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The Portland School Board will hold a special meeting Friday to consider authorizing an inquiry into the use of Signal by Portland Public Schools administrators.
The resolution comes in response to a Nov. 6 WW story that described screenshots from multiple sources showing that district leaders, including Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong, engaged in conversations about district business on Signal, a third-party messaging app.
“The Board of Education has reviewed a news report alleging that some PPS employees have used the Signal messaging application to communicate about PPS business,” the resolution reads. “It is in the best interest of PPS to (1) understand whether, how, and why Signal was used by PPS employees; and (2) determine whether any Signal messages sent or received by PPS employees were public records and, if so, whether they are preserved within the application or can otherwise be recovered.”
School Board Chair Eddie Wang introduced the resolution, and a source familiar with the matter said it has the support of several board members.
Signal, an encrypted text-messaging platform, stores little user data. A PPS spokesperson confirmed that it is not a district-approved platform for conducting official PPS communications. Some of the screenshots WW reviewed also Armstrong and leaders at times used Signal’s “disappearing messages” feature, which allows users to set a time frame after which messages are deleted. (WW is not sharing the specific contents of messages to protect the confidentiality of sources.)
The School Board’s resolution, if approved, would authorize PPS general counsel to work with outside legal counsel to seek facts on three points, before reporting back to the School Board. First, counsel would be authorized to determine if PPS management employees were using Signal or similar applications to communicate about “matters relating to PPS, including the topics and purposes of such communications.”
It would also ask counsel to determine if any PPS employees retained information transmitted through Signal, and about if that information could be collected and preserved in accordance with public records law. The third piece of the scope would allow counsel to collect information on other matters “that relate to compliance with PPS policies and applicable law,” in order to potentially tighten district rules.
“In light of the proliferation of messaging applications, it is in the best interest of PPS for the PPS Board and administration to consider whether any changes to PPS policies and administrative guidance are advisable to provide guidance to PPS employees,” the resolution reads in part.
The resolution also offers the cavaet that the use of non-PPS approved messaging platforms by an employee would, “for some purposes…not necessarily violate PPS policy or state law.” Indeed, some public records experts WW spoke to said that legal regulations around public records law are murky in this scenario. Whether someone is in violation of records retention laws depends on the contents of the records, and regulations around digital communications are still developing in the state.
