With RCFP’s free legal help, WHQR unveils school renovation records

Last month, public officials in New Hanover County, North Carolina, revealed that proposed renovations to address the longstanding maintenance needs of one of the state’s oldest high schools could be far more expensive than they previously estimated, according to reporting from WHQR, Wilmington’s NPR member station. 

While prior forecasts suggested the renovations to New Hanover High School’s 103-year-old campus would cost upward of $90 million, the latest estimates say the cheapest renovation plan would require at least $137 million, the outlet reported. The cost could exceed the county’s borrowing capacity.  

WHQR reported the new details using public records obtained with free legal support from an attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. WHQR’s reporting is the latest example of how the Reporters Committee’s work has made a difference for local NPR stations across the country, and, by extension, the communities they serve.

For months, New Hanover County commissioners and school board members shielded much of the renovation design process, including drafts of potential plans, from public view. In April, WHQR reporter Rachel Keith submitted a public records request to the school district, seeking a recent facility study with the draft plans.  

According to Keith’s reporting, more than a month passed and the district hadn’t provided the records or cited a legal justification to withhold them. One board member “said she was glad the public didn’t have access to the current plans, as they aren’t finished.”

For help convincing the district to comply with the public records law, Keith contacted Reporters Committee Senior Staff Attorney Elizabeth Soja. In June, Soja sent a letter to the school district, urging it to promptly release the records.

“Withholding the Facility Study from the public simply because it is ‘not finished’ is a direct violation of the North Carolina Public Records Law,” the letter stated. “[I]t is firmly established in North Carolina that drafts of public records are, themselves, public records.”

Soon after, the district released the drafts to the public.

RCFP supports public media

This isn’t the first time Soja has helped WHQR obtain public records at no cost. Last year, she helped the public radio station secure records showing that North Carolina’s environmental protection agency didn’t hold a chemical manufacturer accountable for missing a deadline to build a barrier wall intended to prevent “forever chemicals” from leaking into a local river. 

With Congress’s recent decision to claw back $1.1 billion in federal funding for public media, the Reporters Committee’s free legal support for local NPR member stations is arguably more essential now than ever before. The Reporters Committee is committed to helping these news outlets continue to pursue hard-hitting stories and defending them against legal threats to their reporting.

In just the past few years, Reporters Committee attorneys have helped public media journalists across the country shake loose records that revealed how Tennessee’s weak gun laws sometimes fail to protect domestic violence victims, exposed a Philadelphia public transit agency’s struggle to track incidents of sexual assault or harassment against its workers, fueled an investigation into the police killing of a tribal citizen in Oklahoma, and more.

Our attorneys also spent three years litigating a First Amendment lawsuit on behalf of Josie Huang, a public radio journalist in Los Angeles who was violently and unlawfully arrested while covering a protest. The case resulted in a $700,000 settlement for Huang, setting a new benchmark for journalists injured by law enforcement. More importantly, the settlement secured new training requirements intended to help prevent local law enforcement officials from unlawfully arresting and assaulting journalists in the future.

And in Tennessee, WPLN News reporter Paige Pfleger turned to Paul McAdoo, the Reporters Committee’s Local Legal Initiative attorney for the state, when a prosecutor demanded she provide a raw interview tape for a trial. McAdoo wrote a letter to the prosecutor on Pfleger’s behalf that helped her successfully challenge that request. 

“We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without people like Paul and other folks at the Reporters Committee,” Pfleger said last year.