Port Angeles School District Produces the Hamilton Letter
Earlier today, the Port Angeles School District released the first installment of records responsive to my June 22 Public Records Act request: the June 11 letter from Director Nancy Hamilton to the board and district counsel—the document at the center of last month’s censure fight.
Readers can download the full letter below and judge it for themselves.
Today, July 8, was the deadline my July 3 demand letter set for producing this specific record.
The district met it—barely, quietly, and without a word of explanation for why a document its own board declared “a public record subject to disclosure” was, until this afternoon, buried under a 90-business-day estimate.
What Changed—and What Hasn’t
Nine days ago, the district’s position was that it needed until roughly early November to “locate and assemble” records its board had already quoted, counted, and characterized in a public censure resolution.
Today’s email, sent by HR Assistant/Public Records Assistant Stacy McKnight, strikes a different tone.
It states the district is producing records “in a series of installments due to the size and scope” of the request, and that installments ensure “the fullest assistance and the timeliest production of records.”
The email does not mention the June 29 five-day letter. It does not mention the 90-business-day estimate.
It does not respond to my June 29 objection, which went unanswered for over a week, or acknowledge the July 3 demand letter sent to Superintendent Michelle Olsen, Board President Sandy Long, and the district’s public records officer.
The district offered no explanation for the timing. I will simply note the sequence of events and let readers draw their own conclusions.
To be fair about what today represents: this is the first installment the law contemplates, and the district deserves credit for producing it. But my July 3 letter made four demands, and today’s production satisfies only the first. Still outstanding:
The seventeen emails Hamilton sent Superintendent Olsen between December 2025 and May 2026—the ones the censure resolution counts, dates, and describes in detail. My deadline for a first installment of those records is July 15.
The superintendent’s and staff’s written responses to those emails.
The correspondence regarding anonymous constituent complaints referenced on page 4 of the censure.
A revised, individualized estimate with committed installment dates for everything above. Today’s email promises “additional installments as records become available”—a phrase that commits the district to nothing and no date.
The July 15 deadline stands. So does everything in the July 3 letter.
Inside the Letter the Board Censured
Until today, the public knew Hamilton’s June 11 letter only through the board’s characterization of it—eight pages of censure resolution describing a document nobody outside the district could read.
Now the letter itself is public, and it is a different document than the resolution suggested.
The letter is Hamilton’s point-by-point response to seven complaints she says were leveled against her by board directors and district counsel Ms. Maynard during a May 26 executive session—a session noticed under RCW 42.30.110(1)(i), the provision covering discussions of litigation with legal counsel.
Some of her responses are difficult to reconcile with the accusations as she describes them:
On her recusal from the collective bargaining vote: Hamilton writes that district counsel advised her, in a written “recommended next steps” email, to publicly announce her recusal because her husband is a member of the teachers’ union—and that she read that statement at the May 7 board meeting exactly as counsel directed. If accurate, Hamilton was criticized in executive session for following the district’s own legal advice.
On seeking an outside mentor: Hamilton notes that the Washington State School Directors’ Association—the professional development body for school boards statewide—actively encourages outside training, offers a new director network, and sends consultants into districts on request.
On her Facebook posts: She cites the district’s own Policy 1010, which states the board encourages “free expression of opinions by all board directors,” and points to elected officials at every level of government who communicate with constituents on social media.
On the Renker contract: The censure-adjacent complaint, as Hamilton describes it, blames her for the rescission of a contract with Dr. Ann Renker.
Hamilton’s account is that after the board unanimously approved the contract, a constituent reported to her an incident in which the contractor allegedly made racist remarks in a school setting, and that she forwarded that report to Superintendent Olsen as both the superintendent’s contract and board policy direct. The Olympic Herald has not independently verified the underlying allegation, which appears in Hamilton’s letter attributed to an unnamed constituent.
Hamilton writes that she did not direct anyone to rescind the contract—a decision that, she notes, was never hers alone to make.
On refusing to name a complainant: Hamilton writes that no board policy and nothing in the superintendent’s contract requires a director to unmask a constituent who asks for anonymity, and that forcing disclosure would chill community members from bringing concerns to their elected representatives at all.
On her emails and her participation in meetings: She cites board policy directing members to contact the superintendent with questions before meetings, the very practice the censure resolution characterizes as micromanagement.
The Procedural Bombshell
The letter’s most consequential passage may be its last argument.
Hamilton contends the May 26 executive session was improperly noticed under the Open Public Meetings Act.
The session was called under RCW 42.30.110(1)(i)—potential litigation. But Hamilton argues that because the session was substantially about complaints against her, a public officer, it should have been noticed under RCW 42.30.110(1)(h), which governs sessions “to receive and evaluate complaints or charges brought against a public officer.”
That subsection carries a critical guarantee: upon the officer’s request, the discussion must be held in public.
Because the session was noticed only under the litigation provision, Hamilton writes, she was never given the opportunity to invoke that right.
Her letter closes with a demand that any future discussion of her conduct “take place in a public hearing, properly noted in the agenda.”
One week later, on June 18, the board answered that demand with a censure resolution read into the record at a public meeting—a resolution that accuses her of breaching executive session confidentiality by writing the letter in the first place.
The Competing Narratives
The dispute now reduces to two irreconcilable accounts.
Hamilton’s letter calls the allegations “frivolous,” describes the executive session as “an effort to discredit me and my work,” and states that as the board’s only Native American member, she finds it “hard to see this attack as anything other than an attempt to silence minority voices.”
Resolution 2526-18 answers in unambiguous terms. Section 5 declares Hamilton’s discrimination claim “false and offensive,” calls it “utterly baseless,” and states that “baseless accusations of this nature incur legal liability for the District.”
Section 4 rejects her improper-notice argument as false, maintaining the session was properly convened under the litigation provision and that discussing legal risk with counsel “is exactly what occurred.”
The resolution goes further than disagreement. It asserts that by writing the June 11 letter, Hamilton violated the Code of Ethics for Municipal Officers and “waived attorney-client privilege,” and it quotes two criminal statutes—RCW 42.20.100, making willful neglect of a public duty a misdemeanor, and RCW 9A.80.010, making certain intentional unauthorized acts by a public servant a gross misdemeanor.
The resolution closes by demanding she “cease and desist,” warning of “additional censures,” and reserving “the right to seek injunctive relief in court to prevent Director Hamilton from attending future executive sessions.”
Notably, the same resolution declares in Section 1.1 that it imposes “no sanction, restriction, penalty, or limitation” on Hamilton’s rights and that she “retains all rights and powers of her office without diminution”—an assertion that sits uneasily beside Section 3.2’s mechanism allowing staff to disregard her information requests without full-board approval, and Section 7’s threat to bar her from executive sessions.
Who is right on the confidentiality question is a genuine legal dispute—one that turns on whether the session was properly noticed in the first place, and on what the OPMA actually protects.
It is precisely the kind of dispute that can only be evaluated with the underlying records in hand.
Which is why the remaining records matter. The censure resolution describes seventeen emails containing what it characterizes as excessive demands on staff.
Hamilton’s letter describes the same emails as routine pre-meeting diligence encouraged by written board policy. One of those characterizations is closer to the truth, and the emails themselves will show which.
What Happens Next
The district has produced one record out of four categories requested. It has offered no schedule for the rest and no revised estimate to replace the 90-business-day figure it has now, in practice, abandoned.
If a meaningful first installment of the seventeen emails arrives by July 15, with any legally required redactions and a proper exemption log, this dispute de-escalates on its own.
If the deadline passes in silence, the demand letter’s terms are unchanged: the matter goes to Clallam County Superior Court, where the burden of proving the reasonableness of its conduct falls on the district.
Today’s production suggests the district understands that. Seven days will tell whether it has fully absorbed it.
Exactly what I expected when I wrote that the executive session was not compliant with the RCW and that only CONTENT of an exec session that is deemed confidential is in fact, confidential. The session itself is not, per the OPMA and the AGs expression about confidentiality specifically, which was quoted (except it left the important defensive parts out) on the Censure.
Keep it up! <3