More transparency. Less secrecy. Those are rallying cries of a task force examining how Minnesota could better safeguard the lives of its most vulnerable children.
That task force was launched after the Star Tribune's reporting last year on Minnesota's deeply flawed child protection system. That reporting would have been difficult if not impossible without juvenile court records, which investigative reporter Brandon Stahl relied on to tell the stories of children failed by the system.
Yet while that task force was meeting at the Capitol last fall, a different committee was drawing up plans to seal off many child protection records from public scrutiny. The reasoning: Protecting the privacy of abused and neglected children.
This spring, the Minnesota Supreme Court will adopt new rules of public access to electronic records, recognizing that it's time to join the mass migration of public records online. Access to child protection records could be collateral damage in the worthy goal of making court files in state courts available on the Web.
If the court follows the committee's recommendations, it would reverse more than a decade of openness in juvenile court that has served its purpose well.
To understand why restricting this information is such a troubling idea, it's helpful to know why these very sensitive records were made available in the first place.
After years of conducting child protection hearings behind closed doors, the court system began to experiment in 1998 with opening select courtrooms to anyone who was interested. It became statewide policy in July 2002.The result: The public could read the petitions when county social workers asked judges to take action to protect abused and neglected children. They could also read the reports prepared by these social workers and guardians ad litem, the advocates appointed to represent the children's interests.
"At the time, this was hailed throughout the country as a major reform," said Mark Anfinson, a media lawyer who served on the court record public access committee. "It was largely predicated on the notion that problems which are kept invisible to the public are unlikely to receive a lot of public support and attention."