School bullying records cost
Want to know how employee workplace bullying complaints have been investigated in recent years by the Madison school district? It’s going to cost you. A lot.
In response to a July 17 open records request filed by Isthmus, the district said it would cost $4,154 to obtain workplace bullying complaints and investigations from the past five years. The district said the search would take two weeks of staff time to locate responsive documents in a “legacy system,” consisting of paper records.
Isthmus narrowed its request to avoid a search of paper records, asking for documents related to workplace bullying complaints and investigations since November 2021, which are stored in an electronic database.
But that comes with a hefty price tag too — $2,077, for the week of staff time the district says it would take to conduct the search, billed at $415 per day. Because the district says it won’t charge more than $30/hr for staff time in locating records, it appears the search would be conducted by more than one staffer.
Why would a search of an electronic records database be so time consuming and require so much staff effort?
“The location process, regardless of which system that is being searched, is a very manual process,” said the district’s legal services department in an unsigned email. “The database needs to be searched for the entries determined to be responsive to your request. Those responsive reports then need to be saved in PDF format. The next step, which is at no cost to you, is redacting the protected information in each individual record.”
State law says that fees for locating records must not exceed “the actual, necessary, and direct cost” of locating them. Isthmus has since further narrowed its request, asking for records only for cases that resulted in discipline. Even those records would be out of reach for many, costing $1,246. And those documents alone would not reveal how often the district ends workplace bullying investigations without discipline.
Madison Metropolitan School District does not routinely make its disciplinary records public. A bullying complaint against former schools spokesperson Tim LeMonds was made public only after Dane County Judge Rhonda Lanford ordered its release in response to an open records request by NBC15 reporter Elizabeth Wadas. The district wanted the complaint released, but LeMonds sued to try to keep it under wraps.
The results of an internal probe conducted by the school district into those allegations, as well as the results of a probe conducted by an outside firm, were released in response to open records requests from media organizations.
In her oral decision, Lanford said the public has a right to know about employee conduct and how the district conducts investigations of its staff: “There is significant public interest in the release of documents pertaining to investigations and public employees.”
