Press Release - Right to Know - 08/19/2013

PRESS RELEASE

It has recently come to the attention of the Board of Directors of the Octorara Area School District that a Right-To-Know request was allegedly sent by Mr. Alexander to Octorara, and without response, was subsequently appealed to the Commonwealth Right-To-Know office by Mr. Timothy J. Alexander.

The Board of Directors of the Octorara Area School District strives to comply with the requirements of the Right-To-Know law.  It is our practice to comply in a timely manner, within the guidelines of the law, when a request is submitted; as we have done for the 9 previous Right-To-Know requests since Jan. 2012.   We have a track record that proves this to be true.

It is our position that the blog posting on Mr. Alexander's two sites, Parkesburg Gazette and Octorarataxes.wordpress.com is the first that we heard of his alleged Right-To-Know request. We regret that Mr. Alexander did not reach out to anyone on the Board of Directors or the administration when he did not get a response to his alleged request. Rather, he assumed ill-will toward his alleged request and filed an appeal using the same erroneous email address as he used in his original alleged request.

Based on the documents we were able to secure through our legal counsel we do not believe we received the alleged request as Mr. Alexander has indicated. The alleged request was sent to an email address, schoolboard@octorara.org, and all correspondences from the Office of Open Records were sent to the same email address. This email address was provided to the Office of Open Records by Mr. Alexander. This is not a valid external email address.

We will provide an update upon resolution.