'Departing NDA' For Hinsdale D86 Board Members Pushed

HINSDALE, IL – The Hinsdale High School District 86 board last week enacted another measure to keep its information out of the public's hands.

Under the new policy enacted last week, board members should ensure that they are not saving the district's documents to their personal devices. It did not give parameters for which records are covered.

In February, members of a board committee discussed the possibility of a nondisclosure agreement that the district would require board members who are leaving to sign. Member Peggy James referred to it as a "departing NDA."

Members Heather Kartsounes and Jeff Waters agreed on the idea.

"I would like to have this before the next board turns over," Kartsounes said, referring to the April 1 election.

The nondisclosure agreement was not included in the policy that the board approved last week.

Committee members said that any violating board member may suffer a loss of network privileges, face disciplinary action, receive a board censure or be subject to "appropriate" legal action.

Waters wanted to include former board members under the threat of legal action. The others agreed.

Kartsounes said the goal was to keep board members from having "shadow records."

"It protects district information better," she said.

Added Waters, "And it protects board members from ... opening themselves up to liability risk and perhaps incarceration, depending on what they did."

Asked about nondisclosure agreements Tuesday, the district's spokesman, Alex Mayster, told Patch in an email, "While District 86 takes board member confidentiality extremely seriously, we do not ask our board members to sign departing non-disclosure agreements."

In early May, members James, Kartsounes, Abed Rahman and Terri Walker are set to leave the board.

At an election forum last week, three of the six school board candidates – Mary Satchwell, Baron Leacock and Liz Mitha – said they would not sign a nondisclosure agreement. Leacock said he was an attorney, so there were qualifications to his answer.

Candidates Bobby Fischer, Andrew Catton and Warren Ali said they would sign it.

A year ago, Patch published emails that were written by Kay Gallo when she was a board member. In those messages, she criticized board President Catherine Greenspon's leadership.

The emails that Patch obtained contained redactions for information about a student's family and employees.

District 86 asked Patch not to publish the emails, which the district previously declined to release upon request.

"We cannot urge you strongly enough not to publish these emails," the district's spokesman, Alex Mayster, said in an email at the time. "It is deeply disappointing to see so many false, misleading, and inflammatory claims by a Board member."

He also said the redactions would not be enough to protect the family or staff members mentioned in them.

After they resigned as board members in fall 2023, both Gallo and Debbie Levinthal were warned by the district's then-law firm, Robbins Schwartz, not to release information that officials deemed confidential. Both left objecting to Greenspon's leadership.

A few months after Patch's story on the emails, the board enacted a policy that required departing board members to certify that they had deleted or destroyed all personal copies of the district's public records.