HOW FLORIDA VIRTUAL SCHOOL’S CONTROVERSY HAS BEEN KEPT MOSTLY UNDER WRAPS

Over the past year, Florida Virtual School (FLVS), Florida’s statewide, public online secondary school, has dealt with a massive data breach, a series of ongoing disputes with former employees, and a series of allegations against the school’s former attorney. If the problems at FLVS’s have been slow to come to the surface and garnered little media attention outside Orlando where the school’s office is based, it may have something to do with how the school has negotiated access to public documents pertaining to its current disputes.In an attempt to shed light on the ongoing disputes at FLVS, the Orlando Sentinel did what any news outlet would do under the same circumstances: They made requests for public documents concerning the controversy, so their reporters might examine FLSV’s actions and inform readers. Since FLSV is a state-run online school, the Orlando Sentinel naturally had a reasonable expectation that the documents would be released. Suffice to say, this is not what happened.