In Fairfax County, Virginia public schools, public records requests have more than tripled since 2016, which has led to a half million dollar budget increase to keep up. According to DCist, which took a detailed look at the increase in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and their causes, political discord over policy decisions that the school district has made has been a large influencing factor. This includes decisions that the district has made on topics like COVID and racial equity, which have been the subject of political fights nationally.
The Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) increase in funding represents a doubling of the number of staff working on responses to FOIA and Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) requests, adding the equivalent of three full time employees to manage the workload.
It combines responding to the two types of requests into a single office and also provides new technology. The $500,000 being spent is a large jump in addition to the $130,000 that is currently being spent on these requests, but a relative drop in the bucket compared to the more than $3 billion budget of FCPS. While it isn’t a line item that will break the budget, it’s also money that won’t go to address other concerns of Fairfax parents, like classroom overcrowding.
FCPS is dealing with a two-fold problem in managing these requests. The obvious issue is that their FOIA requests have tripled over the past five years, but they’re also becoming larger as broad search terms fill the pool of pages to review with things like long email chains with only a cursory relationship to the request.
This isn’t the type of budget increase that puts everyone on easy street either. FCPS communications director Helen Lloyd put things in perspective, noting, “What this [budget allocation] is going to do is make sure that we are able to do double and triple checks internally to make sure our redactions are really 100%, to make sure that our single FOIA officer is able to be sick occasionally or take some leave off. Right now that is almost impossible, given the compliance requirements and the turnaround times.”
We’re not here to discuss the best way of keeping up with these requests, we do appreciate that FCPS allocated funds for technology along with their increase in staff. Technology can improve the workflow in a number of ways from identifying where and how a search term shows up in documents to automatically redacting all instances of personally identifiable information.
Unfortunately, technology alone can’t solve all of the issues because FOIA requests involve manual gathering and decision making. Our software can intelligently find and permanently redact information for you automatically but to more fully tame these requests will require additional tactics like educating the public about filing a better, more reasonable request. The DCist article cites examples of citizens asking about large requests like seeing every syllabus in the county or vague ones asking what’s being taught in English class. Requests like these gum up the system for both the requestors and those responding from FCPS. Better requests will mean more targeted fulfillment for requesters, better turnaround times, and hopefully some breathing room for those fulfilling the requests.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.