PRO BONO
Advocating for Freedom of Information for Hawai‘i’s Education John P. Duchemin _________________ jduchemin@cades.com
Jeffrey S. Portnoy _________________ jportnoy@cades.com
When the state Department of Education refused to share its public financial records with an education reform group, two Cades Schutte attorneys championed the group’s successful effort to obtain the information and protect the public’s legal right to a transparent government. Jeffrey S. Portnoy and John P. Duchemin have a history of teaming up to guard the public’s right to access government information. Mr. Portnoy, one of the state’s preeminent advocates for open government, and Mr. Duchemin, a former business and government reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser and Pacific Business News, previously have obtained landmark Hawai‘i Supreme Court rulings affirming and expanding the public’s constitutional right to open court proceedings and records. They frequently represent individuals and entities seeking to obtain government records under the state’s open-records law, the Uniform Information Practices Act (or UIPA). So when non-profit educational reform organization the Education Institute of Hawaii (EIH) asked Messrs. Portnoy and Duchemin for help in obtaining financial records from a reluctant Hawai‘i State Department of Education (DOE), the attorneys were happy to accept. Messrs. Portnoy and Duchemin, working pro bono, without charge, brought a civil suit in state court seeking to compel the DOE to produce the records. Their efforts to date have been successful: as the lawsuit proceeded, the DOE finally dropped its objections, and agreed to produce the records more than two years after EIH’s initial request. EIH is a Hawai‘i nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve the quality of public education in Hawai‘i. In March 2018, EIH submitted a formal UIPA request to the DOE for detailed budgetary line-item information from the 2016-17 school year. The goal of EIH’s request was to obtain data allowing for itself and other organizations to perform timely, independent financial analyses of recent public education expenditures. 14 KE KUMU | A CADES SCHUTTE PUBLICATION
