Schools forced to divert staff amid historic flood of records requests

One Virginia school district added half a million dollars to its budget just to process public records requests. In the span of 90 days this school year, an Arkansas district received 100 such requests that cost nearly $20,000 and 400 hours of staff labor to fill.

And in Minnesota’s Owatonna Public Schools, the 61-year-old director of human resources is still plowing her way through a request from the citizens’ group United Patriots for Accountability, which in summer 2021 sought all school communications and records that mentioned 19 phrases including “Black Lives Matter,” “institutional racism” and “Whiteness.” That request has already consumed $165,000 of the district’s money and, director of human resources Chris Picha estimates, 2,200 hours of staff time, much of it drawn from her own weekends and holidays. She has generated approximately 170,000 pages of records and guesses it will take another year to complete the request.