Allison L. Strupeck is supervisor of communication services for Community Unit School District 300 in Carpentersville and a member of the Illinois chapter of the National School Public Relations Association.
Now that Illinois updated its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) effective January 1, 2010, school boards and administrators across the state are grappling with easier public access to district records. Many are sweating this new reality, especially smaller districts with few staff and those unaccustomed to formally processing FOIA requests.
The federal Freedom of Information Act became law in 1966 and was well intended, ensuring records produced with taxpayer funds are made available to the taxpayers upon request and in a timely manner. The premise of FOIA is that public records are essentially “owned” by the public, with few exceptions.
Companion laws have since been adopted by Illinois and virtually every other state. Over time, however, FOIA has come to be felt by schools and other public bodies as a pesky thorn in their sides. When school district leaders receive a FOIA request, their reaction is not usually positive. They often feel overworked and under-resourced. They may even feel defensive or insulted.
In Community Unit School District 300, an alternative approach to FOIA has turned it from a burden into an opportunity. In September 2007, as part of a comprehensive effort to increase transparency and public trust, leaders of this diverse district of 21,000 students in Chicago’s far northwest suburbs decided to establish a FOIA web page. The premise was that the general public should be able to read any of the documents that D300 releases in response to each FOIA request, for free and conveniently.
In 2007, D300’s research of Chicago-area school districts showed that many feared making access to public records “easy” would invite an overwhelming flood of requests. The experience of D300 since that time has shown this to be a needless fear. To the contrary, the number of FOIA requests generally has declined since the online program was established, while public trust in D300 leaders has increased, according to annual survey data.
Here’s how the program works: The responsive documents are posted to the D300 FOIA web page as a PDF within two business days of staff completing the request. Each posting starts with the district’s response letter, which identifies the requestor and recaps what document(s) was requested. If D300 opts not to release a requested document and has legal justification, that fact is stated in the cover letter. Likewise, if a record does not exist, the cover letter makes a note. All responses to all D300 FOIA requests dating back to September 2007 stay on the FOIA web page — forever.
The D300 FOIA web page provides information on appealing a response, as well as links to the Illinois Attorney General’s Public Guides on understanding FOIA and the Open Meetings Act. The web page also shows FOIA status reports, as provided to the D300 school board at each board meeting. These reports list the FOIA requests that were recently received and those recently completed (and how many staff hours it took to complete each request).
The thinking behind D300’s online FOIA program is to get the most use of the effort spent processing FOIA requests, by sharing the results with the general community. Any time any district receives a FOIA request, staff must research the records and provide a formal response. The only additional step required in the D300 model is to post the results to the district website, which takes five minutes or less. In fact, staff actually saves time in not having to re-process requests for the same popular documents, since they are already on the FOIA web page. In D300’s experience, the public relations benefit of these five minutes well exceeds the time spent.
Users of the D300 online FOIA program love it. The FOIA web page has received thousands of hits — far more than just those who requested the records. In 2009, D300 surveyed those who filed requests, a diverse group that included journalists, lawyers, vendors and citizens. Almost everyone said the online FOIA program made D300 more accountable.
One respondent wrote: “As a reporter covering the school district, I found the online FOIA program allowed me and the rest of the public to see what kinds of documents the public was asking of the district, and to see if the district adequately responded to that request.”
A newspaper editorial confirmed the program payoff, stating: “Public bodies exist to serve the public. To serve the public they need to conduct business in public and provide easy access to information. District 300 appears to be doing that, and we commend the district for it.”
But perhaps of greatest note, 100 percent of those surveyed strongly agreed that all school districts should put their FOIA responses on their websites.
To see how the program works, go to www.d300.org/about-us/freedom-information-act. Click “online responses” on the left to see the archive of D300 responses to FOIA requests.