(C) Virginia Mercury This story was originally published by Virginia Mercury and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . A court fight to hold Richmond Public Schools to account shows strong journalism lives [1] ['More From Author', 'January', 'Bob Lewis'] Date: 2024-01-23 It was astonishing governmental arrogance by any measure. What legitimate grounds could Richmond Public Schools assert for withholding a report on an independent, third-party review of a deadly shooting at commencement ceremonies for Huguenot High School graduates last summer? The only reason I could imagine for denying public access to the findings of a probe into failures that led to the broad-daylight assassination of a fresh HHS graduate and his stepfather outside the Altria Theater last June 6 was to cover up damaging revelations. Five others were wounded in the attack. Of all the documents school officials might claim that the public had no right to see, RPS’s leaders picked one that explained how school and district personnel at varied levels made disastrous judgments and failed to share potentially lifesaving information. An estimated crowd of more than 3,000 people, awash in the joyful afterglow of seeing loved ones get their diplomas, was departing the theater when gunfire shattered the balmy, early evening tranquility. Shawn Jackson, 18, and Renzo Jackson, 36, lay fatally shot outside the theater. Screaming and terrified, people stampeded into adjacent Monroe Park and Virginia Commonwealth University’s campus. The mass shooting topped newscasts nationally. Even in Richmond, a city where gun violence is so commonplace that it leads local news broadcasts almost nightly, it shocked the conscience. During calendar years 2022 and 2023, a total of 27 mass shootings in Virginia left 43 people dead and 101 injured, according to the nonprofit, independent Gun Violence Archive. The GVA defines a mass shooting as an incident in which at least four victims are either killed or injured by gunfire, excluding the shooter. Thirteen suspects have been arrested in those attacks. Richmond and Norfolk tied for the most mass shootings in Virginia during those two years at five incidents apiece. In Norfolk, eight people died in mass shootings and 17 were injured, while six died and 20 were injured in Richmond. Guns take a particularly dreadful toll on teens who reflexively use them to settle scores, as allegedly happened at the HHS graduation. In 2023, individual shootings ended the lives of 34 Virginians between the ages of 12 and 17, according to GVA data. Again, the commonwealth’s capital was tied for the most alongside Norfolk and Newport News with four individual teen gun deaths each last year. When reporters at WTVR-TV (CBS6) and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, joined by government transparency advocate Joshua Stanfield, filed requests for the report under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, they were denied. The stated reason was attorney-client privilege, which shields discussions between lawyers and their clients on specific legal matters. After RPS’s refusal was challenged Jan. 12 in Richmond Circuit Court, Judge Reilly Marchant swatted the school district’s specious argument aside in his Jan. 16 order that the 32-page document — with a few sentences he felt contained potentially privileged information redacted — be released by the next day. Reporter Tyler Layne of WTVR said he repeatedly tried to convince a clerk for the school board that the board should reconsider its decision to deny his FOIA request. That went nowhere, so he sued. “The reason we took the school board to court is because we believe the public deserves to know. That’s behind everything I do,” he said in an interview Friday. When the document was released, it was immediately clear why the district tried to bury it. The slain student had some very dangerous enemies at school who were unambiguous about their malignant intentions toward him. It was so serious that Shawn Jackson was designated as a homebound student, a step taken to distance him from those who wanted him dead. In page after page, the report shows in dismaying detail how Jackson’s mother’s clear, numerous and even desperate warnings to school staff and administrators failed to initiate protective actions by the district. One of the more alarming portions of the report is an email chronology that begins in June 2022 with the slain student’s mother, Tameeka Smith, telling an HHS counselor, the school principal at the time and RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras that her family’s home had been “shot up” by her son’s enemies from Huguenot. Last January, she emailed the counselor asking if her son could be isolated when he took a test at HHS, reminding school officials that her son was homebound because of “ongoing mental health issues as well as the threat of neighborhood violence stemming from his association with another student that was involved in a crime.” Two days later, when she learned to her horror that her son wasn’t isolated, she emailed the counselor again, writing: “He was in the class with people who literally tried to kill him.” That should have set off loud alarm sirens. Some school personnel knew of the danger Shawn Jackson faced from his adversaries, the report said. Yet somehow — in breach of the district’s own written threat assessment protocols — the homebound student was allowed to participate in the commencement ceremony without the required authorization of the principal at the time. All of these damning details would have remained unknown to the public, but for local journalists’ uncommon and brave decision to force the issue to court. Megan Rhyne, the executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, said that governmental entities, emboldened by the continuing financial enfeeblement of news organizations, are more willing to thumb their noses at FOIA requests, even when there is an obvious duty to inform the public. Even in cases as egregious as the RPS matter, journalists have to weigh the requisite investment of money and time necessary to take the matter to court. The University of Virginia, like RPS, is citing attorney-client privilege to withhold a report into the point-blank shooting deaths of three of the school’s football players aboard a bus returning from a Washington, D.C., field trip in November 2022. That was also national front-page news that shocked the world of intercollegiate sports. “As the newspaper industry started shrinking — not just Virginia but all over — the number of cases being brought by media outlets to enforce public records and public meetings laws has shrunk drastically with it,” Rhyne said. However, she said she has seen an increase in the number of individual journalists and ordinary people who consider public information to be indeed public, who are suing in General District courts to access information to which state law says they’re entitled. Layne, who has been actively on the beat reporting on-camera at CBS6 for barely two years, is like a terrier when he sinks his teeth into a public accountability story. He knows how to use FOIA laws and is unafraid to escalate a matter to court if he feels the government is wrongly denying access. Last year, when the City of Richmond denied his FOIA request for documents about a tree known to be decayed and dangerous that later fell on a city worker in a city park and killed him, he sued in Richmond General District Court. The city released the information a day before the case was to be tried. Layne may have fewer fellow journalists guarding the ramparts with him these days, but he’s not alone in asserting rights available to every citizen to pry the lid of secrecy off government information and expose the rot public officials try to conceal. That’s as it should be. Freedom of information isn’t just for journalism. It’s for you. 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