Costly data demands leave some Minnesota school districts frustrated

The first data request showed up on Cathy Moen’s desk in July. It came from an anonymous email address and was signed only “good citizen.” Whoever they were, they wanted data from the Hastings Public Schools. A lot of it.

Other queries followed. “Good citizen” wanted detail on all reimbursements made to district employees and elected officials, information on all policy discussions — and all district communications regarding “critical race theory,” inclusivity and equality.

Moen, the district’s director of human resources, spent weeks this fall watching the pile of boxes in her office grow. They were filled with reams of meticulously gathered and printed district data. She guessed just one of the requests involved at  least 100,000 pages that would need to be reviewed by a district attorney — incurring legal fees — and made available for the requester to view. 

Asked during a recent school board meeting to quantify how much time and money it would cost the district to fulfill the requests, Moen couldn’t answer. 

Leaders in other districts say they’ve been similarly inundated the past few years with what sometimes appear to be politically motivated data requests that are massively expensive for the district, difficult to decipher and sometimes originate from out of state.

It’s vexed them to the point where they may seek changes in the coming legislative session to the state’s Government Data Practices Act.

The Owatonna People’s Press last month reported the Owatonna school district spent $300,000 to fulfill a data request related to an equity plan and assessment and a word search of district correspondence containing words and phrases such as “Black Lives Matter,” “systemic racism” and “critical race theory.”

Carrie Tate, board chair of the Hastings Public Schools, said while she supports the right of the public to access and review district data, she remains concerned about the cost of fulfilling large and vague requests.

“A person has the ability — or a group of people have the ability — to severely bankrupt a district with these requests,” she said.

‘Runaway train’

Rochester Public Schools has seen a steady stream of public data requests since the pandemic. One was so large, Superintendent Kent Pekel estimates it cost the district nearly $1 million to fulfill. 

“Literally, they wanted, for instance, a review of every course with, quote, ‘a sociological theme for issues of equity.’ That’s not a keyword search,” Pekel said. 

In the last year, the district has also received requests from companies like SmartProcure, a for-profit organization based in Florida that aggregates data from local, state and federal governments. The district added a half-time position to its payroll just to work on data requests. Occasionally they’re able to recoup costs but it still takes time and work to estimate the invoices. 

“It’s been kind of a steady drumbeat that, in my view and in the view of our school board, risks becoming maybe a runaway train if we don’t find some ways to better define what the purpose of these data requests is in the public interest,” Pekel said. 

Last month, the Rochester school board formally asked the Minnesota School Boards Association to seek changes to the Minnesota Data Practices Act to require requesters provide their full legal name and address and let the district recover reasonable costs of fulfilling data requests for expenses such as supplies, equipment, staff time and legal consultation.

“I believe that the public interest is served by both journalistic and citizen data requests,” Pekel said. “But what's happening is — not just the number of them, but the scope of them — is becoming prohibitive.”

The Minnesota School Boards Association has not been tracking the issue, but executive director Kirk Schneidawind said he noticed a spike in districts receiving large data requests during the pandemic.

“There was just some really intense requests — more than normal,” Schneidawind said. “It was, in large part, around critical race theory, and … perhaps there might be some questions about academics, like what is being taught.” 

‘Give them the data they want’

Public data advocates sympathize with districts struggling with massive data requests but they don’t believe changing the law is the answer.

“You can’t understand what your government is doing unless you can get access to information that the government has about what it’s doing, and that ought to be just part of the reality of government,” said Don Gemberling, spokesperson for the Minnesota Coalition on Government Information, a volunteer council focused on education and government transparency.

Gemberling, who helped draft and administer the Data Practices Act, said he believes the law needs to preserve the ability of data requesters to remain anonymous in order to guard against intimidation. More transparency is the solution to address heightened community fears about what’s happening in schools, he added.

“Figure out what’s the real popular stuff, and you put it online,” Gemberling said. “Part of what’s happening (is)...they’re trying to get information out of school districts because (requesters) think there’s all kinds of terrible things going on inside schools … and the way to deal with them is to not do weird responses. Give them the data they want if it’s public.”

Current law, he added, allows districts to recoup costs of providing data to those who ask for it. School systems, he noted, can also seek prepayment on certain requests. That’s built into the statute as a way “to try and control … what might be bad behavior.”

Back in Hastings, it doesn’t feel that simple.

Hastings superintendent Tammy Champa said the data requests started during the pandemic and haven’t stopped.

“Prior to COVID, I didn’t have any data requests,” she said. “You may occasionally have somebody calling and asking for some data or information about something, but to have an official data request, FOIA, that type of thing, really, I started to see them during COVID. Since then, I think it’s gotten a little bit more popular, or just a way to, I don’t know, impact the district.”

The anonymity of requesters can make it that much more difficult  to understand exactly what people want from the district, she added. “CRT means a lot of different things … and we don’t necessarily know exactly what their request or area is, so it makes (the required response from the district) that much larger.” 

Moen’s seen that firsthand in the dozens of boxes that piled up in her office to satisfy the “good citizen” requests.

“Getting the information here, spending the time to print documents and get them over to me and searching their files,” she said, “there’s a ton of time invested in these data requests that you don’t see the dollars for because it’s all district staff time, but it is a cost because I’m not doing something else when I’m working on data requests.”

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