At 5:55pm yesterday, after our weekly print issue went to press, look what showed up in my email inbox. It’s a letter from Michael J. Looby, legal counsel to the Buffalo School District. Nice of him to stay in touch.

Attached are those highly sensitive financial disclosure papers that I requested on Monday, April 20, and was allowed to see, but not copy on Thursday, April 23.

Is it a coincidence that Looby responded just a few hours after receiving this Show Cause Order?

“Campaigns report required information in eclectic ways,” he writes, “not necessarily using a standardized form. Accordingly, until seeing the actual filings, it is not possible to ascertain if a given report might contain information which we are prohibited from transmitting, or which is statutorily exempt.”

Translation: It took the legal staff of the BPS nine days to reach the same conclusion I came to in half an hour last Thursday—that there were no Social Security numbers included in the 24 pages that constitute the candidates’ financial statements.

Looby then followed up with an email to me at 6:36pm yesterday, asking me to forward the attachment to another petitioner named in the Show Cause Order. It’s the same 24 pages of documents with a different cover letter, asking me again to remit $6.00 for the PDF. So, looks like I’m up to $12 in debt to the Buffalo Board of Education for essentially the same information.

At this rate, he could just fill up my email inbox with the same documents, over and over, until my bill equals any shortfall in next year’s school budget.

Read it and weep, folks. Today’s the deadline for candidates to file their April 30 updated financial disclosures. Prediction: The incumbents drop theirs off at the William Street Post Office at 11:59pm tonight. They will arrive at City Hall on Saturday. On Monday, the BPS legal cousel will begin the laborious task of scouring them for SS numbers. The school board election will take place on Tuesday, so no one will know in time just how much money was poured into the attempt to elect the incumbents to their $5,000/year positions.

Unless, of course, the 11am court date Monday compels them to release this clearly public information in an immediate manner.

Click here for a copy of the three-page report from the State Education Department to Buffalo School District General Counsel Michael J. Looby, dated March 31, 2009, which is written about in today’s Buffalo News. The report is a response to a school board request that the state investigate alleged leaks from board members to Buffalo News reporter Mark Sommer, regarding remarks made during an alleged executive session that took place on January 29, 2008.

Evidence does not support the claim that it was a properly convened executive session in the first place, not to mention the fact that Hon. James A. McLeod and Hon. Craig T. Hannah resigned (on April 15, 2008) from the ethics committee that conducted the ethics investigation—the day after it was pointed out by Artvoice that they were serving in that capacity in violation of the Official Compilation of Codes, Rules and Regulations of the State of New York.

Note that the school board is so concerned with controlling information that the first two paragraphs of the state report deal with board president Mary Ruth Kapsiak’s failure to include essential evidence to the SED when she requested an investigation back on April 25, 2008, and again on November 20, 2008. The State Education Department did not even receive the evidence supporting the board’s request for an investigation until February 10, 2009.

Once they were provided the information, it only took 49 days for the legal counsel of the State Education Department to offer a determination that “reflects only the practical difficulties inherent in conclusively proving the alleged violations of law, and not vindication of the handling of this matter by either the Board or Williams.”

Imagine the good that could be done for the schoolchildren of Buffalo if the superintendent and school board spent more time thinking about them than they do thinking about their travel itineraries and legal strategies?