By Brad Bumsted
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Capitol Reporter

HARRISBURG — Taxpayer-funded charter schools are a “cancer” on the state's open records law because they routinely ignore citizens' requests for records, the state's open records director said on Monday.

In response to a question at a Senate hearing, Terry Mutchler, the director, said charter schools are the No. 1 violator of the law.

“They ignore the citizens. They ignore us. They ignore the courts,” Mutchler told the Senate State Government Committee. “They just play by their own rules.”

Ron Sofo, the CEO and principal of City Charter High School, Downtown, laughed when he heard Mutchler's comments.

“We don't” ignore open records requests, Sofo said. “I can't speak for everyone else in the commonwealth, but we follow the law.”

Sofo said his charter school had no difficulty filling recent requests from the media for expense reports and travel accounts. He has been in charge of City Charter High School for about 10 months and in that time has not heard others in the charter school community talk about ignoring requests.

“I think painting everyone with a broad brush is inaccurate,” Sofo said. “Deal with the people who don't comply.”

Ken Kilpatrick, communications director for the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, said it's “the first we've heard of this accusation.”

“I've only become aware of it because of today's hearing,” Kilpatrick said. “I don't know it to be true.”

Charter schools are self-managed public schools, established to give schools more flexibility and to free them of state regulation. They must be approved by local school districts.

Charter schools are subject to the state's Right to Know Law, said Erik Arneson, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, sponsor of a bill aimed at revising the law. “Absolutely,” Arneson said when asked whether charters are covered. “Charter schools are public schools.”

The Senate needs to find out whether charter schools are “confused” or whether “there's an active disregard,” Arneson said.

Sen. Matt Smith, D-Mt. Lebanon, said he was surprised by the testimony. “It certainly is worthy of further examination. We need to find out whether that's the case and if so, why that's the case,” Smith said.

It's problematic if other public schools are following the law and charters aren't, Smith said.

Pileggi's bill would update a major revision on the Right to Know Law he pushed through the General Assembly in 2008.

“I believe it is a very good law,” Mutchler said. “My great hope today is we'll have to do minor surgery but not a transplant.”

Hundreds of thousands of records made available under the 2008 law would not have been available without it, Mutchler said.

Pileggi said his bill is just the beginning of the process to tweak the law.

The bill needs to address “the power agencies have assumed to simply ignore the law,” since Mutchler's office can't enforce its own rulings, said Kim de Bourbon, executive director of the Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition.

The bill would make campus police reports public record from the state-related universities — Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, Temple and Lincoln.

It will move forward with “recognition that we need to go further” in making records available at state-related universities, Arneson said.

The issue surfaced in 2011 with the arrest of child sex abuser Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State football defensive coach. Sandusky was convicted in 2012 and likely will spend the rest of his life in prison.

The bill allows agencies and local governments to charge higher rates for commercial open records requests and sets up a separate system, almost entirely within the Department of Corrections, to handle inmates' requests, Arneson said. About 30 percent of the Office of Open Records' requests come from inmates, Mutchler said.

While he agrees with Mutchler that the law was much improved in 2008, Pittsburgh lawyer David Strassburger, of Strassburger McKenna Gutnick & Gefsky, a Downtown firm that handles media issues, said there's a problem with a provision of the bill allowing agencies to appeal to court immediately — bypassing the Office of Open Records — if they determine the request is “unduly burdensome.”

If agencies take immediate appeals, “That would bring procedure to a screeching halt” in terms of getting government records, Strassburger said.