Employment documents of officials

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.