ORLANDO, Fla. – Orange County School Board Chair Teresa Jacobs released a letter on Friday she sent to the Florida Commission on Ethics in which she said her campaign “may have inadvertently used a portion of an email list from Orange County Public Schools.”
Jacobs, who won re-election on Aug. 23, told News 6 reporter Mike Holfeld she released the letter because she wanted to be “transparent.” Jacobs said she does not believe the use of the email addresses impacted the outcome of the election.
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Jacobs issued a statement Friday, about a week after sending the letter the the Ethics Commission. She said she held off on commenting until she knew the commission had received the letter, which was sent via certified mail on Aug. 27.
“During my years in public office, my highest priority has been to uphold the trust the public has placed in me. For this reason, I am disclosing an error made by my campaign and the actions I have taken to self-report it to the Florida Commission on Ethics. It was discovered that my campaign inadvertently used a portion of an Orange County Public Schools’ email list. Upon discovering the error, I notified the school district and, shortly after that, the Florida Commission on Ethics. Although this was done unintentionally and without my knowledge, I take full responsibility for my campaign and deeply regret this mistake,” Jacobs’ statement said.
In the letter to the commission, which can be read in full below, Jacobs said the error was brought to her attention the day before the election.
“I do not believe I have violated the code of ethics because there was no intent to use this data,” the letter stated. “However, I am writing to you today to self-report and to determine whether any ethics laws were violated and, if so, what penalty is associated with those violations so that, to the best of my ability, I can rectify this unfortunate and inadvertent error.”
In the letter, Jacobs said her husband, who oversaw her emails for her 2018 and 2022 campaigns, used an account that had not been accessed in years and noticed a large number of OCPS employee email addresses. He believed that other email addresses obtained by Jacobs had been merged with the OCPS email addresses, so he deleted all the @OCPS emails and thought the rest were from her original lists.
Jacobs said officials investigated the matter and discovered that a portion of her campaign email list “was a portion of the OCPS database of parents.”
“As soon as this was confirmed, I felt compelled to contact the Ethics Commission,” Jacobs wrote.
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