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Voice of San Diego has filed for a temporary restraining order to halt San Diego Unified School District’s destruction of email archives over a year old that’s set to begin June 1.
A hearing is scheduled for Friday, June 1, at 2:30 p.m.
On May 9, NBC 7 reported that the district, after a year of considering the issue, would delete all old emails beginning Friday. Last year, district leaders had decided to delete all emails older than six months without even consulting trustees on the Board of Education. But pushback from journalists and the community made them reconsider.
“Now that employee prep is nearly complete the servers will not store email older than a year effective June 1,” Maureen Magee, a spokesperson for the San Diego Unified School District, told NBC 7.
District officials said last year that deleting old emails will save money and alleviate the burden of public records requests. But officials still have not clearly explained the costs at stake. The district uses free cloud-based email systems. Last year, the district claimed that it spends millions of dollars storing emails on servers, but it turned out that estimate included other non-email storage costs.
Voice of San Diego has several long-standing public records requests pending with the district, and it is unclear whether responsive records will be deleted according to the plan.
“VOICE will have no opportunity to reverse the destruction of these records unless the Court intervenes in the action now,” reads our petition to the court.