeting at which school board member Glen Stewart was given a $101,000 job. (You can see part of the interchange in this picture.)

The devastating part of Seedorf’s letter was her pointing out that Hammon had not quoted the Freedom of Information Act correctly. He left out such an important part when supposedly quoting section 7/1.f and did not even use the correct punctuation to indicate that his citation of the paragraph was a partial one. I’ll quote it below in its entirety, as did Seedorf, putting in boldface type what Hammon decided to omit:

(f) Preliminary drafts, notes, recommendations, memoranda and other records in which opinions are expressed, or policies or actions are formulated, except that specific record or relevant portion of a record shall not be exempt when the record is publicly cited and identified by the head of the public body. The exemption provide in this paragraph (f) extends to all those records of officers and agencies of the General Assembly that pertain to the preparation of legislative documents.

“Words were specifically omitted from the citation, ”Seedorf wrote, then, citing them.

Next, Seedorf quoted the Illinois Attorney General’s web site regarding the purpose of the Open Meetings and Freedom of Information Acts:

Both…endeavor to open the workings of government to the public, shed light on government actions and, in the process, strengthen our democracy.

The outside audit, Seedorf continued presented the school district audit “in its final completed form…It was distributed to board members…”and, then, quotes the final paragraph of the first page of the Auditor’s letter:

In accordance with Government Auditing Standards, we have also issued our report dated April 18, 2006 on our consideration of Consolidated School District 158’s internal control over financial reporting and on our tests of its compliance with certain provisions of laws, regulations, contracts and grant agreements and other matters.

Seedorf goes on to state,

That report is an integral part of the audit …and should be considered in assessing the results of our audit.”

In his rejection letter, temporary Supt. Hammon said what Seedorf requested was a

“draft copy not to be reproduced without the permission of William F. Gurrie and Company.”

Seedorf’s rebuttal?

Whether or not the document I have requested bears any “draft” terminology, the fact is that it was made public and you were present at the open meeting in which it was made public. It may have been a draft on April 18, 2006 when it was written, however, on May 30, 2006, when it was presented at a public meeting, it became a public document.

Seedorf then quotes a Northwest Herald story containing “…specific quotes from the document I am requesting…”