District hit by second suit

Attorney Paul Nicholas Boylan has filed another lawsuit against the Chico Unified School District charging it with violating the California Public Records Act.

A month ago he sued CUSD on behalf of Tim Crews, publisher of the Willows-based Sacramento Valley Mirror, who was dissatisfied with the district’s response to his request for documents related to its controversial 2004 reassignment of then-Marsh Junior High Principal Jeff Sloan.

This time his client is Barbara Black, Sloan’s sister-in-law. Black has had her own beef with the district resulting from a downtown encounter with former Superintendent Scott Brown in 2004 that apparently turned ugly.

The new lawsuit stems from the district’s blanket refusal to respond to Black’s Nov. 19 CPRA request for the same documents it gave Sloan earlier. The district’s attorney stated the request lacked specificity and was burdensome, Boylan said during a phone interview.

“I’ve never in all my years as a CPRA attorney encountered a case where a blanket refusal was given for documents that already had been given to another party,” he added. Saying he had no position on the Sloan case, he stated his only goal was to compel the district to correct its policies and procedures.