Listening to Minnesota Public Radio Wednesday, we appreciated an interview with seasoned Minnesota education journalist Beth Hawkins.
Tom Crann's MPR story for Thursday, Report: People worried about masks, critical race theory barrage Minnesota schools with costly records requests looks at the issue. Crann reports:
Minnesota school districts are facing a barrage of records requests from parents and law firms associated with campaigns against masks and critical race theory. And these often sprawling requests are costing districts: Rochester Public Schools estimated it would cost $900,000 to fulfill one, and the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school system said it would take staff two years to complete another.
That's according to Beth Hawkins, who wrote about this for the education news site The 74 Million.
“It should be lost on no one that this is a midterm election year and tapping into parental anger about the COVID issues of the last couple of years has been politically galvanizing,” she said on All Things Considered Wednesday. “We saw that in the fall 2021 elections on the East Coast, and I can only imagine that similar tensions are being stoked here.” . . .
Hawkins considered the requests and the strength of Minnesota's data practices law in Minnesota districts flooded with Freedom of Information requests.
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? . . . .
Read the rest at The 74 Million.
Photo: Chris Picha, human resources director for Owatonna Public Schools, sits at her desk among the stacks of documents compiled of the first four keywords searched from the data request made by the local group United Patriots for Accountability. (Photo courtesy of Chris Picha). From the Owatonna People's Press story, Local group makes massive data request to Owatonna School District.
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