Document Retention Policy

Foundational policy provides: classifications, retention-schedule

Owner: Chancellor

Last review: 2022-08-01

Document Retention Policy

This policy establishes mandatory retention periods, storage requirements, disposal procedures, and administrative responsibilities for all paper and electronic records created or maintained by the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee.

Foundational-policy bundle

This policy is a foundational bundle. Three companion files in this directory together constitute the policy:

• policy.md (this file): narrative, scope, and policy statements.
• data.yaml: the canonical machine-readable form of the classifications (Section 3.0 of the source PDF) and the record retention schedule (Appendix A). The PolicyCodex application reads data.yaml directly to drive the classifications picker and the retention-schedule lookups; it does not parse this narrative file.
• source.pdf: the original PDF source archived for audit.

Scope

All diocesan departments, parishes, and Catholic schools under the authority of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee. The classification taxonomy and retention schedule in data.yaml apply uniformly across these entities.

Editing

Edits to this policy go through the PolicyCodex admin UI, which opens a pull request against this repository. A reviewer approves and a publisher merges; on merge the handbook rebuilds and the PolicyCodex app picks up the new data.yaml on its next polling cycle.

Direct edits to these files via Git are technically possible but are discouraged outside of one-time bundle setup.

Authority

This policy supersedes any prior retention or records-management guidance issued by the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee. Changes require written approval per the change-management provisions of the source PDF.

Narrative status

This policy.md narrative is a minimum-viable scaffold generated when the bundle was first created. The canonical policy content remains the source PDF and data.yaml. The narrative is expected to be revised through normal editorial review.