By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

LAS VEGAS – The Clark County School District is fighting the public release of teachers’ school-issued email addresses with the argument that spam email could prevent educators from communicating effectively with parents.

The request for teachers’ email addresses comes from the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a free market think tank has been working to inform educators in the nation’s fifth-largest school district of their right to quit the local teachers union.

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The Institute is suing the school district for the release of the email addresses. Both sides made their pitch to District Judge Douglas Smith on Tuesday.

NPRI attorneys argued that teachers’ work email addresses are “government-generated and government-issued,” and are therefore public records, reports the Las Vegas Sun.

But attorneys for the Clark County School District claimed that a teacher’s email address is part of his or her private personnel record.

They also warned that public access to the email addresses would lead to teachers’ inboxes being inundated with spam email. And that, the lawyers say, would “interfere with teachers’ ability to communicate with students and parents,” reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Smith will soon decide whether NPRI’s lawsuit should go to trial, though there are indications the judge is sympathetic to the district’s argument, reports the Review-Journal.

At the heart of the lawsuit is the NPRI’s two-year-old campaign to advise Clark County’s 17,000 teachers of the various hoops they have to jump through in order to quit their local teachers union.

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Teachers in the Las Vegas-area are only able to quit the Clark County Education Association – their local union – during a very brief time period late in the summer. If vacationing teachers forget to cancel their CCEA membership during that brief “drop window,” they are obligated to remain dues-paying union members until the next year.

That’s obviously why the CCEA restricts cancellations to that time of year.

What’s less obvious is why the district is working overtime to prevent employees from learning about their labor rights.

As NPRI officials note, the district allows teachers to receive email about legislative activities and union messages. Why are district officials so desirous to prevent anti-union information from reaching teachers?

It doesn’t make sense.

And it makes even less sense to use scarce financial resources on attorney fees to fight this information request.

Hopefully, the judge will determine that the public’s right to know is more important than teachers’ right to a spam-free inbox.