2023-11-20 - MPS School Board Renita, Joe and Bill's Public Comments

Link to the full meeting: https://youtu.be/29dOZcxQgGE

Renita's public comments:

I have submitted several FOIA requests over the past two years. There has been a consistent policy of responding with an Estimate of Fees and one was actually done for no fee, because it was very basic. Once I paid 50% of the Estimate Fee, the FOIA request was fulfilled and I would receive another FOIA Fee Itemization Form with the “Actual Fee” to be paid.

I submitted two FOIA requests on Oct. 25th. One was for the communication mentioned in the Special Meeting for Oct 10th Special Meetings. The other was for “All communications containing the words “archive.org” and/or “wayback” from August 1, 2023 thru October 25, 2023 from email, written documents or any other social communication source.” Both of these were very specific and simple queries and requests.

This time instead of being given an “Estimate Fee,” I was given an “Actual Fee.” The hourly rates have gone up by more than 100% since those from 18-24 months ago. The amount of the deposit requested also exceeded the 50% allowable by FOIA, however I only paid the actual 50% deposit.

Once I received the pdfs by email for the FOIA requests, I asked for a final Fee Form of the actual time spent on the FOIA fulfillment. I was told that the original was the Actual Fee and the balance was due. Basically there was no need to account for the actual time spent searching and redacting the information I was given.

So I am to believe that before the request was fulfilled that the Director of IT knew it would take 2 hours to do a search and produce a file and that the Director of HR knew it would take 2 hours to redact the documents, which had not yet been captured. Perhaps this Board makes it a practice to take a quote and just pay it at the end of a project with no actual accounting of the job done.

Furthermore, FOIA makes it clear that there is to be actual accounting of the time spent fulfilling the request and that the redacting time is to be rounded down, if it is a partial 15 minute increment. In this case, there were absolutely no redactions done on any of the documents that I was given. The majority of these documents were simply form emails sent by a company to everyone on their email list. There was also a 373 page document included in the search which included the phrase archive.org from the Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching. This document was labeled as documents search redacted. Why would a public document be redacted?

So I paid the $224.22 for this FOIA request, although I believe FOIA violations exist. But as previously mentioned, we can take you to court and you have plenty of legal coverage by your insurance policy, paid for with our tax dollars, to defend yourself. You are obviously willing to take that chance.