If you’ve been waiting for an email from someone at the Office of the State Superintendent for Education, LL might know what’s behind the hold-up. Under new rules, some emails from OSSE employees need to be approved at a weekly committee meeting before they can be sent out.

OSSE employees looking to send any email to more than one “stakeholder” outside the agency needs to submit it to the “communications review team” beforehand. OSSE “stakeholders” means any organization outside of OSSE itself, including charter school operators, government agencies, and the D.C. Public Schools system, according to OSSE spokesman Briant K. Coleman. That’s a whole lot of emails.

OSSE employees still interested in sending their emails (or reports, presentations, or letters) need to submit the drafts by 10 a.m. Monday for the communications committee’s weekly meeting on Tuesday. Anyone who misses that Monday deadline faces a potentially days-long wait to send their emails, although Coleman tells LL that OSSE can review “unanticipated” communications quickly.

“We do not believe that this new process will make OSSE slow to communicate with [local education agencies],” Coleman writes in an email.

Not convinced: the people who work with OSSE and have griped about the new policy to LL. Via an email that presumably lacks the committee’s sanction, one OSSE employee complains that the new rules reflect an “obvious level of distrust of staff.”

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