A Howard County Board of Education member with a history of litigation against the board told Columbia Patch he will file a lawsuit alleging what he describes as the improper destruction of records, including email.

At issue, according to board member Allen Dyer, is that school board records, including email, are being destroyed even though the board has not filed paperwork required under Maryland law.

Mark Blom, attorney for the Howard County school system, said Dyer is wrong and the handling of all records is "completely in compliance with the law."

Maryland law requires governmental bodies to provide an inventory of their records and a schedule for when certain records will be sent to the state archives.

Dyer said he was alarmed by an Oct. 1 memo sent to the board by the school system's technology officer. The memo, a copy of which Dyer provided to Columbia Patch, says that emails can be deleted from accounts and that deleted emails are subsequently expunged from the computer system after three or four days.

The memo also notes that backups of email records are kept for 30 days before being written over.

"That memo was finally documentation of an existing practice acknowledging that there's no email archiving and that essentially everyone has the ability to destroy emails in their inbox or outbox at any time without any approval procedure," said Dyer, a lawyer who lives in Ellicott City.

"There's no archiving. That to me is very disturbing," he said. "They're public records, and without preserving the public record you attack the integrity, the legitimacy of government. We don't operate on a whim as government officials. We operate according to rules. We are obligated to document what we do, when we do it and to maintain records."

Dyer sent a cease-and-desist letter to the school system's technology officer on Oct. 4, telling him not to destroy any more records and to recover any records that had previously been removed.

Dyer then sent a letter Oct. 21 to Blom, the school system's attorney, notifying him that a lawsuit will be filed in Howard County Circuit Court. Dyer said the suit could come as soon as Monday (Oct. 25).

Dyer also asked for all backups of records to be preserved and not written over and for immediate backups to be made of a variety of records, including all email, data files, databases, network logs, recorded conversations and meetings, and also any paper records.

Blom depicted the lawsuit as unnecessary.

"We have reviewed this issue. We've given it a legal review, and we've also given it a review from our auditors and our independent auditor and determined that Mr. Dyer is wrong," Blom said.

"We have a schedule that specifies the retention and disposal of documents. That schedule has a list of documents that have to be kept forever, and also documents that can be destroyed. That schedule was adopted in accordance with law and has been approved by the state of Maryland," he said.

 The original memo from the school system's technology officer, the letter from Dyer to the technology officer and the letter from Dyer to the school system's attorney can be viewed on this page.

Though e-mails are only retained in the backup files for 30 days, "what e-mail is retained is up to the individual decision of the sender or the recipient and whether they decided to retain it," Blom said. "Some of them may be available if the individual decided to retain them, but the automatic retention is 30 days."

That time limit is due to limits on electronic storage, he said. "It's not a decision made that we didn't want to keep them longer, but it's simply the capacity of the school board's electronic computer system."

If the school system's technology department were to recommend expanding the storage capacity, and if the costs were minor, then "maybe it'd be worth it," Blom said. 

In the meantime, a committee of area residents and members of parent-teacher associations will be reviewing the school system's policies and practices on records retention and recommending whether any changes should be made, he said. 

"So we would really hope that Mr. Dyer would respect the committee process and let that develop before he goes on and incurs a cost to the taxpayers," Blom said.

Dyer had mounted multiple bids for a seat on the school board before being elected in 2008. This is not the first time Dyer has sought to take legal action against the Howard County school board on which he serves. Last year, the Maryland State Board of Education dismissed two cases he filed.

One, concerning the county board's policies on copyrights and royalties and the board's authority to keep legal memos from being published, was dismissed because the Maryland state board said it did not have jurisdiction since the matter did not involve education laws or regulations.

The other, concerning county board funding of transportation for nonpublic school students, was also dismissed. The Maryland state board said Dyer did not have the legal standing necessary to bring the case forward.

Before Dyer was on the board, he had previously sued the county school board alleging violations of open-meetings laws. A judge ruled that Dyer did not have legal standing in that case to make a legal complaint. 

Dyer said this Howard County Circuit Court case will be different. "I don't see how they could deny me standing," he said.

"I'm a board member; board members are individually liable," Dyer said. "At this point, my tail is on the line. I'm the one that goes to jail. That gives me standing. I should be sent to jail if I don't protect the public records."