“Screw you telegraph!”

Or, um, welcome to Sunshine Week ’13, The Telegraph’s annual participation in a national initiative to bring attention to your right to know what your elected officials are doing on your behalf and how they are spending your hard-earned money.

That crude three-word salute was the opening salvo in a series of comments that greeted our Facebook promotion of the first in a weeklong series of Sunshine Week stories to appear today: teacher absences in the Nashua School District.

That story, coupled with a sidebar on how much money the district spent for substitute teachers during the past year, appears on the front page of today’s paper.

Here’s a sampling of a few other comments:

• “Teachers care for and teach our kids!!!! Focus on something like all the budget cuts some want to make in education!!!”

• “They are teaching our kids for the future. They deserve more money and recognition!”

• “Anything so people will read the TELETRASH!!”

And this is all before anyone had a chance to read the story.

So what is it we wrote that prompted such harsh condemnation?

“Teachers in the Nashua school system receive 11 sick days each year. Nashua Teachers Union President Bob Sherman states you can’t compare that to the private sector because vacation time can be used whenever people want.

‘The vacation times given to teachers are fixed, and with only three personal days, you can rapidly use up sick days if you’ve got children or family members that have become ill or any type of legal issues to attend to,’ Sherman said. ‘Between personal and sick days, that’s a number we’ve been willing to live with for 30 years or more.’

Read more in The Sunday Telegraph, when we kick off Sunshine Week with a look at teacher absences.”

Now, unless I’m mistaken, there is nothing in these 119 words to suggest teachers don’t “care for and teach our kids” or don’t deserve “more money and recognition.” Nor did it suggest that Nashua’s teachers as a whole were bilking the system.

Rather, what appears to have gotten under their skin was that we had the gall to assemble, examine and report data about teacher absences in the first place.

All of which speaks directly to one of the truisms of so-called investigative or watchdog journalism that I’ve learned during my more than 35 years in this business: A strong majority of readers love it as long as the spotlight isn’t aimed at them.

For example, we doubt local school officials appreciated it in 2008 when we reported that a former intern went 0-for-8 when, posing as an average citizen, he visited school district offices and asked for copies of the superintendents’ contracts.

Or that some municipal officials appreciated a similar exercise a year earlier that revealed only three of our communities – Nashua wasn’t one of them – were able to produce upon request a public document mandated by the federal government in 1986 that details plans to deal with a hazardous material spill.

Or that a segment of New Hampshire’s day care operators appreciated it when the state began posting inspection violations online in 2006 in response to a Telegraph investigation that found the documents weren’t readily available to the public.

Still, we would like to think that most people would agree that public access to school superintendent contracts, emergency management plans and child care center violations is generally good for democracy.

So as we enter our ninth year as an active participant in Sunshine Week, please keep an open mind before reaching any nefarious conclusions about why we do some of the things that we do.

As noted in today’s accompanying editorial, we sought teacher absences data this year for the same reasons we pursued text messages from the mayor and Board of Aldermen, access to the mayor’s daily calendar, city vehicle and mileage reimbursements, severance payouts for city and town employees, and other public information.

Because you have a right to know – and we all have the right to ask.

Nick Pappas is editorial page editor at The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-6505 or npappas@nashuatelegraph.com. You can also follow the Opinion page on Twitter at @TelegraphEdit and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TheTelegraph.

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