COD to Update Email Retention Procedure

Revised Email Retention Procedure Anticipated in Spring of 2025 at College of the Desert

PALM DESERT — Had it not been for Area 4 Trustee and former Superintendent/President Joel Kinnamon’s request to halt an email retention procedure for further review, hundreds of thousands of emails at College of the Desert would have already been permanently deleted by now.

Stuart Davis, executive director of Educational Technology, sent an email on June 25 stipulating that the IT department was setting email retention to three years of history which would have reduced retention by four years effective July 25.

Kinnamon at the July Board of Trustees meeting argued that under Board Administrative Policy 3310 the Destruction of Records stipulates that, the Board of Trustees should be notified of any intent to dispose of records and such notification shall be recorded in the Board Minute.

Superintendent/president Laura Hope said at the Board of Trustees meeting on Friday that based on Kinnamon’s questions, “We’ve decided to recalibrate our course of action with better clarity.”

“The short version of the update here is exactly what President Hope just said, which is we’re going to take a step back and take a crack at redrafting our document retention policy to make a little more clarity around email specifically,” Jacob Knapp, general counsel for the Board of Trustees, said. “Our intention will be to draft that, run it through the governance process, and have something new and improved in the spring semester, spring of 2025.”

In the meantime, he vowed, “We don’t intend to make any changes to practices or implement anything.”

The new Email Retention Procedure will go through the governance process and come back before the Board of Trustees for approval.

“What we intend to do is really put something together that’s more user-friendly for the district and our employees and everyone else,” Knapp said. “We’ll see where we end up. But what I’d envision is something that I’ve helped implement at other public agencies where we make it clear when it relates to emails what employee’s obligations are as it relates to the emails that they have in their inbox.”

We will specify, have time periods to make sure the employees have an opportunity to archive and retain the emails that need to be saved, and a process by which we could delete by automatic process, those that are no longer necessary once the time period has elapsed, Knapp said.

“So. that’s just in a nutshell where we are thinking about going, but we wanted to give the board an update since it came up at the last meeting. Again, we’ll be working on a new administrative procedure and to have something in spring of 2025.”