Diversity, Equity, Inclusion materials (Ravena-coeymans-selkirk Central School District)

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the New York Freedom of Information Law, I hereby request the following records:

All materials and correspondence between the district Board of Education, district Administration, district Equity Committee or Office, Faculty, Staff, Third Party Contractors and Consultants related to the following terms, subjects or concepts between April 2021 to the date this request is fulfilled:

Race
Anti-racism
Racism
Equity
Culturally Responsive
Decolonize
Diversity
Implicit Bias
Intersectionality
Microaggression
Oppression
Patriarchy
People of Color
Privilege(d)
Safe Space
Social Justice
Tokenism
White Supremacy

This request shall also include any teachings of such curriculum mentioned above by any faculty employed within the school district, third party contractors, consultants or other third parties invited by the school or agents of the school.

This request shall also include any documents or materials accessed by the school district, but stored on third party service providers on behalf of the district, and links/references/credentials for access to such materials if present in emails or electronic systems or files stored in browser caches, cloud storage (i.e. Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc), or local hard drives managed by the district. This request shall also include non-school email and texting services used by the district, board, administration and faculty to conduct activities and business related to the school district (i.e. Gmail, Outlook, etc).

This request shall also include any training material or supplemental information provided to district staff, whether required or suggested.

Please keep in mind, pursuant to the Retention and Disposition Schedule for New York Local Government Records (LGS-01): Any record listed in the LGS-01 Schedule for which a Freedom of Information (FOIL) request has been received should not be destroyed until that request has been answered and until any potential appeal is made and resolved, even if the retention period of the record has passed.

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 5 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Jackson Parker

Thank you for your response to my Freedom of Information Law request dated March 6, 2023. I understand the concerns regarding the breadth of my original request and would like to provide clarification to help narrow the scope and make it more manageable for the Ravena-coeymans-selkirk Central School District to process.

Please consider the following modifications to my original request:

Timeframe: Limit the search to records and correspondence from January 1, 2022, to the date this revised request is processed.

Search Terms: Instead of the 18 original search terms, please focus on the following eight terms:
a. Equity
b. Culturally Responsive
c. Implicit Bias
d. People of Color
e. Social Justice
f. Diversity
g. Decolonize
h. Intersectionality

Correspondence: Focus the search on correspondence between the district Board of Education, district Administration, and district Equity Committee or Office only. Exclude correspondence between faculty, staff, third party contractors, and consultants unless they are directly communicating with the aforementioned groups.

I hope these clarifications and modifications will make the request more manageable for your team. I appreciate your assistance in locating and providing any responsive records to this revised request.

Dear Superintendent Bailey,

I am writing to appeal the denial of my Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request dated April 14, 2023. In this request, I sought all materials and correspondence between various stakeholders in the Ravena-Coeymans-Selkirk Central School District related to certain terms and concepts from January 1, 2022, to the date the request is fulfilled.

The Records Access Officer, Suzanne Starr, denied my request on the grounds that it did not reasonably describe the records being requested and that it would impose an unreasonable effort and expense on the District to fulfill the request due to its broad scope.

However, I wish to note that there are legal precedents and advisory opinions that support the fulfillment of such a request. For instance, in the case of Data Tree, LLC v. Romaine, the court held that a request was not overly burdensome merely because it involved a large number of documents. The court stated that the volume of documents requested is not a factor to be considered in determining whether a request reasonably describes the records sought. Additionally, the New York State Committee on Open Government has issued several advisory opinions affirming that the volume of records requested is not a valid basis for denial.

I believe that my request reasonably described the records sought and that the District has an obligation under FOIL to review the records, determine their responsiveness, and redact them as necessary. I am willing to work with the District to potentially narrow the scope of my request, but I maintain that my initial request was valid and should be fulfilled.

I respectfully request that you review this matter and overturn the decision to deny my FOIL request. I look forward to your response within the statutory timeframe.