Community members sue Bremerton School District

Community members sue Bremerton School District | FOX 13 Seattle

"The whole thing seemed a little strange to us,,,": Community members have filed a lawsuit over the school board's recent actions related to Superintendent James Crawford.

BREMERTON, Wash. - Bremerton students start classes start on September 3, but before the first bell rings, controversy is already ringing through the Bremerton School District.

Last month, the school board placed Superintendent James Crawford on administrative leave.

Lynn Horton and Eric Morley are community members and part of the Citizens for Bremerton School Board Transparency community group. They told FOX 13, the board placed Crawford on leave citing network use and a complaint about workplace behavior, which they say turned out to be an anonymous complaint.

"The whole thing seemed a little strange to us as we worked closely with Dr. Crawford over the past year and saw a lot of success," Morley said. So, they started asking questions and filing records requests. "We have asked for a number of documents, but we have gotten very little in response," Horton said.

She said they are specifically asking for documents regarding correspondence between board members as well as school district staff members. "Because we believe the school board is not operating in compliance with the open public meetings act," Horton said.

They add, they’ve had little success getting that information, which is why Horton, Morley and two others have now filed a lawsuit to get the public disclosure documents they’ve asked for.

"Our group is committed to make sure the Bremerton School District follows state law, follows their own policies and is a transparent governmental entity and up to this point we’ve seen very little of that," Horton said.

"We just believe that there is more information that could be shared that should be shared," Morley said. While they said this stemmed from their support for Crawford, this lawsuit goes beyond that. "The consequence of their actions has the potential to eliminate that and further degrade the academic performance of our kids and our community," Morley said.

"We are 100% behind Dr. James Crawford, we believe the school board has it within their power to do the right thing by reinstating him, and we are fully supportive of that, but beyond that, we firmly believe that they need to change their business practices to become fully transparent to this community," Horton said.

FOX 13 reached out to the Bremerton School District for comment regarding the lawsuit. Here is what we heard back:

"As a standard practice, Bremerton School District does not provide comment on pending litigation.

The district is committed to transparency and fully complies with the Washington State Public Records Act. Since June, the District has received and responded to an unusually high volume of public records requests, including many requests seeking a large quantity of responsive records, and has been able to promptly fulfill and close many of them in accordance with the law. We continue to diligently process all our open public records requests."

On August 15 though, when the school district announced Donna Dearin-Colosky will serve as the district's focused interim superintendent starting on August 26, it also included this: "Dr. James Crawford remains on administrative leave while the third-party consultant with expertise in human resources continues to gather facts related to the BSD work environment and the tenor of interactions under Dr. Crawford’s leadership."