Hinsdale High School District 86 Board President Cat Greenspon apologized last week for confusion over the removal of responses to old Freedom of Information Act requests from the online public log.
While speaking at the Oct. 24 board meeting, Greenspon said the move to limit responses available in the log to just those from the current year and the prior two years was not well disseminated to the public.
“The board could have supported administrative decisions more by communicating better. We didn’t. For that I apologize, We can do better,” she said toward the end of the meeting.
But Greenspon stressed that the older records are still available to the public through the district archive.
“There is not a nefarious plot to somehow limit information to the community,” she stated. ”To be clear, the FOIA log is still available. It’s archived. It was not deleted.”
Earlier in the meeting the board discussed the FOIA log in response to criticism from some community members about being unable to access FOIA material prior to 2022 on the district online portal.
During public comment, resident Yvonne Mayer accused the district of “big brother” behavior for limiting and tracking use of the log.
But district officials said links to hundreds of the records removed from the log at the start of the year had already been rendered obsolete due to the district switching software over the years.
“Every time we’ve made a transition, links were broken from FOIA responses,” Greenspon said.
The administration, directed at a policy committee in August 2023 to address the issue, decided to make publicly available up to three years of FOIA requests and their responses, while older ones would be archived and accessible through the FOIA request process.
Keith Bockwoldt, the district’s chief information officer, said the process gives administrators the ability to update responses in cases where district policy has changed during intervening years.
“Having the archive process in place makes it more streamlined. We’re still transparent. Records are still available upon request,” Bockwoldt said.
Board member Jeff Waters, through questioning Deb Kedrowski, chief FOIA officer and administrative chief of staff, established that the district is under no legal requirement to provide a FOIA log and that many comparable school districts do not.
“We do go above and beyond most other public-facing bodies,” said Waters.
“The district releases a significant amount of information voluntarily,” Kedrowski remarked.
Board member Asma Akhras underscored the importance of protecting student privacy when releasing records that may contain personal information.
The FOIA portal is available on the board of education’s webpage, http://www.hinsdale86.diligent.community. The portal can be used to both access publicly released record and to submit FOIA requests electronically. Requests can also be emailed to Kedrowski at [email protected].
