The Broward Teachers Union accused the school district Thursday of blocking hundreds of e-mails sent by school employees to School Board members since March -- without board members' knowledge.

The union says e-mails about teacher raises, use of federal stimulus money and employee contract negotiations never made it to board members' in-boxes -- or to their junk e-mail folders. Instead, they were filed away on a server and never read.

BTU lawyers sent Board Chairwoman Maureen Dinnen and board attorney Edward Marko a letter Thursday asking the district to stop blocking e-mails and threatening to sue if they don't do so by Oct. 26.

The letter argues blocking e-mails violates the sender's and the receiver's constitutional rights under U.S. and Florida laws.

Superintendent Jim Notter said district attorneys were reviewing BTU's letter. He questioned its timing, with the district in the throes of negotiating a contract with the union. BTU has asked for an average 4 percent pay increase. The district isn't offering any raise, but has offered to pick up the difference in employee health insurance.

``Unfortunately we're back in a position where it's adversarial,'' Notter said.

He also said a union e-mail and phone call campaign last year crashed board members' in-boxes, shut down fax machines and kept important calls from coming to their cellphones.

``Some of the shenanigans they pulled last year absolutely could have impacted the safety of our kids or employees,'' the superintendent said Thursday night.

It is unclear who, if anyone, decided to block e-mails to board members -- or if it was a technical glitch.

Notter said he did not ask for the block, but he also said he would not be against it now: ``I certainly would support it going on at this time,'' he said.

While the board's technology policy protects members from getting bombarded with unsolicited e-mails, there's no indication that messages from unionized employees fall into that category.

The accusation comes at a time when the district faces increased scrutiny after last month's arrest of suspended board member Beverly Gallagher in a federal corruption sting. Board members have admitted the scandal has cost some of the public's faith in the district.

``If district officials are willing to intercept employees' messages, I have to wonder who else they might decide they don't want school board members to hear from and to what lengths they will go to stop or even slow the lines of communication,'' BTU President Pat Santeramo said in a statement.

The teachers union, like other unions, has frequently urged members to reach out to elected schools officials. (Teachers are asked to contact the board when they're not teaching, like before and after school, on weekends and during off-duty breaks, union spokesman John Ristow said.)

To e-mail all board members at once, the union set up a website where employees can select a form message or write a message of their own and send it to the board with one click, Ristow said. Those messages -- at least since March -- apparently did not make it through to the board.

Ristow said the district could be keeping all messages originating from that website from reaching the board, though the e-mails are reaching district administrators.

BTU discovered by chance that employee e-mails weren't getting through.

According to the union, board member Stephanie Kraft received a copy of an e-mail from BTU in March that thanked employees for sending the board ``hundreds of thousands'' of messages over the past year.

In a response to Santeramo, Kraft wrote: ``PS, board members did not receive any emails, let alone hundreds of thousands,'' the union said. (BTU later clarified its members sent close to 100,000 e-mails to the board in the 2008-09 school year, not hundreds of thousands.)

BTU began investigating, working with lawyers from the national American Federation of Teachers in Washington, D.C. They found that board members did not receive e-mails from 186 employees who sent a message to each member asking for teacher raises in March.

They also found the district blocked e-mails two more times: in April, when BTU stewards asked that federal stimulus dollars be used to save jobs, and in August, when employees wrote about contract negotiations.

Thursday's letter says BTU is considering legal action against the board's technology use policy, which says use of electronic services ``shall be properly monitored, and to the extent reasonably possible, users of school sponsored telecommunication services and networks shall be protected from harassment or unsafe, unwanted, or unsolicited contact.''

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