School Smacks Student Journalist with $8K Bill for Public Records

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A student journalist who writes for The Perspective, the online student newspaper that serves the three high schools in Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, recently got an expensive lesson about the cost of the First Amendment.

Salem High School student Chris Robbins was smacked with an $8,000 bill for a Freedom of Information Act request from the district after he set out to research why access is blocked on school computers to certain websites.

Robbins asked the district to turn over information about what websites are blocked and how decisions are made on blocking, as well as teacher and staff e-mails relating to appeals to access blocked sites.

When Robbins received the $7,917.15 bill, “we thought it was a typo,” journalism teacher and newspaper adviser Leola Gee told The Detroit News.

The district said the bill represented the cost to have an employee who earns about $45 an hour pore over the e-mails of 85 staff members who had appealed blocked websites, a task the district said would devour about 176 employee hours.

The student journalist appealed.

The district’s response?

A new cost estimate was issued, but it was even higher, for $8,806. A full accounting is found on The Detroit News.

The district said the re-calculated bill would represent 170 hours versus the originally estimated 176 hours, but said the person retrieving the information earns $49.95 an hour, rather than the $44.92 previously cited.

The Perspective backed off in a compromise, withdrawing its request for the teacher e-mails. The district turned over the other information Robbins requested free of charge.

Michigan’s FOIA law was amended last January to reduce prohibitive fees. Copying costs can’t exceed a dime a page, and government bodies must assign the task of retrieving information to the lowest-paid employee with the skills to do so. People seeking records may also sue if they consider fees to be exorbitant, among other changes to the law.

At the time, Dirk Milliman of the Michigan Press Association said the changes involved some compromise, but told the Detroit Free Press they address “two most major concerns expressed by our members with regard to FOIA in Michigan: costs and delays.”

The changes took effect July 1.

Michael Reitz, executive director of Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy and an attorney, told The Detroit News that “a big bill for FOIA requests … effectively turns into a denial of the request.”

In a statement, Plymouth-Canton schools spokesman said the district followed the law:

“Our number one priority as a school is the education of our students, and student FOIA requests can be an excellent learning opportunity for the leaders of tomorrow whom we are educating today. The FOIA process is often not well-understood by those who have not previously used it, and it is understandable that pupils may not be aware that Section 4 of the Act provides the structure for fees associated with producing records.

“When it becomes apparent that producing a thorough response to a request may require significant labor, and hence potentially significant costs, the district may engage with the requestor to explain the forecasted fees, and work to provide as much information as possible without incurring those fees.”

A former columnist for The Detroit News, Gee isn’t a stranger to the FOIA process, having filed her first request for information in the 1970s.

“Students have a right to ask government entities for public documents without getting a punitive response,” Gee said. “The hubris they’ve displayed is mind-boggling.”

Robbins’ story is planned for publication on Dec. 18.