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interest of his in education was nothing more than an interest in information, information that includes ideas and values and techniques as well as technology."
According to the Attorney General, “that interest of Mr. Jefferson in education and information carried over to the field of government.” He quoted the gentleman from Monticello statement on the importance of access to information: “If I had to choose between a government without a press or a press without a government, I should not hesitate to choose the latter."
Baliles emphasized that “what Mr. Jefferson perceives and what we must never forget is that a democratic ry is based upon an informed citi.u.ry and an informed citizenry is dependent upon information. . We must remember today, as Mr. Jefferson did then, that to control information is to control understanding and indeed it is the basis of knowledge upon which decisions are made. And we need only to look at the activities of the ministries of information in totalitarian countries to see the result of information control.”
He described Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act as “a reasonable approach to guaranteeing the public’s right to access to government while it recognizes and requires the value of open meetings and open records... First, it requires that governmental bodies are required to hold their meetings in public. The second basic requirement is that the official records of governmental bodies and their agencies are generally subject to public inspection. And the act expressly provides that it is to be liberally construed to promote an increased awareness by all persons of governmental activities. That is, the act is to be liberally construed and the exceptions are to be narrowly interpreted, and that’s the way I wrote it in my first year in the General Assembly,” Baliles stated at the FOI conference.
We believe that Virginia's Attorney General will narrowly interpret the exemptions cited by the school board in refusing to release the architectural reports. We eagerly await his ruling.
In the meantime, we’d like to remind the school board, the ^iperintendent of schools and the board's special legal advisor of the words of Earl Warren, former Chief Justice of the United States: “Policies of secrecy, whether they stem from indolence or design, are cancerous to the body politic and must, if our government is to remain ‘of, by and for the people,’ be curbed by adequate legal guidelines. ”
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