The Akron Education Association withdrew a lawsuit Tuesday it brought against the school district earlier this year accusing members of the Akron Board of Education of violating public records laws by editing video of a school board meeting.
The withdrawal of the suit, filed in Summit County’s Common Pleas Court, allows the union to investigate the school board’s capability to edit videos, AEA attorney Don Malarcik said in a statement, and refile the lawsuit at a later date, which Malarcik said he intends to do.
Superintendent Michael Robinson said in a deposition that the school board doesn’t have the capability to edit videos, Malarcik’s statement said, but technology employees at the district said the capability does exist and Robinson was made aware of it.
Still, the employees maintained they did not use the capability to cut some of the video from a January discussion about hiring outside tutors, as the AEA claimed happened.
Angela Carter, Robinson’s chief of staff, called the lawsuit “meritless” in her own statement and said it was dismissed ahead of a Sept. 11 hearing in which the district’s motion to dismiss would be heard. The dismissal came hours before AEA President Pat Shipe was scheduled to be deposed about the factual claims in the case, Carter’s statement said.
The lawsuit came after a controversial vote Jan. 8 to hire Varsity Tutors, using state funding, to tutor students. The AEA opposed the decision and filed an injunction to stop outside tutors from doing the work. The school board later rescinded its approval for the tutors.
But as part of its lawsuit, the AEA accused the school board of editing video of the meeting where the matter was first decided and deleting part of the conversation that took place before the initial vote.
District officials have denied making any edits to the video. In response to an open records request, a lawyer for the district said previously that APS does not record its board meetings.
“Rather, APS merely coordinates the live streaming of the Board meeting through YouTube,” an attorney, Stephen Funk, wrote. “The APS therefore does not have any video recordings of the Board meeting at all.”
Instead, he wrote, the livestream of each meeting is uploaded to YouTube in real time, then YouTube archives the video on its website.
An ‘unfortunate’ glitch
In a message sent Jan. 18, Ryan Rittenhouse, who said he was the primary person responsible for running and maintaining the school district’s YouTube channel, wrote that a buffering issue caused a jump in the official record and it was not the board’s policy to edit livestreams.
He said in an email to a spokesperson, Mark Williamson, that the missing time in the recording was caused by a “‘perfect storm’ of technology issues” that happened more than two hours into the meeting. When the video appeared “to ‘jump’ over a real-world interaction between board members, the streaming signal we were sending to YouTube had a ‘buffering’ issue,” he wrote.
“It is unfortunate that this ‘glitch’ occurred at approximately the same time as the interaction of the board members was occurring in the real world,” he wrote. “We believe that it is due to this glitch that this interaction is now missing from the archived livestream.”
The interaction in question involved board members Rene Molenaur and Barbara Sykes. In the archived video, Molenaur’s comments cut off mid-sentence.
Rittenhouse said in his statement that “it is our policy not to edit livestreams” and there are “no alternate versions, no other back-ups, hard copies, or edits that exist.”
Questioning the superintendent’s credibility
Robinson, in a letter to Shipe, called her accusation that the video had been altered “both reckless and inaccurate.”
In Carter’s message, the school district again pushed back on the accusation that board members intentionally deleted 40 seconds from a live-streamed video. The suit, she wrote, “wrongfully attacked” the reputations of school board members, who were named in the lawsuit, and “caused the school district to needlessly incur the time” and expense of defending the suit.
Malarcik said the dismissal is a common practice when new facts are uncovered, and he intends to refile the lawsuit within the year, once the AEA has investigated two claims.
First, the conflicting testimonies between Robinson and technology employees require a digital forensic expert, Malarcik said. Second, a private consulting company that appears on Robinson’s resume from 2018 to 2021 is suspect, Malarcik said — Robinson said during his deposition that he worked with no pay but testified that he could not recall the name of anyone who could verify the employment claim.
“Dr. Robinson’s credibility is central to the lawsuit,” he wrote.
Robinson worked at Burns/Van Fleet as a senior executive beginning in March 2020, according to his resume. Stuart Berger, the CEO of Burns/Van Fleet, created a transition report for APS this spring.
Berger told Signal Akron previously Robinson was a consultant, but the right project for him never came about. While Robinson may have contributed to the firm, Berger said, he didn’t consider Robinson an employee.
“I know he was never paid,” Berger said.
Malarcik, in his statement, said the voluntary dismissal was not a finding in favor of the administration.
“In fact, the depositions further bolstered our belief that the video was altered and edited illegally,” he wrote. “We look forward to refiling this important lawsuit once these new issues are fully investigated.”
