burner.mcanonymous
Who else files FOIAs in our District?
This is one of my favorite subjects to talk about because I obsessively check this document at every board meeting: the list of other people who have filed FOIA requests. Here’s what the document looked like for May 2022, after a very heated April 2022 Board meeting.
Usually, the district gets one of fours types of requests:
Local media organizations (those that are left) asking for stuff for stories. Here in Evanston, it’s the Evanston Roundtable, Evanston Now, or the Evanston Patch.
National right-wing media organizations hunting for juicy equity-related clickbait. I’ve seen a fair number of overly broad requests from the Federalist, for example.
Paranoid Parents - Mister Kite above is very clearly some paranoid parent worried that they will be cancelled and doxxed on one of the local facebook groups. They probably denied his FOIA request for being “predecisional” (A common reason, I’ll talk about later)
Photographers - Literally every month there is a photographer FOIA’ing documents from the district related to their competitor’s contracts. You have to admire the hustle here but I suspect these requests are denied, this is a FOIA exemption.
The best part about the paranoid FOIA requesters is that they think anyone cares about their FOIA request. I am 99% sure that I am the only person who looks at this document. For instance, last month, where they didn’t even spell the name of the record I was searching properly! In this case, I am looking for records relating to a proposed contract with Dr. Quintin Bostic:
Shout out to Scott Rodgers, I hope you got your competitor’s contract. I would also be shocked if the District put out an RFP for these services at all, I haven’t seen an actual RFP from them in years (!). This is a whole different topic I will cover in a future post regarding a very expensive SQL query.
In related news, my son was hurt at school yesterday and required a lengthy visit to the ER and five stitches. It’s hard not to assign some blame to the District for not properly having enough supervision in the classrooms because they’re wasting funds on pet projects.