$33M for a FOIA Request! What Is This MI District Hiding?

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In 2022, a Rochester community school district in suburban Detroit settled a lawsuit for nearly $200,000 with a mom who claimed the district was keeping a dossier on parents who opposed COVID lockdowns. Another mom was given a bill for $33 million to respond to a FOIA request.

The school is back in the news.

This Michigan mother wanted to follow up and see what the district was doing to stem future retaliation against parents, so she filed a FOIA Freedom of Information request. The district granted her request with a hefty price tag. That school district claimed that it would require reviewing approximately 21 1/2 million emails, and that would take an estimated 717,000 hours of labor at a rate of $46 an hour.

The parent told the Free Press: “For one person making, like, $83,000 a year, it would take them, like, 400 years to fulfill that FOIA request.”

She’s not the only one. Other parents have been hit with multi-million dollar fees to review classroom curriculum, which begs the question, What are they hiding?

Jessica Opfer was told it would cost more than $25 million to fulfill her request for records about why the district got rid of a language arts curriculum that her eldest daughter loved. Lori Grein, a spokesperson for Rochester Community Schools, said both Clair’s and Opfer’s requests required diverting large amounts of staff time to review documents for material that wasn’t public and, therefore, had to be redacted.

“I obviously wasn’t going to pay these exorbitant fees, and at this point, I felt I had hit a brick wall,” Opfer told The Free Press.

It is happening in other areas of the countryread on at The Free Press.


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