Twenty Lehighton Area School District residents filed a petition in Carbon County’s Court of Common Pleas on July 1 seeking the removal of school board Director David F. Bradley Sr., alleging he publicly posted more than 100,000 pages of district records to a publicly searchable website without first ensuring confidential information had been removed.

The documents included student Social Security numbers, medical information and educational files. The petition accuses Bradley of neglecting “duties imposed upon him as a school director concerning the collection, maintenance and dissemination of private and confidential records of students and employees.”

The filing, prepared by Arley Kemmerer and Matthew Mottola of the Kemmerer Law Firm, comes roughly seven weeks after the district’s school board voted to censure Bradley on May 26 for the same conduct.

The records at the center of the case were obtained through years of Right-to-Know litigation. Bradley filed his initial request with the district on April 21, 2022, seeking inspection of all Pennsylvania School Code 518 records retained between April 30, 2016, and April 20, 2022, including minute books, auditors’ reports, financial account books, orders, bills, contracts, invoices, receipts and purchase orders, according to the petition.

The request triggered appeals and litigation before the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records and the Court of Common Pleas. The Office of Open Records ultimately held that the district had not established grounds to redact any private or confidential information from the requested records. The court later found the district failed to show good cause for a protective order and, finding the district had acted in bad faith, imposed sanctions against it for not making files readily available.

After the litigation concluded, the district provided Bradley with the records electronically on several USB drives. Through a separate agreement, the district was permitted to redact private and confidential information before producing the documents and conducted a quality control review. Despite that review, Kemmerer and Mottola wrote, the district “provided Defendant with records that contained unredacted private and confidential information of its employees and students.”

Bradley, who owns and operates a website at www.lehightongovt.org, had used the site to post information regarding district business and displayed the district’s logo, “suggesting that the website was associated with the district,” the petition states. After receiving the records, he posted them for public viewing and included a search function that allowed users to perform keyword searches of the documents.

Among the information made accessible through that search function were the full Social Security numbers of employees, employee and student medical and health records, and student educational records.

“A member of the public was able to learn that a student of the district was committed to a hospital to receive inpatient mental health treatment,” Kemmerer and Mottola wrote.

It was discovered on May 13 that Bradley had posted the records. After the district informed him that the posted materials contained private and confidential information, he waited nine hours before removing them, according to the petition. His website subsequently carried the message: “Due to an unforeseen situation concerning records received from the LASD, we’ve temporarily removed all records from public view. Thank you for your patience.”

The petition argues Bradley knew or should have known the records could contain sensitive material, given his direct participation in the litigation over those very records.

He “performed either no review or a limited/cursory review of them to determine if they contained private and confidential information,” the petition states, and failed to take reasonable measures to prevent their disclosure before posting them publicly.

As a board member, Bradley was charged with helping carry out the board’s responsibilities under federal law and district policy 216, Kemmerer and Mottola wrote.

That policy, adopted by the Lehighton Area School District Board of Directors, states the board “recognizes its responsibility for the collection, retention, disclosure and protection of student records” and “prohibits the unauthorized access, reproduction, and/or disclosure of student education records and personally identifiable information from such records.”

By posting the records, Kemmerer and Mottola contended in the petition, Bradley “failed to safeguard information entrusted to the Board and acted contrary to the Board’s responsibilities concerning the protection and confidentiality of such records.”

Bradley was appointed to the board on Nov. 13, 2025, in a 5-3 vote to fill the seat vacated by the resignation of Director Sean Gleaves. His term runs through December 2027.

In addition to the 20 named petitioners, all residents and taxpayers of the district, 185 other community members signed a petition supporting the effort to have Bradley removed, according to the filing.

Petitioners include Tom Williams, Rodney Rehnert, Walter Zlomsovitch, Paula Bonser, Margaret Wetzel, William Stoudt, John Finnegan, Rochelle Finnegan, Lynn Solt, Jeffrey Miller, Donna Miller, David Nothstein, Lori Nothstein, Diane Koch, Larry Heffley, Roberta Heffley, SherryAnn Dally, Irene Fritzinger, Leo Desrosiers and Mildred Heiser.