Donley: Critical Letters About Price Lab Weren't Withheld From Regents

Bob Donley, the executive director of the Iowa Board of Regents, said letters criticizing plans to close at were not withheld from regent board members tasked with voting on the matter.

Donley said the regents received hundreds of correspondences from concerned faculty, teachers, students, parents and others about plans to close the school that serves as a training lab for teachers and a K-12 school for about 350 students. Regents approved the closure effective in June earlier this month.

"I have had conversations with all of the regents about numerous correspondences," Donley said.

Records obtained by Patch through an open records request were apparently not being forwarded to the regents, and at least one in which Donley responds "NO" when asked if it should be sent to the regents. The regent office did not respond to an email and during a phone conversation on Monday, the day before the article ran, opted not to respond to the matter at that time.

Donley said the regents notified him that many of the emails the board office was forwarding were duplicates of messages they were receiving independently.

"Many of these individuals were communicating directly with the regents," Donley said. Others, he said, had clearly been copy and pasted from other letters.

The information provided in response to the records request, which also named Regent President Craig Lang and Regent President Pro Tem Bruce Rastetter, included only a handful of traces of regents getting letters, and no written responses to people writing in.

Donley said he and individual regents spoke to a number of people by phone but the letters were too numerous to respond.

"We treated every one of them with the care that we could," Donley said.

Regent Bob Downer said this morning that he received hundreds of letters about Price Lab and felt he had received all of the view points covered although he couldn't say specifically if he had received each and every email correspondence sent in.