Update: School Official Cites Personnel Exemption in Withholding Survey Evaluation of Murley

Updated May 15:

Swesey said the school board's attorney advised not to disclose the documents, citing the personnel exemption in the Iowa Code: “Personal information in confidential personnel records of government bodies relating to identified or identifiable individuals who are officials, officers, or employees of the government bodies.”

Pervious coverage:

Iowa City school officials say they won't release results of a survey evaluating the superintendent and an Iowa open government expert says that's probably OK under the state's open records law.

Iowa City school board President Marla Swesey told the Press-Citizen this week that the more than 600 responses the district received will be kept private. The records are being withheld because they're part of Superintendent Steve Murley's official job evaluation.

“I think if we hadn’t used it for his evaluation that it would have been public, and that’s sort of what I thought would happen,” Swesey told the newspaper. “But since we did use it for his evaluation, that’s how it comes out, so I was surprised, too.”

In Iowa, personnel records are exempt from public disclosure. Iowa's open records law was recently amended to allow the public access to more personnel information, but Iowa Freedom of Information Council Director Kathleen Richardson said the the results to the Murley survey are probably still exempt.

"I can see where they might argue that the results are part of an employee's confidential personnel record, and while that section was amended last year so that some information must be released, this kind of information is probably still covered," Richardson, who teaches journalism at Drake University, told Patch.