Illegal Campaign Activity at Provo School District
- Better Bond Volunteers
- Oct 30, 2019
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 31, 2019
Many people have remarked to us that they feel like the school district has only been giving one side of the story concerning the bond. By law, the District must remain an impartial entity during the bond process. Utah Code prohibits them from using any public resources, including employee time, for political purposes like influencing bond elections. They can only provide information, and they must not encourage citizens or staff to vote or act one way or another.
In August, a Provo elementary school principal sent an email to their school’s community council, which includes teachers, parents, and staff, encouraging them to volunteer with the pro-bond PIC (Political Issues Committee). This was a clear violation of state laws regarding using public resources to promote the bond. When we received a copy of this email we reported it to the State elections office. This led to a “slap on the wrist” email from the state and a promise from Provo School District to be more careful in the future.
As a follow up, a GRAMA request was also submitted to the District for more information about the District’s pro-bond activity. This was done primarily to confirm that the district was complying with the instruction from the state Elections office, and to remind them that we as citizens expected them to honor the public trust and follow the rules during this bond process.
The individual that made the GRAMA request reports: “ I personally never expected much to come from this request. When the records were ready for delivery and payment was required (according to Utah law, no complaints about that) the District official said something to the effect of ‘You know, we’ve stopped using our emails for pro-bond activities. Everything is okay now so if you just cancel the request I can save you some money.’ Why would they encourage us to not take the files they had already prepared? By law we have to pay for the District’s time on large requests, and that time had already been spent. Wouldn’t they have wanted payment to cover their expenses?”
The documents from the GRAMA request reveal a wide range of unethical and potentially criminal behavior originating at the highest levels of Provo School District’s administration. In part, these emails show a large amount of employee time spent directly in support of pro bond PIC, instructions from Superintendent Keith Rittel to every senior staff and every principal in the district requiring participation with the PIC, directions from those principals to teachers and staff echoing those instructions to support the bond, senior staff directly soliciting PIC donations from contractors in return for positive feedback to the school board, and offering instructions to those contractors on how to donate without leaving an audit trail.
These are serious, and even criminal, offenses that deserve to be taken seriously. We are including a few of the email exchanges below so you can see them yourself. To maintain privacy, we have removed many of the names and personal details of employees and contractors.
#1 The superintendent directs all Principals and other senior District officials to “...actively (not passively)...” support the bond. He asks the principals to illegally contact parents about participating with the pro-bond PIC. He even tells them that he will be taking attendance at these political committee meetings.
#2 Principal instructs staff to publicly endorse the bond on the pro bond PIC website. “It’s important as employees of Provo District we show support for this bond.” A teacher who received this email made a post from the school instagram page encouraging parents to support the bond, which was later removed. It is likely that other Principals sent similar messages to their teachers and staff.
#3 District officials aggressively encouraged contractors and architects to donate to the the pro-bond efforts. It is unacceptable, and illegal, for a District official with significant influence over the selection of contractors to use their official email and title to solicit political donations. These companies have a financial incentive to keep their clients happy and it is a complete misuse of power and influence to approach them in this way. The district officials instructed them to donate in ways that would avoid detection in an audit, encouraging them to donate in a way that would be difficult to trace. The district official promised to let the board know about their forthcoming PIC contribution.
#4 When one of the contractors had difficulty making a payment through the pro-bond site, they were instructed to send a check directly to the district office, directed to another senior staff member.
#5 A district official coordinating the design and printing of PIC materials through a district contractor. Every single “Vote Yes” sign, billboard, and bumper sticker distributed throughout the city is a direct product of criminal misuse of public resources.
There are many more, including the superintendent and others designing and coordinating PIC materials production, more soliciting donations from contractors, district officials working on the pro-bond website, staff discussing who will have oversight of different aspects of the PIC, and other violations.
The GRAMA request was narrow in scope, it covered only a few days and a few key words. These are only the most alarming of emails. There are many more showing a pattern of staff working directly for the PIC in a blatant disregard for the law.
We filed a report with the Provo Police Department several weeks ago outlining our findings and they found the claims credible enough to refer the investigation to the Utah Attorney General’s office. We have just recently confirmed that Provo School District will soon be the subject of a full investigation by the AG’s office, who oversee the Special Investigations and Public Corruptions Unit, which will surely uncover much more widespread misuse of public resources. However, their process will take months, and we felt that Provo voters had the right to know now.
Some have questioned why educators who oppose the bond have wished to remain unidentified. As you can see, their concerns about supervisors and district leadership punishing them for their views seems completely justified. Teachers and staff who believe that the tax burden will be too great on many families, or that Dixon Middle school should not be moved from its current neighborhood should never fear for their careers for expressing their political views.
Whether you oppose or support the bond, contact your board member and tell them you do not support this unethical behavior from district leadership.These issues of public trust, accountability, mistreatment of our many wonderful educators and staff go beyond the bond.
We deserve better.
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS - added 10pm on 10/30/19
A few clarifying points about the post:
The dates in the emails are in the day/month/year format. The emails are almost all from August.
The emails that refer to avoiding audits do not appear to refer to avoiding state election disclosure laws, as the pro bond PIC has included the in kind donations solicited from the contractors in their filings.
Timing Soon after obtaining them we notified the State Elections office, overseen the Lieutenant Governor, we were in possession of these emails showing district resources being used in support of the PIC. The elections office told us that if what were said was true, they would be a criminal matter, and not am elections issue. They advised us that the proper course of action was to submit a police report. We followed that advice and submitted a 29 page summary including these and other emails to the Provo Police. The Provo PD soon notified us that to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest they were forwarding the case onto the office of the Utah Attorney General. We only received confirmation from the AG office within the last week that they believe the evidence merits a full investigation of the matter. We wish the investigation could be completed sooner, but were told it would not be done after the election was concluded. We felt that this information is serious enough that Provo's voters had a right to know before we voted, so we made the decision to publish the emails ourselves.
As per their directions, we never sent these emails to the elections office, and as far as we are aware, no one from the State Elections department or Lieutenant Governor's office has seen them. Claims that they have already been reviewed and addressed are false.
That was a cheap shot at our President. Shame on you. Here’s a story you news people wrote. So has this plan for this bond been in the making for years? Read it and make up your own mind.
https://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/central/provo/kaufusi-named-chairwoman-of-provo-school-board/article_be3c2b4f-fa02-530b-9c4e-00dca479ea95.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share
This is the typical “October Surprise,” which campaigns use to try to sink candidates and elections. Having covered several of these in my career as a journalist, I see it nothing expect dirty politics when this campaign uses murky photos and cites GRAMA and pejorative terms like “rampant illegal activity.” While the world likes to slam journalists right now, I am going to say that you anti bond folks are violating some basic ethical principles that us “enemies of the people” and all Americans should hold dear. 1. You get response from the district. That's only fair. 2. You tell us when you got this info and why you waited until now to publish. It appears to be timed t…
I, as a teacher, can report that in a faculty meeting we were directly told that we could not use paid time to support either side of this issue. Furthermore, in that meeting, we were not urged to vote either for or against the bond. The issues at hand were explained to us, but in no way were we instructed about which way to vote. That being said, I voted in favor of the bond. I have looked at all the reports and arguments and I have come to the conclusion that the bond is the best way to address these serious problems with our schools.
I was previously ignoring the talk about improper use of district resources because I figured it was a few lower-level employees here and there who didn't understand the law. But, this is different. This is a HUGE problem and I can't believe that anyone on any side is defending it. You have the email right there with the superintendent directing top-level employees (principals and others) that they needed to support the bond as a part of their job. If this doesn't matter to us as a community, then we might as well be done with campaigning laws altogether. This behavior is EXACTLY the type of thing that campaign laws are written to prevent against. You have employees being pushed into…