Editorial: Education Department Emails Are Troubling

Once again, the devil is in the emails.

The Public Education Department went above and beyond to compile lists of public school teachers and their work email addresses and then sort the nonunion teachers in response to a verbal request by Jay McCleskey, a political consultant to Gov. Susana Martinez.

PED spokesman Larry Behrens then used his personal email account to send the lists to McCleskey.

The emails also went to several high-ranking state officials — including the governor’s chief of staff, Keith Gardner— at their personal email accounts or email addresses with the governor’s Susana PAC. Education Secretary-designate Hanna Skandera forwarded a copy she received to Martinez at susana2010.com.

While Behrens admits he messed up by not using his government email account for state business, it is also troubling that he sent the information to other state officials at nongovernment email addresses.

All this raises the question of an inside political job. Two Democratic legislators are asking the attorney general to look into whether PED broke the law by using state resources for political purposes.

Behrens’ May 2 email says “we have no master list of all teacher e-mails so IT went through websites school by school and copied the publicly available staff e-mails.” He said he then “filtered the addresses” to come up with a list of teachers in nonunion districts in an effort to compile the requested list of nonunion school teachers. His email ends with, “There are over 20,000 teachers in N.M.” So it would appear this response must have taken considerable public employee time and effort.

McCleskey had been seeking a way to contact nonunion teachers in New Mexico. PED denied a subsequent records request request by a McCleskey employee for home addresses of licensed teachers.

While state agencies are not required to compile information in response to records requests, they aren’t barred from doing so. Which begs the question, is this PED’s standard operating procedure? The Democratic-leaning Independent Source PAC, which has been critical of the governor, says it never has such luck with its records requests.

The question of a state agency doing the bidding of a political group on the taxpayers’ dime is troubling. If that’s what happened, it should have no place in the Martinez administration, which has pledged transparency and the rooting out of corruption and abuse.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.