Lyons Township High Won't Reveal Communications Plan

LA GRANGE, IL – Lyons Township High School this week decided to keep under wraps its 2-year-old communications plan that prepared for the expected controversy over a land deal.

During a November 2022 closed meeting, Superintendent Brian Waterman referred to the plan from The Donovan Group, a public relations firm.

This was about a week before the school announced its desire to sell its 70 acres in Willow Springs.

Through a public records request last week, Patch sought the public relations firm's plan.

On Monday, the school denied the request, citing the exception for preliminary drafts and recommendations under the Freedom of Information Act.

In an interview Thursday, John Kraft, co-founder of the downstate Edgar County Watchdogs, said such a document is a matter of public record as long as it is a final product from a firm that the school hired.

Under its contract with the school, Donovan was paid $48,000.

The high school has used the preliminary drafts exception before.

Last March, Patch received information that then-board President Dawn Aubert was planning to resign. So Patch filed a public records request for any correspondence about it.

The school waited until after spring break to announce to the public that Aubert was resigning, effective immediately.

In response to the records request, the school provided Patch with the formal statement on Aubert's resignation.

But the school indicated it was keeping another document secret, perhaps an earlier communication from Aubert about her plan. The school cited the preliminary drafts exception.

In an online piece, the Chicago-based Ancel Glink law firm, which has many government clients, said the exemption is intended "to protect and permit the free expression of ideas in all sorts of reports prepared at all levels of local government."

In the case with Aubert, her decision to resign was not related to school business.

Kraft, the downstate watchdog, said correspondence about a board member's resignation would not fall under the exception for preliminary drafts. If it did, he said, a lot of government's communications would be exempt.

He said his group has a strategy for when public bodies wrongly use the exception.

"We'll sue them for it," he said.

Patch wrote a story Thursday about how the public relations firm encouraged the school board to double down on its secrecy over the land sale.