Libraries are often responsible for records, and we are always interested in how information is shared and transmitted. And sometimes people use information as a weapon.
The same people who are trying to have books banned in libraries across the countries are also working to harass schools with information requests. This is becoming an issue for an increasing number of schools in Minnesota.
Check out this excerpt, and you can read the whole article for more details.
Million-Dollar Records Request: From COVID and Critical Race Theory to Teachers’ Names & Schools, Minnesota Districts Flooded With Freedom of Information Document Demands
“Lately, the phone at the Minnesota School Boards Association has been ringing off the hook with dozens of calls from anxious leaders of small school districts — sometimes very small — facing a common quandary.
They have been inundated with public records requests seeking millions of documents with information on everything from their schools’ COVID protocols to classroom materials, names of teachers and the buildings where they work, even text messages that mention race or social-emotional services.
Sometimes the requests come from law firms. Often they come from local residents who have protested mask and vaccine requirements at school board meetings. Clearly boilerplates, some letters go to multiple districts at once.
The school officials making the phones ring are anxious about a range of things. There’s the cost and labor required to fulfill the requests, which districts report have skyrocketed in the last six months. There are demands that information be produced on tight timelines — sometimes bolstered by legal citations that don’t apply in Minnesota. And particularly when the person asking for information has been a loud fixture at board meeting protests, there are fears about being singled out for retaliation.
It’s a variation of a scenario playing out across the country, as local groups — often loose organizations of people initially angered by schools’ responses to COVID-19 — coalesce around how topics related to race, history, the LGBT community and antisemitism are taught. Some are getting help from national organizations and law firms.
In Owatonna, about an hour south of the Twin Cities, attorneys representing a local organization requested correspondence and documents in August that officials estimated would encompass 2 million pages. The district’s human resources director has been chipping away at it, in addition to her regular duties and the additional strains of keeping schools staffed during a pandemic.
In nearby Rochester, school leaders warned that it would cost an estimated $900,000 to fulfill a 41-page request from the local group Equality in Education for materials mentioning a broad range of subjects including critical race theory, equity and anything with “a sociological or cultural theme.”
The Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school system received a request that it initially estimated would take two years to fulfill. The requesting attorney, whose Twin Cities law firm takes on far-right legal battles, trimmed the list of keywords he wanted searched, and the district hired two people to review the resulting documents for private data that would need redacting. District leaders now anticipate delivering the records by the end of the calendar year.
Laws vary from state to state as to what reimbursement schools can collect for answering public records requests, but under Minnesota’s Data Practices Act, districts must cover some potentially significant expenses. This year, the school boards association, among others, is asking state lawmakers to either find funds to pay for fulfilling the requests or allow districts to recover all costs from requesters.
This, in turn, has prompted freedom of information advocates to ask the Legislature not to change the law or to make accessing public data more expensive. They have on their side a recent Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that government agencies must fulfill even public records requests they find “burdensome.”
There’s nothing new about people frustrated with notoriously opaque school districts. Or about government officials grousing about the obligation to comply with the law — particularly when they find themselves in the hot seat. But freedom of information is never more important than when trust between the public and public institutions is low.
Watching nervously as the debate rages, Minnesota’s government transparency advocates worry: Will freedom of information survive? “
You can read the rest of the article here.