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06/08/2018

School bus accident bill passes with ONMA amendment

By Dennis Hetzel, Executive Director

Journalists will continue to see names of minors in school-bus accident reports, though this information only will be made available upon request if House Bill 8 becomes law. The Ohio Legislature has passed an ONMA-supported amendment to a bill that would have blocked access.

We opposed this bill for nearly two years for two main reasons. First, the information on these reports is important and even critical for journalists to have. Almost any school-bus accident is a matter of great public interest. Second, we were greatly concerned about setting a precedent to remove information from initial incident reports. It is settled law that incident reports are open records with only specific exceptions such as Social Security numbers.

Supporters also testified that this information made children prey to pedophiles or identity thieves. We tried to demonstrate that these claims were illogical and unsupported by any evidence. This was a difficult bill to fight, because every legislator’s initial response was to protect children and their privacy.

After the bill passed the House easily and our compromise ideas were rebuffed, we received consideration of two amendment suggestions in the Senate. One would have redacted the names only from Internet postings of the reports.  The other was to create a “journalist exception” similar to other areas of the law. The Senate opted for the latter. On Thursday, the House concurred in the Senate change, sending the bill to Gov. Kasich.

For journalists to obtain this information, the request will have to be made in writing and include the journalist's name and title and the name and address of the journalist's employer with a statement that disclosure of the information sought would be in the public interest.

It’s not an ideal solution, but I’m confident this was the best outcome we could achieve.

Assuming Kasich signs the bill, this also means we have two new exemptions to the open records law. The House also added an unrelated exemption to protect health care information held by certain quasi-governmental entities. We do not believe this exemption will affect newsgathering, but it wasn’t needed. We argued that the concern already was covered by existing exemptions for medical information, and that the language was an inappropriate addition to the ever-growing list of exceptions. The bill takes that list up to the letters “hh.”

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