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• In a column last week in the Delaware County Times, Gil Spencer wrote of his efforts to find out how much money the Penn-Delco School District had paid its solicitor, Mark Sereni, and his law firm.

Here, in his words is what happened:

A few weeks ago I asked then-Superintendent Leslye Abrutyn for Sereni’s bills. She said they would be made available upon request. But, when I requested them from the district’s chief financial officer, he wrote me that the request would have to go through the district’s “Right To Know” officer.

The existence of a district “Right To Know” officer fascinated me. Our correspondent Loretta Rogers, who has covered the district for 14 years, told me she’d never heard of such a person or position.

Neither, it turned out, had current school board President David Seitz. It took a little while to confirm that the RTKO was actually Dr. Abrutyn herself. Before I could ask her again for the info, she resigned as district superintendent.

I came to learn that it was Mark Sereni himself who suggested the creation of the Right To Know officer, but it seemed so few people knew who that officer was, I wondered if the public had a Right To Know it.

In his e-mail to the board, Sereni claims, “The ‘Right to Know’ officer was not a newly created position. The superintendent had been our district’s Right-to-Know officer since at least 5/13/05, when I drafted for her a response to (a) Right-to-Know request.”

But that doesn’t explain why not even Dave Seitz had ever heard of it.

“I did not ‘invent’ the Right to Know officer in response to Gil Spencer’s request,” Sereni wrote. “He (meaning me) cites ‘knowledgeable district sources’ in support of this fabrication. Question — who are those lying sources?”

But if Sereni read my column he knows I did not say the Right to Know officer was invented by him in response to MY request, only that it was a “newly created position.”

I did not say that I thought the position was cooked up as a way to avoid responding in a timely manner to requests from the public for public information. But do I think that? Yeah, that’s exactly what I think.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In his e-mail to the board [Sereni] . . . writes if Seitz and district Business Manager John Steffy spoke with me (they did) they “violated attorney-client privilege and confidentiality …” This “could have horrific consequences,” he wrote.

Question: Does Mark Sereni actually think the attorney-client privilege exists to protect attorneys?

Sereni works for Penn-Delco, not the other way around. As a publicly elected official, Dave Seitz not only has the right, but, some would say, the obligation to answer legitimate questions about how taxpayer money is spent in the district. No elected or appointed school board member requires Mark Sereni’s permission to talk to anyone. They should remember that.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Interestingly enough, I did hear from Penn-Delco’s new “Right To Know” officer, human resources head Debbie Albence, early Tuesday morning, concerning my request for Sereni’s billing charges.

As I reported Sunday, for the 2006-07 school year, they were in excess of $260,000, more because June’s bills aren’t included.

Compare that to the county’s biggest school district, Upper Darby, where Frank Catania is solicitor.

Over the same time period, in a district with almost four times the students of Penn-Delco (12,300 to 3,300) Catania made a total of $130,601, which includes his $1,000-a-month retainer.

So either Sereni is working a lot harder for Penn-Delco than Catania is for Upper Darby or something would seem to be out of whack.

To find out, we’ll need to go over all of Penn-Delco’s legal bills to get to the bottom of it. Good thing the district has a “Right To Know” officer to help us in this regard.http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7007901180

• The story of the Georgia district attorney who released a video of teenagers having sex at a party seems, at first blush (if you will pardon the pun), ludicrous. The video apparently shows former high school football star, Genarlow Wilson, having sex with 15- and 17-year-old girls. Wilson, who is now 21, has served two years of a 10-year prison sentence for aggravated child molestation.

A Georgia court annulled the decision against Wilson last month, in a case that had received enormous national attention because of the length of the sentence for a consensual act between Wilson, who was 17 at the time, and a 15-year-old girl.

District Attorney David McDade released the video last week, claiming he had to do so in response to the state’s open-records law. Others think differently, arguing that the release was a ploy by McDade to block Wilson’s release from prison; and one legislator has said he plans to introduce a bill to prohibit such actions in the future.

“I’m going to call it the David McDade Act,” [State Senator Emanuel] Jones told the AP. “Sometimes we have to protect our kids from district attorneys.”

Always on the margins, there will be questions that require serious thought by people on all sides of the issue.