VA Governor Denies Requests To Make Emails To School Tip Line Public

VIRGINIA — Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office is refusing to make public the emails sent to a tip line launched last month after he encouraged parents to report on schools and teachers when they feel their "fundamental rights are being violated."

Shortly after the governor announced the tip line on Jan. 24, news organizations and individuals sought copies of emails sent to the education tip line, under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

“The requested records are being entirely withheld pursuant to Section 2.2-3705 as working papers and correspondence of the Office of the Governor,” the governor’s office said in response to the requests, according to news organizations that filed FOIA requests.

Working papers for certain officials in state government are exempt from the state’s FOIA law.

"The email address that is made available to all Virginians to give us feedback is part of our constituent services. This is an important part of listening to Virginians, and the big part of why I ran was to listen to Virginians, to listen to parents, to teachers, to everybody," Youngkin told reporters during a visit to Alexandria Thursday.

"The way constituent services works is that the letters and phone calls and emails all come into constituent services and our team responds as needed to them. It's confidential," Youngkin said.

Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, told InsideNoVa that there is no requirement for the messages emailed to the tip line to be withheld and said they could be released with names and email addresses redacted.

“I think the response was totally predictable, but I also think the response is tone-deaf. This is an issue of intense interest for the public,” she said. “The office is making a choice to keep this information from the public, creating even more questions about what the purpose of this tip line is or what the governor plans to do with the information collected.”

Margaret Thornton, a Virginia native and a post-doctoral scholar at Princeton University whose research focuses on segregation in schools, filed a FOIA request on Jan. 26 to obtain the emails after she learned about the email address.

SEE ALSO: Youngkin Asks For Reports On 'Divisive' Schools Via Email Address

The Youngkin administration “claimed that they were for transparency,” Thornton told the Virginian-Pilot.

“And this is an opportunity to be transparent about our schools and they are choosing secrecy. I find that very disappointing and likely very harmful to the children of the Commonwealth,” Thornton told the newspaper.

Thornton, a high school teacher in Virginia for five years, said she sympathizes with her friends who are teachers and have expressed their own concerns about the tip line.

In response to Thornton tweeting that her request had been denied, Sen. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, said this is not how the state's Freedom of Information Act works.

“If the governor wants to set up a tip line to report teachers who mention Black history, he shouldn’t be hiding what he ‘finds,'" Lucas tweeted Wednesday.

The first executive order issued by Youngkin after getting sworn in as governor on Jan. 15 was the banning of the use of critical race theory or related "inherently divisive concepts" in the state's public schools.

In a Jan. 24 appearance on the show of conservative radio host John Fredericks, who was Donald Trump's Virginia presidential campaign chairman in 2016 and 2020, Youngkin encouraged Virginia residents to send an email to helpeducation@governor.virginia.gov if they are concerned about practices inside their local schools and what is being taught by teachers.

"We're going to make sure that we catalog it all, and it gives a great insight of what's happening at the school level and that gives us further, further ability to make sure that we're rooting it out," Youngkin said.

On Thursday, Youngkin defended his office's decision not to release the emails in response to FOIA requests.

"We do not report on anything from constituent services. It would be inappropriate to comment on anything in the content," he said. "I think this is a very important part of our listening. It makes me a better governor when I hear from all Virginians because it helps inform me on what's on people's minds."