MCPS Charging Parental Rights Group $18K to Fulfill Public Information Request

[Anonymous]

Why on earth should our tax dollars be used for this nonsense? I fully support their right to FOIA documents, but obviously they should pay for the months of work this will require.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The request was probably too broad. If it takes 440 hours they were probably requesting every document in the system to be viewed or scanned in some way.

You can see the substance of the request at the link. They’re asking for emails containing “opt-out” and "opt out" sent from 30 addresses over a 6 month period.

That's an easy search to run on the back-end. Manual processing time would obviously depend on the number of emails, but I'd be surprised if there are more than a thousand or so. Probably much less after deduplication.

I've done FOIAs ordered if magnitude bigger than that. And we didn't charge, despite the FOIA being obviously malicious.

I fully support charging, but $18k is ridiculous.

Whether or not the FOIA request is "malicious" is irrelevant. I work for a federal agency and review FOIA responses. We don't hand out free FOIA responses if we feel like it. There are specified criteria for a fee waiver. If a request does not meet the criteria, then the requester must pay search and review fees if they exceed a nominal amount (every agency is different, but generally anything up to $25-50 is provided free of charge). Search and review fees are based on the grade level of the staff performing the work; and hourly rates for attorney staff or managerial staff are obviously much higher than for clerical or administrative staff. For a FOIA of this magnitude you would have staff at all levels doing the work. I'm an attorney so I don't get involved in searches, but I've had reviews that have taken a week and I am required to report all of those hours to the FOIA office for billing purposes. When you consider the number of staff hours devoted to this, $18,000 does not seem unreasonable (also, as many others have pointed out, this is only the initial estimate and surely the parties will work together to narrow the search).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So much for MCPS transparency. This charge seems excessive:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/montgomery-county-public-schools-charges-parental-rights-group-18k-fulfill-public-records-request.amp

"Parental rights group" [sic]. More like the "It's intolerable for my child to be exposed to a book where a girl's uncle marries a man, even though my child has classmates with LGBTQ+ family members, and somehow that's not intolerable but a book is" group. Let's call them the anti-book group.

Now, does MCPS routinely use fees as a barrier for Public Information Act requests? Yes, they do. That is well known. On the other hand, we don't know what the anti-book group is asking for. If the anti-book group is asking for records where MCPS will have to do a lot of legal review because of the Public Information Act's exceptions to disclosure, then yes, it's perfectly valid for MCPS to charge for a lot of legal review. The Public Information Act provides options for the anti-book group:

1. Appeal the fee to the Public Information Act Compliance Board.
2. Ask the Public Information Act Ombudsperson to mediate.
3. Sue MCPS.

Or they can run to national Fox News. Which doesn't seem like a very effective strategy for a group that is trying to distance itself from the Christian supremacist hate group M4L, but they didn't ask for my advice.

100% Bravo and Bravo to MCPS for making these groups use some of their cash. Trust me these hate groups got deep pockets 18k nothing for them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So much for MCPS transparency. This charge seems excessive:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/montgomery-county-public-schools-charges-parental-rights-group-18k-fulfill-public-records-request.amp

"Parental rights group" [sic]. More like the "It's intolerable for my child to be exposed to a book where a girl's uncle marries a man, even though my child has classmates with LGBTQ+ family members, and somehow that's not intolerable but a book is" group. Let's call them the anti-book group.

Now, does MCPS routinely use fees as a barrier for Public Information Act requests? Yes, they do. That is well known. On the other hand, we don't know what the anti-book group is asking for. If the anti-book group is asking for records where MCPS will have to do a lot of legal review because of the Public Information Act's exceptions to disclosure, then yes, it's perfectly valid for MCPS to charge for a lot of legal review. The Public Information Act provides options for the anti-book group:

1. Appeal the fee to the Public Information Act Compliance Board.
2. Ask the Public Information Act Ombudsperson to mediate.
3. Sue MCPS.

Or they can run to national Fox News. Which doesn't seem like a very effective strategy for a group that is trying to distance itself from the Christian supremacist hate group M4L, but they didn't ask for my advice.

100% Bravo and Bravo to MCPS for making these groups use some of their cash. Trust me these hate groups got deep pockets 18k nothing for them.

What hate groups?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The request was probably too broad. If it takes 440 hours they were probably requesting every document in the system to be viewed or scanned in some way.

You can see the substance of the request at the link. They’re asking for emails containing “opt-out” and "opt out" sent from 30 addresses over a 6 month period.

That's an easy search to run on the back-end. Manual processing time would obviously depend on the number of emails, but I'd be surprised if there are more than a thousand or so. Probably much less after deduplication.

I've done FOIAs ordered if magnitude bigger than that. And we didn't charge, despite the FOIA being obviously malicious.

I fully support charging, but $18k is ridiculous.

Whether or not the FOIA request is "malicious" is irrelevant. I work for a federal agency and review FOIA responses. We don't hand out free FOIA responses if we feel like it. There are specified criteria for a fee waiver. If a request does not meet the criteria, then the requester must pay search and review fees if they exceed a nominal amount (every agency is different, but generally anything up to $25-50 is provided free of charge). Search and review fees are based on the grade level of the staff performing the work; and hourly rates for attorney staff or managerial staff are obviously much higher than for clerical or administrative staff. For a FOIA of this magnitude you would have staff at all levels doing the work. I'm an attorney so I don't get involved in searches, but I've had reviews that have taken a week and I am required to report all of those hours to the FOIA office for billing purposes. When you consider the number of staff hours devoted to this, $18,000 does not seem unreasonable (also, as many others have pointed out, this is only the initial estimate and surely the parties will work together to narrow the search).

I wish my agency would take a harder line regarding fee waivers.... We tend to grant them to everyone. I strenuously objected to granting it when a private individual requested 100,000s of documents created over a 12 year period, but they did... To make matters worse, the professional mission staff at the agency are stuck doing not only the searches, but processing the records, too.

Anyway, given that this is scoped to email sent over a relatively short period from specific addresses with a couple specific search terms, it doesn't seem like there should be a large number of responsive records. The estimate of three hours of review by an attorney seems perfectly reasonable, but I don't see how this could possibly take 440 hours of time by a communications specialist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So their request is so broad it will take someone almost three months of full time work to process it.

I’m glad MCPS are charging them $18k (and I am sure there is some right wing plutocrat willing to pay it- they probably only whined about it because they could complain about MCPS while fundraising off it at the same time)

These “parents rights” groups need to get the eff out of MCPS.

These "entitled MCPS taxpayer-paid" employees need to get the eff out of MCPS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The request was probably too broad. If it takes 440 hours they were probably requesting every document in the system to be viewed or scanned in some way.

You can see the substance of the request at the link. They’re asking for emails containing “opt-out” and "opt out" sent from 30 addresses over a 6 month period.

That's an easy search to run on the back-end. Manual processing time would obviously depend on the number of emails, but I'd be surprised if there are more than a thousand or so. Probably much less after deduplication.

I've done FOIAs ordered if magnitude bigger than that. And we didn't charge, despite the FOIA being obviously malicious.

I fully support charging, but $18k is ridiculous.

I agree. I have had my emails searched multiple times for FOIA requests. They send over a paralegal to do a search on the key words on my Outlook and extract all the responsive emails. I can't recall it ever taking more than five or so minutes. Someone then reviews to see what should be deleted. That is more time consuming.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The request was probably too broad. If it takes 440 hours they were probably requesting every document in the system to be viewed or scanned in some way.

You can see the substance of the request at the link. They’re asking for emails containing “opt-out” and "opt out" sent from 30 addresses over a 6 month period.

That's an easy search to run on the back-end. Manual processing time would obviously depend on the number of emails, but I'd be surprised if there are more than a thousand or so. Probably much less after deduplication.

I've done FOIAs ordered if magnitude bigger than that. And we didn't charge, despite the FOIA being obviously malicious.

I fully support charging, but $18k is ridiculous.

I agree. I have had my emails searched multiple times for FOIA requests. They send over a paralegal to do a search on the key words on my Outlook and extract all the responsive emails. I can't recall it ever taking more than five or so minutes. Someone then reviews to see what should be deleted. That is more time consuming.

These days they would typically run the search on the Google Workspace or Outlook server using e-discovery tools. You just tell it what accounts to search, the date range, and the list of keywords. You get back a PST file containing the responsive emails, which can be filtered from there.

They should be able to run the entire search in less than 10 minutes.

The time-consuming part would be processing the emails returned, but it shouldn't take more than a minute or two to read each email looking for confidential material.

440 hours is absurd.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They have to retrieve all of the emails, put all of the files into a searchable database, search the database for the key words, review to make sure there is nothing privileged and confidential or under attorney-client privilege, and produce all of the documents. That cost seems pretty reasonable.

Lots of us could do this in a week, except for attorney review.

The privilege review is the time consuming part.

Not according to the MCPS estimate. 3 hours for legal review. 440 hours for a communications specialist to process the emails.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They have to retrieve all of the emails, put all of the files into a searchable database, search the database for the key words, review to make sure there is nothing privileged and confidential or under attorney-client privilege, and produce all of the documents. That cost seems pretty reasonable.

No, it’s not. I’m a former federal attorney / general counsel and the estimate is absurd. Most of the request is done via keywords and tech/AI with limited actual human hours involved.

[Anonymous]

Some of you are not very tech savvy….


Good for this group. I’m following and will send them money if they need it. I’m sick of MCPS schools cramming political ideology down the throats of parents in grade school.

[Anonymous]

I fully support the MCPS position on curriculum, but they shouldn’t be using MPIA’s cost recovery provisions to deny access to public records by apparently coming up with the least efficient way to search for records. I can only assume they’re printing out every email from the listed individuals and having an 80-year-old with poor eyesight search through them manually. That’s the only way you could get 3 months of work from this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I fully support the MCPS position on curriculum, but they shouldn’t be using MPIA’s cost recovery provisions to deny access to public records by apparently coming up with the least efficient way to search for records. I can only assume they’re printing out every email from the listed individuals and having an 80-year-old with poor eyesight search through them manually. That’s the only way you could get 3 months of work from this.

They do this to everyone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I fully support the MCPS position on curriculum, but they shouldn’t be using MPIA’s cost recovery provisions to deny access to public records by apparently coming up with the least efficient way to search for records. I can only assume they’re printing out every email from the listed individuals and having an 80-year-old with poor eyesight search through them manually. That’s the only way you could get 3 months of work from this.

They do this to everyone.

That doesn’t make it better.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I fully support the MCPS position on curriculum, but they shouldn’t be using MPIA’s cost recovery provisions to deny access to public records by apparently coming up with the least efficient way to search for records. I can only assume they’re printing out every email from the listed individuals and having an 80-year-old with poor eyesight search through them manually. That’s the only way you could get 3 months of work from this.

They do this to everyone.

That doesn’t make it better.

It’s MCPS’s way of discouraging access to something that it wants to hide. On a much smaller scale, I’ve been through this type of issue with MCPS before and it’s total BS by the school system.

Instead of fighting parents and devising ways to try to hide documents, they should be working with the community to make our schools better.