Michigan district demands $33 million to fulfill parent’s information request

A Michigan school district is under fire after demanding $33 million to grant a mother’s legal request for information.

The Rochester Community School District (RCSD) lost a lawsuit in 2022 and paid nearly $200,000 for keeping a list of parents who’d criticized the school – and even getting one parent fired for doing so.

Elizabeth Clair, the mother of a 7th grader in the suburban Detroit district, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to make sure the district wasn’t still tracking parents.

RCSD processed her request but said she would have to pay $33 million to receive the information. 

The district claimed it would take more than 700,000 hours for an employee making $46 per hour to comb through more than 21 million emails, news site The Free Press reported, but Clair, who works in finance for an automotive company, called that “absurd.” At an annual salary of $83,000, that would be about 400 years of work to fulfill the request, she said. 

“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 told The Free Press. “I fail to understand why this district puts up such a fight against us. 

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

Another mother, Jessica Opfer, had a similar experience.  

When the district got rid of curriculum her daughter loved, Opfer was told it would cost her $25 million to find out why. 

“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. 

Education reformers expressed their shock at the situation on social media. 

“INSANE,” observed Libs of TikTok. “What is @rochcommschools trying to hide???” 

“Parents shouldn’t be priced out of knowing what’s going on inside their children’s public school district,” commented Nicki Neily, president of Parents Defending Education. 

RCSD already faced a lawsuit in 2022 for refusing to answer FOIA requests regarding its History of Ethnic and Gender Studies curriculum. 

However, it’s not the only public institution charging unaffordable fees for information. 

Last year, a Wisconsin school district charged $11,000 to a legal group seeking information about a transgender student exposing themself in the girls’ locker room. 

And a judge in Nebraska sided with an advocacy group after a public administrator presented it with a $44,000 bill to handle an open records request. 

David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida, told The Free Press he’s seen an increase in the last decade of “vexatious requests,” that are “weaponizing FOIA” as a way to “harass and punish and get back at” governments for personal or political gains. 

However, he also said local governments are becoming “increasingly secretive and exploit the exemptions in the law.”