School districts did a lot of misbehavin’ after the COVID thing started. The Rochester Community School District in Michigan was keeping dossiers on parents who were critical of COVID lockdowns. Elena Dinverno sued and was awarded S190,000.00. No one else was suing so the open question was how many parents and who?
[Elizabeth] Clair said she wanted to know what the district was doing to stem future retaliation against parents. So she filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for six months’ worth of emails containing the word anti-retaliation.
A few weeks later, she heard back from the district’s FOIA coordinator: Her request had been granted. All she had to do was pay $33,103,232.56. That’s right. More than $33 million.
The district explained that it would take an employee 717,000 hours at a rate of over $46 per hour to review the 21,514,288 emails related to her request.
The Rochester Michigan School District reminds me of Nashua. Let’s see. What can we do or say so we don’t have to release these public records? And then they wait to be sued, knowing that in most cases, the interested party can’t afford it. It is one of a handful of reasons objected to HB1002 on principle without regard to the changes. You opened a door, and claiming it was to stem abuse is no excuse. The government, especially the local government, abuses citizens as fast and often as it likes. In the hands of the wrong legislative majority, it will expand to punish citizens and make records inaccessible.
The Michigan case is an exaggerated example of this, but it operates on the same premise. We can’t possibly search all these emails with a defined search term. We need an overplayed monkey to sift them like the evidence locker in the 1930s and 1930s-period drama, absent the Chinese or pizza takeout containers. And no Starbucks.
33 million, please.
“As taxpayers in the community, as parents who send our kids and entrust our children to these institutions every day, I think everything should be transparent,” Clair said. “I fail to understand why this district puts up such a fight against us.”
“It just leads me to think,” she continued, “what are they hiding?”
From parents being labeled as domestic terrorists to being sued by teachers’ unions, the culture has become increasingly cloistered, which is suspicious when you consider that public schools, in general, burn through more taxpayer dollars than any other feature of local government while consistently producing the worst overall outcomes.
Your local situation may or may not be similar, but this is an example of what can happen when you let the anti-transparency bureaucracy get its foot in the door. This is why we will forever oppose efforts to prevent transparency by giving the government any loophole in public records law.
Their baseline inclination is to hide things, knowing they can get away with it. Any legislative action should not enable this.
