A Mom Asked for Public School Board Records. They Charged Her $33 Million.

 Parents are suing schools to find out what their kids are learning. Schools are suing parents to shut them up. How did we get here?

Elizabeth Clair, the mother of a seventh grader in suburban Detroit, wanted to find out whether her local school district had mended its ways after it lost a lawsuit for improperly tracking disgruntled parents. Instead, she’s the one who learned a lesson: Prying information out of local governments can be very expensive—and state transparency laws don’t always help.

Back in 2022, the Rochester Community School District settled a lawsuit for nearly $200,000 with another mom who accused the district of keeping a “dossier” on parents critical of Covid lockdowns. Clair said she wanted to know what the district was doing to stem future retaliation against parents. So she filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for six months’ worth of emails containing the word anti-retaliation.

A few weeks later, she heard back from the district’s FOIA coordinator: Her request had been granted. All she had to do was pay $33,103,232.56. That’s right. More than $33 million.

The district explained that it would take an employee 717,000 hours at a rate of over $46 per hour to review the 21,514,288 emails related to her request.

“It’s just absurd,” Clair, a financial analyst for a local automotive company, 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.”

A detail of an invoice for $33 million from Rochester Community Schools to Elizabeth Clair for her public records request. (Nic Antaya for The Free Press)

Clair isn’t the only Rochester parent to be slapped with a multimillion-dollar bill from the district. 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.

Both Opfer and Clair tried to negotiate to bring down the prices. Clair tried narrowing down her request, but the district said her new ask would cost her over $1,000—a price she said “was still too high,” and a sign the district was “clearly unwilling to cooperate.”

“As taxpayers in the community, as parents who send our kids and entrust our children to these institutions every day, I think everything should be transparent,” Clair said. “I fail to understand why this district puts up such a fight against us.”

“It just leads me to think,” she continued, “what are they hiding?”

While multimillion-dollar fees to review classroom curricula are unusual, the trend of American parents using the FOIA as a weapon in their disputes with school districts has grown substantially since the Covid-19 pandemic. During school closures and lockdowns, with kids at home learning on laptops, many parents saw firsthand what they were being taught in the classroom. The fact that teachers unions were advocating for continued lockdowns—even as many parents were itching to get their kids back in school—left many moms and dads feeling that teachers weren’t prioritizing their kids’ educational needs.

As tensions rose, a growing chorus of parents started pushing back, demanding greater transparency into their kids’ education. Many were backed by right-leaning think tanks and nonprofits championing “parental rights.” And, rather than trying to rebuild trust with these parents, the schools went on the offensive.

In 2021, the National School Boards Association, which lobbies on behalf of nearly every school board in the country, labeled parents opposing school closures “domestic terrorists” and even suggested invoking the PATRIOT Act against them. In 2022, six months after Illinois lifted state lockdown restrictions, the Chicago Teachers Union defied a city order to return to in-person learning, which it said was “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”

It was during this uproar that parents started turning to local versions of the Freedom of Information Act, which grants Americans access to the records of federal agencies. Since the federal legislation was passed in 1966, each state has adopted its own laws that guarantee citizens’ access to public information—from city budgets to public school records.

Elizabeth Clair, the mother of a seventh grader in Rochester, Michigan, received a bill for $33 million for a public records request. (Nic Antaya for The Free Press)

But not all information is public. David Cuillier, the director of the Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida, said that each state’s laws allow for “a whole slew of exemptions”—such as “health records at public hospitals or grades of students in public schools, Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, that sort of thing.”

In addition, Cuillier said he’s noticed an uptick over the last decade in what he calls “vexatious requests.”

“They just ask for everything, and it would take staff a ton of hours,” he said. “It’s crippling some agencies, and they’re really struggling to figure out how to deal with that.”

Cuillier says such purposely broad requests are “weaponizing FOIA,” or “using it as a way to just harass and punish and get back at their governments” over personal feuds or for political aims.

At the same time, Cuillier said, local governments have become increasingly secretive and exploit the exemptions in the law. “It’s up to the government, their discretion, and usually they side on secrecy,” he said.

Nicole Solas, a Rhode Island mother of two and a retired lawyer, learned what can happen in this kind of conflict.

In the summer of 2021, Solas filed a request with the South Kingstown school district asking for communications between district officials relating to critical race theory and gender theory. She said she got back an estimated bill of $9,570 to fulfill it.

Solas said she felt this was a deliberate attempt to “price her out.” To avoid the high fees, she split her FOIA into 160 separate requests and filed them via the state’s Access to Public Records Act (APRA). But on June 2, 2021, the South Kingstown School Committee set up a special open session meeting. On the agenda? “Discussion/Action: Filing lawsuit against Nicole Solas to challenge filing of over 160 APRA requests.”

Solas described the public meeting to The Free Press as a “public struggle session.” A video of the meeting shows a member of the school board calling Solas’s requests a “disturbing attempt. . . to create chaos and intimidate our district.” During public comments, a black woman got up and accused Solas’s ancestors of “skinn[ing] my ancestors alive.” When Solas asked, “How does this relate to the agenda item?” another person in the audience responded, “Your whitedom!” Superintendent Michael Podraza said neither he nor anyone else in the system could comment on the dispute with Solas because the administrative staff had turned over since that time.

Two months later, the district sent Solas 6,500 pages of documents, which she says were almost entirely blacked out with redactions. In August, a local affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the country, sued Solas and the school system, claiming that she sought the personal records of district staff, which are not subject to the open records law.

In the three years since, Solas has filed three lawsuits against the district, with the help of the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank. Solas alleged that she was denied the right to attend public meetings, that the district violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments by suing her, and that it violated the state’s public records law in not responding to her requests. Solas came out on top in that last suit through a settlement in April that required the district to grant all of her public records requests, cover her legal fees, and pay a civil fine. The NEA’s suit against Solas as well as her Constitutional rights suit are still pending.

“I had to spend a lot of time repairing the reputation that my school district wanted to destroy,” Solas said of her lawsuits. She has since taken her two kids, now 5 and 8, out of public school and enrolled them in Catholic day school, which costs her and her husband around $20,000 a year for both kids, she said.

“We’re a single-income household. I don’t know how long we can afford this, but I feel like I have no option because I don’t have school choice in Rhode Island and my public school district. . . ” she said, pausing for a moment, “. . . they literally hate me.”

It’s not just culture war issues that have schools clamming up. In Utah, John Gadd, a father of six, found himself embroiled in a battle with his state school board association because he wanted to understand why his property taxes had gone up 71 percent in nine years.

Gadd knew that much of the money was going to public schools. So he filed Utah’s version of an FOIA request with the Utah School Boards Association (USBA) and his local Alpine School District.

John Gadd, a father of six in Pleasant Grove, Utah, is suing the Utah School Boards Association to find out how they’re spending his property tax dollars. (Spenser Heaps for The Free Press)

His bills for at least five FOIAs to the district added up to more than $8,200. But what concerned him most was that all four of his FOIA requests for the financial records of the USBA—an entity that provides assistance to all of the states’ school boards—were denied.

The USBA claimed it wasn’t subject to FOIA because it isn’t legally a “public association.” “Local boards of education,” it argued in court, “do not exercise control over USBA”—meaning it’s not a government entity.

Cuillier, the FOIA expert, said this defense is “a huge issue today” and a common sign of a broader problem: “the privatization of government services, which in some states allows them to hide information from the public.”

“If it’s using our money to do government services, then we ought to see how that money is spent,” Cuillier added. “If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, then it’s a duck.”

Gadd, a retired lawyer, didn’t buy USBA’s excuse either. After scouring public records, he calculated that the USBA has received over $74 million of taxpayer dollars in the last 10 years from local school districts. And, he notes, the organization is run by elected school board officials from across the state. Gadd even dug up records showing USBA’s $1.15 million headquarters is classified as a “government building” and is exempt from property taxes.

In March, he filed a lawsuit against the USBA claiming that its records should be open to the public. The case is pending, but in the meantime, Gadd reached out to all 50 state school board associations across the country. Of the 21 he’s heard from so far, only two—Washington and Oregon—said they are subject to state FOIA laws.

Back in Michigan, the fight for transparency has hit another roadblock. In March 2022, Carol Beth Litkouhi, a mother of two, sued the Rochester district after her request for the curriculum from the “History of Ethnic and Gender Studies” class was denied on the grounds that the district was “not knowingly in the possession of any records.”

“I thought, this makes no sense,” Litkouhi told The Free Press. According to the class syllabus, which Litkouhi did get a copy of, “there should be case studies and readings and assignments, and nothing was turning up.”

It turns out that Litkouhi had stumbled on another major exception in the state’s open records law. In February, a Michigan court ruled against Litkouhi, declaring that “public school teachers are not included in the definition of ‘public body’ and therefore records created and retained by individual teachers are not public records subject to disclosure for purposes of FOIA.” Last month, the Michigan Supreme Court denied Litkouhi’s appeal.

Her lawyer, Steve Delie, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan-based free market think tank, called the ruling “a massive blow to transparency.”

“It’s hard to think of something more core to public schooling than what is being taught,” Delie said. “And now that can be withheld.” He added that the ruling “goes beyond schools,” and can now empower government bodies across the state to shield records from public view.

Since filing her suit, Litkouhi said she has been labeled as “hateful” and accused of trying to “destroy public schools.”

“I’m literally just a mom responding to what has been happening to me when I asked about a class in my district’s school,” she said.

But she’s not giving up. In November 2022, Litkouhi won a seat on the Rochester Community School Board. But even then, she said, it took months to overcome objections from the board president so she could just see documents detailing the district’s legal bills. Still, she’s not giving up.

“I care about our schools too much to let this sort of thing happen—to let them slip, to let leadership at the top think that this is the way that they should treat the community,” Litkouhi said. “The lack of access to information like this is what has created all of the lack of trust to begin with.”

 

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