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A Michigan school district is facing scrutiny over its attempts to charge parents millions of dollars for access to otherwise public records.

The story begins in 2021, when parent Elena Dinverno sued Rochester Community School District officials for, one, having compiled a dossier of parents who’d complained about the district’s draconian COVID policies, and two, having called her workplace to get her fired.

Early the following year, the school settled the suit for $188,750.

Later that same year, another parent, Elizabeth Clair, submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the district asking “for six months’ worth of emails containing the word anti-retaliation,” according to The Free Press (TheFP).

“Clair said she wanted to know what the district was doing to stem future retaliation against parents,” TheFP notes.

A couple of weeks later, district officials replied. They said her request had been granted but that she’d need to pay a $33,103,232.56 fee for access to the pertinent records.

“The District estimates that answering your request will require that it review approximately 21,514,288 emails,” officials wrote in a letter to Clair. “As itemized in detail on the attached cost-estimating sheet, this search would cost approximately $33,103,232.56 to complete.”

“In accord with MCL 15.234(8), the District requests that you provide a good-faith deposit of 1⁄2 the estimated cost of fulfilling your request, which is $16,551,616.28. If you choose to provide this deposit, the District will provide you an estimated timeline for the completion of your request,” they added.

The attached cost-estimating sheet showed that it would allegedly take a district employee 717,000 hours at $46/hour to review all 21 million emails.

Clair was stunned.

“It’s just absurd,” she told TheFP. “For one person making, like, $83,000 a year, it would take them, like, 400 years to fulfill that FOIA request.”

Clair reportedly isn’t the only parent who’s been exorbitantly billed for access to basic public records.

“Jessica Opfer was told it would cost more than $25 million to fulfill her request for records about why the district got rid of a language arts curriculum that her eldest daughter loved,” TheFP notes.

Lori Grein, a district spokesperson, claimed to TheFP that both requests for access to records would allegedly require staff to be diverted away from their regular duties for a large amount of time.

“I obviously wasn’t going to pay these exorbitant fees, and at this point, I felt I had hit a brick wall,” Opfer recalled.

Both ladies tried negotiating, and to the district’s credit, it did eventually reduce its asking price for Clair’s request down to $1,000 — though she argued that this price “was still too high” and thus a clear sign that district officials were “clearly unwilling to cooperate.”

“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, what are they hiding?”

All this comes amid an influx of FOIA requests being filed by parents in the wake of the COVID pandemic that, as previously reported, was so badly mishandled by many school districts,

One of the impetuses for this trend was what the National School Boards Association did in 2021 when it smeared anti-lockdown parents as “domestic terrorists” and suggested using the PATRIOT Act against them.

Another impetus was with the Chicago Teachers Union, which in 2022 defied a city order to end the COVID lockdown and resume in-person schooling because the order was allegedly “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

“It was during this uproar that parents started turning to local versions of the Freedom of Information Act, which grants Americans access to the records of federal agencies,” TheFP notes. “Since the federal legislation was passed in 1966, each state has adopted its own laws that guarantee citizens’ access to public information—from city budgets to public school records.”

Vivek Saxena
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