From the Herald Online:
“What we have here is an unprecedented case,” attorney Kevin Hall told the justices. Hall, a Columbia lawyer, is representing Rocky Disabato, a Charleston man who sued the S.C. Association of School Administrators seeking access to its internal records, including telephone records.
The association gets broad support from taxpayer dollars because many of its members – school administrators – pay their dues with money from their school districts’ coffers, Hall said.
For that and other reasons, the S.C. Supreme Court should declare the group a public body subject to the Freedom of Information Act’s records’ disclosure provisions, Hall said.
John Reagle, the attorney representing the association, acknowledged that technically, the group is a public body. But he said it is a nonprofit corporation set up to be an advocacy group for public education issues in South Carolina. He urged the court to find that the FOIA can’t be applied to any private, issue-oriented advocacy organization.
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