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Asked and Answered

Employment documents of officials

June 14, 2009

Question

Can I request under the Public Records Act the resume and application for employment of a school district Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent. I have an interest only in the prior employment history and will assume the private data (address etc). will be blocked out. My interpretation of 6254(c) is that prior work history is public record.

Answer

Under section 6254(c) of the California Public Records Act, certain personnel files are protected from disclosure under the personal privacy exemption.However, with respect to public employees such as a school district superintendent and assistant superintendent, the kind of information that would be included in a resume, curriculum vitae or job application to demonstrate a person’s fitness for his or her job, in terms of education, training, or work experience, is not a matter of personal privacy.

The California Court of Appeal has held in Eskaton Monterey Hospital v. Myers, 134 Cal. App. 3d 788, 794 (1982) that”information as to the education, training, experience, awards, previous positions and publications of the (employee) . . . is routinely presented in both professional and social settings, is relatively innocuous and implicates no applicable privacy or public policy exemption.”As a result, you should be able to obtain the information you seek. However, your right to do so (particularly, with respect to the job applications) is not unequivocal.

The governing body might raise an argument under Wilson v. Superior Court, 51 Cal. App. 4th 1136(1997)that the job applications are protected from disclosure under the deliberative process exemption (section 6255 of the California Public Records Act) on the grounds that the job applications are pre-decisional documents whose purpose is to aid the School District in selecting appointees.Depending on the information sought in the job applications, the applications may contain information protected by the constitutional right of privacy.

Asked & Answered posts should not be relied on as legal advice, and FAC makes no guarantees about their completeness or accuracy. All posts carry a date of publication that readers should take note of in assessing their usefulness, given that laws and interpretations of them may change over time. Posts predating Jan. 1, 2023, that discuss the California Public Records Act may contain statute numbers no longer in use. Please see this page for a table showing how the California Public Records Act has been renumbered.