Diversity, Equity, Inclusion materials (Schalmont 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 recent FOIL request, providing a sole contract for "The Equity Prof", who was contracted to provide various DEI training, along with agendas for professional development workshops funded by the district to promote DEI. While I appreciate the records that were provided, I have reason to believe that some responsive records may be missing from the materials provided.

Specifically, in Section V.B of the contract with the consultant who provided social justice and anti-racism training to the school district, it states that "The CONSULTANT will provide the INSTITUTE with electronic copies of materials to be used in conjunction with the educational session. After the educational session is completed, such materials can be used by the INSTITUTE as reference, but are not to be used in any future trainings, workshops, or educational sessions."

I believe that the electronic copies of materials used in conjunction with the educational session are missing from the records that were provided. These materials are important to my request as they would help me to fully understand the extent of the training and materials used in the educational session.

In this regard, I would like to bring your attention to advisory opinion FOIL-AO-17829 dated September 28, 2009, issued by the staff of the Committee on Open Government, which provides guidance on disclosure of commercial confidential documents under FOIL. The opinion states that a promise or agreement regarding confidentiality cannot be sustained when the grounds for denial of access appearing in the Freedom of Information Law cannot justifiably be asserted.

Additionally, there is mention of questions that were to be answered by attendees or hypotheticals such as:
- What do we know?
- What do we need to know?
- What are we looking forward to with this work?
- What concerns do you have about this work?

Please provide any notes, meeting minutes or artifacts created during this session, that attempt to answer these questions, in addition to the presenters materials provided or made available to the district.

Therefore, I respectfully request that you conduct a more comprehensive search for these materials and provide any additional records that may be responsive to my request, consistent with applicable exemptions under FOIL. If any of the documents are being withheld on the basis of an exemption, I request that you provide me with a detailed explanation of the reasons for the exemption.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to your prompt response.

I am writing to appeal your response to my recent FOIL request, in which I sought 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

My request also included 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. Furthermore, I requested 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. Additionally, I requested 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).

Your response only provided a contract and agendas for professional development workshops, without providing any information regarding competitive bids or communications with vendors. I believe that this is inadequate, given the scope of my request.

Therefore, I respectfully request that you conduct a more comprehensive search for any additional records that may be responsive to my request, including communications with vendors and any competitive bids that were solicited for the services, consistent with applicable exemptions under FOIL. If any of the documents are being withheld on the basis of an exemption, I request that you provide me with a detailed explanation of the reasons for the exemption.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. I look forward to your prompt response.