CCSD pushes to release deceased student’s farewell notes

The Clark County School District hopes to win favor in the court of public opinion with the unsealing of several farewell letters that a 13-year-old student wrote to her younger brother and peers before she killed herself two years ago.

But Hailee Lamberth's parents, who sued the district last year after discovering their seventh-grade daughter suffered months of bullying at White Middle School in Henderson, fear public access to her handwritten notes would harm the emotional stability of their surviving son and the other children named in the letters.

"The concern is all about children," said Allen Lichtenstein, an attorney representing the Lamberths. "I hate saying that because I sound like a politician, but in this case, it's actually true."

During a Thursday hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge George Foley Jr., Lichtenstein questioned the district's motives in requesting the public disclosure of the farewell notes and other sensitive records.

"They want it for public relations purposes," he said. "They got some bad publicity in the newspaper (but) these aren't public records."

Foley indicated he "expeditiously" will issue a decision on whether to unseal and open to the public any or all of the records that the district's attorney argued will help it build a better defense — both in court and in the public eye — of what role, if any, it had in Hailee's decision to kill herself in late 2013.

The wrongful death lawsuit that the Lamberths filed against the district claims school administrators and staff neglected to investigate or provide parental notification of the reported bullying, as required by state law.

In a June 23 court filing, the Lamberths included 12 pages of farewell messages that Hailee left for herself, family and friends. An additional 42-page document includes the telephone records of children Hailee contacted in the days and hours before her death. A third record chronicles the investigation that Principal Andrea Katona conducted following Hailee's death.

The district plans to use those documents to demonstrate Hailee contemplated and even planned the details of her suicide months before any reported bullying.

The Lamberths "repeatedly indicated that we don't care about children. They repeatedly indicated that we have violated the law," Dan Waite, a lawyer for the district, told the judge on Thursday.

"So the public has a right to know whether those allegations — about the very schools that they send their children to — whether those allegations have merit or not."

Waite added that the Lamberths, through news conferences and testimony before the Nevada Legislature, have drawn significant attention to their child's death.

Hailee's father, Jason Lamberth, addressed state lawmakers in March to advocate for a bill that increased measures to combat bullying in Nevada schools.

Regardless, public advocacy for an issue should not trigger an automatic disclosure of certain personal information, said Khaliah Barnes, director of the student privacy project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based not-for-profit organization that lobbies for privacy rights in public education.

"You can have victims' advocates speaking out and bringing awareness to these issues without having to expose sensitive details," Barnes said.

"The district doesn't need to sway public opinion here," she added. "Instead, it needs to make a compelling argument to the judge, which can be done in a private manner."

Contact Neal Morton at nmorton@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0279. Find him on Twitter: @nealtmorton.