Maryland School Superintendent State-Issued Phone set to auto-delete texts after 30 days
(WBFF) — Project Baltimore continues to learn more about the 98 text messages deleted from the State Superintendent of Schools' state-issued cell phone. And the discoveries are leading some to say Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury should consider resigning.
“Most people would take a look at this circumstance and say it's a cover-up,” said Adam Andrzejewski, the founder of Openthebooks.com, a non-partisan government watchdog group.
Andrzejewski’s group, last year, filed 50,000 public records requests, across all 50 states, concerning how your tax dollars are spent.
Andrzejewski is a public records expert, but he’s never seen anything like this. Weeks ago, Project Baltimore received a log of 98 text messages, each one deleted, from the taxpayer-funded cell phone of Superintendent Choudhury. And what Project Baltimore just learned about these deleted text messages, Andrzejewski says, is a big problem.
“The superintendent should consider resigning his position,” Andrzejewski told Project Baltimore.
On Monday, The State Board of Education issued a statement on its website concerning the text messages. The reason they’re gone is because the superintendent’s cell phone was set to automatically delete text messages after just 30 days.
“It's all his texts. It's not just your 98 texts. It's every text. It's all the text that he's using to conduct state business,” said Andrzejewski.
That’s one problem. Here’s another. Project Baltimore filed the initial public records request on April 10. At that time, according to the metadata of the 98 text messages, there were 12 texts that were not yet 30 days old. According to state law, as soon as the public records request was filed, those documents should have been preserved. But they were not. Those 12 text messages were also deleted.
That problem is addressed in the statement, “The State Board recognizes that text messages cannot be deliberately deleted after they are requested as part of a PIA request.”
“This needs to be investigated immediately as record concealment or destruction of the public record,” said Andrzejewski. “Those records belong to the people.”
Project Baltimore, a few weeks ago, received the metadata for the 98 text messages - sent or received by the Superintendent. We filed a public records request for them on April 10 because they could further shed light on why the state changed how it reports test scores of low-performing schools, which made far less information about those school available to taxpayers and parents. That decision was made after Fox45 News broke the story that 23 schools in Baltimore City had zero students, among those tested, score proficient in math in 2022.
ALSO READ | State School Superintendent's text messages deleted, potential violation of Maryland law
In the statement, the Board of Education broke down Choudhury’s text messages this way. Two were to administrative employees. Three were personal numbers. Four were with the Director of the Center for School Safety. Twenty-four were with another public official’s personal number. And 62, we’re told, were spam.
“The people in Maryland own those records,” explained Andrzejewski. “They paid for the creation of those records, and they need to be able to see those records.”
According to Maryland law, every government agency, at least once every two years, must review its document retention policy, which guides public officials on what records should be preserved and for how long. But the State Department of Education’s policy has not been updated since 2006. The last time MSDE’s record retention policy was updated was 17 years ago. To put that into perspective, the iPhone had not yet been invented.
MSDE’s policy doesn’t even mention text messages. As a result of Fox45’s reporting, the board said it will work with the state archives “to determine how best to address text messages moving forward.” But Andrzejewski said, it doesn’t matter. Because the superintendent was using a taxpayer-funded cell phone to conduct taxpayer-funded business. He says those messages should not have been deleted.
ALSO READ | 23 Baltimore schools have zero students proficient in math, per state test results
“He didn't want to turn over information about how he was making decisions on what student test scores to post in the worst performing schools,” Andrzejewski told Project Baltimore. “The victim here are students trapped in those failing schools and their families.”
If there were to be an investigation into the State Superintendent’s deleted text messages, it would most likely come from the Attorney General’s office. When we asked the AG’s office for a comment, we received a reply that simply said, “The Attorney’s General Office neither confirms nor denies existence of investigations.”
