Posted on 08/17/23
| News Source: FOX45
Project Baltimore continues to learn more about the 98 text messages deleted from the State Superintendent of Schools' state-issued cell phone. And the discoveries are leading some to say Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury should consider resigning.
“Most people would take a look at this circumstance and say it's a cover-up,” said Adam Andrzejewski, the founder of Openthebooks.com, a non-partisan government watchdog group.
Andrzejewski’s group, last year, filed 50,000 public records requests, across all 50 states, concerning how your tax dollars are spent.
Andrzejewski is a public records expert, but he’s never seen anything like this. Weeks ago, Project Baltimore received a log of 98 text messages, each one deleted, from the taxpayer-funded cell phone of Superintendent Choudhury. And what Project Baltimore just learned about these deleted text messages, Andrzejewski says, is a big problem.
“The superintendent should consider resigning his position,” Andrzejewski told Project Baltimore.
On Monday, The State Board of Education issued a statement on its website concerning the text messages. The reason they’re gone is because the superintendent’s cell phone was set to automatically delete text messages after just 30 days.
“It's all his texts. It's not just your 98 texts. It's every text. It's all the text that he's using to conduct state business,” said Andrzejewski.
That’s one problem. Here’s another. Project Baltimore filed the initial public records request on April 10. At that time, according to the metadata of the 98 text messages, there were 12 texts that were not yet 30 days old. According to state law, as soon as the public records request was filed, those documents should have been preserved. But they were not. Those 12 text messages were also deleted.
That problem is addressed in the statement, “The State Board recognizes that text messages cannot be deliberately deleted after they are requested as part of a PIA request.”
“This needs to be investigated immediately as record concealment or destruction of the public record,” said Andrzejewski. “Those records belong to the people.”
Project Baltimore, a few weeks ago, received the metadata for the 98 text messages - sent or received by the Superintendent. We filed a public records request for them on April 10 because they could further shed light on why the state changed how it reports test scores of low-performing schools, which made far less information about those school available to taxpayers and parents. That decision was made after Fox45 News broke the story that 23 schools in Baltimore City had zero students, among those tested, score proficient in math in 2022.