Evergreen Public Schools - School Shooting

Mr. Keplar,

In response to your October 27, 2023 public records request for:

"a complete electronic copy of all documents, internal communications, and communications with the Board of Directors, from the time period October 19th through October 20th, 2023, pertaining to the shooting in the McKenzie stadium parking lot. This request is to include all communications from Superintendent John Boyd discussing plans to notify the community, parents and staff of the shooting."

You may know that state law contemplates that a public agency like our School District should fulfill simple records requests within five business days. However, under that law additional time is granted when: (1) The agency needs to obtain clarification as to the scope of records being sought; (2) Simply locating and gathering the records will take significant time; (3) The agency must review the records once gathered, to identify and excise (or "redact") any content that is protected from disclosure; and/or (4) To give an opportunity for persons named in the records, or to whom they pertain, to seek imposition of judicial limitations on the scope of records that will be disclosed to you, based on assertion(s) of personal privacy rights they may decide to initiate.

At least reasons (1) and (2) apply to your request, requiring more time for the processing and fulfillment of it. As to our need for clarification, the first segment of your request seeks documents, internal communications, and communications with the Board of Directors "pertaining to" the shooting in the McKenzie stadium parking lot. Since reasonable persons can disagree on what records do and do not "pertain to" any particular topic, we are left guessing about the parameters of what you are asking for in processing your request. To that end, if you were to clarify that by the first segment of your request you seek documents, internal communications, and communications with the Board of Directors "directly and fairly discussing" reports of shots fired in the vicinity of McKenzie Stadium on October 19, 2023, I am reasonably confident we will be able to understand what you seek. Please let me know if you are agreeable to that clarification.

Finally, records disclosure laws require that I provide you our best estimate as to when we will have records ready for production to you. I anticipate that we'll be able to produce the records you seek on or before December 2, 2023. That is indeed an estimate. If it develops that a materially shorter or longer timeframe is necessary, I'll let you know. Should you have any questions or concerns about the foregoing or about any other aspect of our processing of your request as we proceed to work towards fulfilling it, of course do not hesitate to let me know.

Thank you,

Eliza Cornelison
Paralegal | Human Resources
Evergreen Public Schools
360-604-4049 | eliza.cornelison@evergreenps.org<mailto:eliza.cornelison@evergreenps.org>

Mr. Keplar,

In response to your October 27, 2023 public records request for:

"a complete electronic copy of all documents, internal communications, and communications with the Board of Directors, from the time period October 19th through October 20th, 2023, pertaining to the shooting in the McKenzie stadium parking lot. This request is to include all communications from Superintendent John Boyd discussing plans to notify the community, parents and staff of the shooting."

You may know that state law contemplates that a public agency like our School District should fulfill simple records requests within five business days. However, under that law additional time is granted when: (1) The agency needs to obtain clarification as to the scope of records being sought; (2) Simply locating and gathering the records will take significant time; (3) The agency must review the records once gathered, to identify and excise (or "redact") any content that is protected from disclosure; and/or (4) To give an opportunity for persons named in the records, or to whom they pertain, to seek imposition of judicial limitations on the scope of records that will be disclosed to you, based on assertion(s) of personal privacy rights they may decide to initiate.

At least reasons (1) and (2) apply to your request, requiring more time for the processing and fulfillment of it. As to our need for clarification, the first segment of your request seeks documents, internal communications, and communications with the Board of Directors "pertaining to" the shooting in the McKenzie stadium parking lot. Since reasonable persons can disagree on what records do and do not "pertain to" any particular topic, we are left guessing about the parameters of what you are asking for in processing your request. To that end, if you were to clarify that by the first segment of your request you seek documents, internal communications, and communications with the Board of Directors "directly and fairly discussing" reports of shots fired in the vicinity of McKenzie Stadium on October 19, 2023, I am reasonably confident we will be able to understand what you seek. Please let me know if you are agreeable to that clarification.

Finally, records disclosure laws require that I provide you our best estimate as to when we will have records ready for production to you. I anticipate that we'll be able to produce the records you seek on or before December 2, 2023. That is indeed an estimate. If it develops that a materially shorter or longer timeframe is necessary, I'll let you know. Should you have any questions or concerns about the foregoing or about any other aspect of our processing of your request as we proceed to work towards fulfilling it, of course do not hesitate to let me know.

Thank you,

Eliza Cornelison
Paralegal | Human Resources
Evergreen Public Schools
360-604-4049 | eliza.cornelison@evergreenps.org<mailto:eliza.cornelison@evergreenps.org>

Good afternoon,

Thank you for the clarification. To reiterate your request, specifically the portions of your request that pertain to email communications stored on the District’s server, I understand you to be seeking emails using the following date range: October 19, 2023 – October 20, 2023, sent by:

1. Internal communications; The District interprets this to mean emails sent between employees of the District
2. Any email sent by any member of the Board
3. Any email sent by John Boyd, or John Boyd’s assistant, Lori Strohl

AND containing any of the following keywords:

shooting
shot
gun
firearm
police
stadium
parking lot
lockdown
parking lot to the south of McKenzie Stadium – We simplified the last term to “McKenzie” since “parking lot” and “stadium” are already included in the list.

Our IT Department has run a preliminary search on the District email server based on the above parameters. The total number of emails responsive to Item 1 is 8,847. The total number of emails responsive to Items 2 and 3 combined is 16 (these are also included in the 8,847 emails responsive to Item 1).

Based on our past experience as to the number of pages typical for emails of those sorts, and the number of pages of attachments that would be expected to have been associated with the sending of emails of those sorts, we'd expect those emails, with such attachments, to average somewhere in the range of 5 pages each. That translates to a total estimated number of pages of records in need of production to you of 44,235.

Each of those 44,235 pages of records would need to be read, individually, before being produced to you, in order to identify any content that is exempt from public disclosure within them, according to any of the well-more-than 100 different state and federal statutory privacy and confidentiality laws that can apply under the Public Records Act. In particular, given the nature of the emails you've requested, a very large number of them would be expected to have content subject to just one of those many exemptions - that being, content that is the statutorily-private and -confidential educational or personal information of identifiable District students. Each email having that sort of content would need to be identified, and then the student's name or any other personally-identifying information about him/her (e.g. parent's name, residential address, phone number, personal email address of the student or of his/her parent or siblings, etc.) then would need to be selectively redacted on a word-by-word basis from the email, before it is provided to you.

Review and redaction, even just for the exemptions applicable to that kind of student information, is a very technical, painstaking, and time-consuming process. Because of that, it is very difficult to provide any sort of accurate estimate as to how long we believe it will take to fulfill your request. Given the limited resources we have to process requests like yours, and that in the end (with other aspects of your request) we know your request will require production of well more than 8,847 emails, that time frame estimate would have to be that it will take us many, many months to entirely fulfill your request.

On the other hand, we can give you a reliably accurate estimate as to when we'll be able to provide you an initial, partial installment of responsive emails. In that regard, we anticipate we'll be able to do that within the timeframe of the previously provided estimate, on or before December 2, 2023. And then, we'd plan on thereafter making another partial installment of records to you every 60 days, until fulfillment of your request has been completed.

Finally, we will need to receive an advance payment from you of the fees chargeable to you for processing this request. To that point, the law authorizes that we charge requestors like yourself $.05 cents for every 4 electronic files that are in need of being duplicated in order to fulfill a request like yours. We can either seek pre-payment of the entire amount if we can determine with certainty what that overall ultimate amount will be, or charge a 10% advance payment of an amount that we reasonably can determine will not be any greater than that ultimately-chargeable overall fee.

Here, since each email you've requested is a separate electronic file for purposes of determining those chargeable fees, it appears that fulfillment of your request will end up requiring an overall payment by you of not less than $110.58 (i.e., 8,847 x .25) x .05 cents). We will need to receive a 10% advance payment ($11.05) before we can provide you the first partial installment of records toward overall fulfillment of your request that I've told you to expect by December 2, 2023. The remaining 90% will be due prior to providing you the final installment of records.

You can mail the payment of $11.05 directly to me, at the address below:

Evergreen Public Schools
Attn: Eliza Cornelison
P.O. Box 8910
Vancouver, WA 98668

Alternatively, if you wish to make the payment in person at our School District's business office, you may do so at the District Office, located at 13413 NE LeRoy Haagen Memorial Drive, Vancouver, WA 98684, during school day business hours ( 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.). In any case, payment by check, money order, or other similar instrument should be made payable to "Evergreen School District No. 114" and it would be helpful if a memo notation were made on the check stating "Payment of PRA Request Fees." I suggest calling ahead to make sure the office is open, and I'm available to receive your payment.

Please also be advised that under governing provisions of the Public Records Act, we need to receive your payment, per the above, within 30 calendar days of today's date, or your request will be considered to have been abandoned by you and it will be closed.

It may be that the time frame I've estimated above for initial partial and/or ultimately complete of your request, and/ or the payment amounts I've referenced, are longer or larger than you expected or that will meet your informational needs or desires. If that is the case, you may be able to reduce the time frame and/or monetary payment amount requirements I've described, by narrowing your request and/or seeking different records, such that fulfillment of it requires a lesser number of records and/or different sorts of records that would not prompt need for the sort of time-consuming review/redaction/exemption processing work that I described above.

For example, if you’re only seeking the 16 emails responsive to items 2 and 3 of your request, I’m confident I could produce all of the records you’re seeking on or before December 2, 2023, and the correspondingly de minimis PRA fees ($0.20) would be waived.

If you choose to go the route of substituting your current request for one that is for a narrower or different set of records, you need only send me an email describing with reasonable specificity that different scope of records you'd like to receive, and we will thereupon proceed to instead work toward fulfillment of your request according to those terms.

Thank you,

Eliza Cornelison
Paralegal | Human Resources
Evergreen Public Schools
360–604-4049 | eliza.cornelison@evergreenps.org<mailto:eliza.cornelison@evergreenps.org>

Good afternoon,

I’m writing to let you know that the records responsive to your October 27, 2023 public records request are available. To reiterate your request:

“Emails using the following date range: October 19, 2023 – October 20, 2023, sent by:

1. Internal communications; The District interprets this to mean emails sent between employees of the District
2. Any email sent by any member of the Board
3. Any email sent by John Boyd, or John Boyd’s assistant, Lori Strohl

AND containing any of the following keywords:
shooting
shot
gun
firearm
police
stadium
parking lot
lockdown
McKenzie”

Modified by you on November 9, 2023 as follows: “I believe that items 2 and 3 would fulfill this request; per your response that is ("emails responsive to Items 2 and 3 combined is 16") 16 items. I may submit a request for item 1 in the future but for my current purposes I would like to focus on items 2 and 3.” The records responsive to your request are linked here: Keplar 10.27.23 RR<https://evergreenps-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/eliza_cornelison_evergreenps_org/ErYmlCEWkz9Ng0tCo_RS-NUBK1IgGb-F76QwINV4bGnfVw?e=HMix8Z>.

As requested, where possible, the records are being provided in the native format in which they were received. Please note, six pages of email records were converted to pdfs and are not being provided in their native .msg format. You’ll see these six pages of records contain material that has been redacted. Under public disclosure laws, we must provide you in writing an explanation of those redactions. That information is below.

Student Records:

* Green box redactions (________) were made to prevent a person from reading the names or personally identifiable information (PII) of student(s) of the District where that name or PII would be linkable to protected educational or personal information about the student that appears in these records.
* That content is protected from disclosure under the Public Records Act by RCW 42.56.230(1); 20 USC § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99; and RCW 42.56.070.

Two records were withheld in their entirety, an Evergreen High School Student Master Emergency Contact List pdf, and an Evergreen High School Reunification 10.19.2023 Excel Sheet. Those records were attached to an October 19, 2023 email from Breanne McClellan to Tracy Thompson, and contain the following personally identifiable information (PII) of student(s) of the District: Student Skyward Key; Student Full Name; Grade; Advisor; School; Family 1 Guardian 1 Full Name; Family 1 Guardian 1 Phone Number; Family 1 Guardian 1 Second Phone Number; Family 1 Guardian 1 Third Phone Number; Family 1 Guardian 2 Full Name; Family 1 Guardian 2 Phone Number; Family 1 Guardian 2 Second Phone Number; Family 1 Guardian 2 Third Phone Number; Family 2 Guardian 1 Full Name; Family 2 Guardian 1 Phone Number; Family 2 Guardian 1 Second Phone Number; Family 2 Guardian 1 Third Phone Number; Family 2 Guardian 2 Full Name; Family 2 Guardian 2 Phone Number; Family 2 Guardian 2 Second Phone Number; Family 2 Guardian 2 Third Phone Number; Emergency Contact(s) Name; Emergency Contact(s) Phone Number. This information is further detailed on the withholding log provided in the above linked folder.

Lastly, I do want to thank you for your patience as I’ve worked on this matter for you. If you should have any questions or concerns at all about any aspect of our processing or fulfillment of your public records request, please let me know. Still while welcoming such contact by you, the Public Records Act advises I should notify you that, by my delivery of this email to you, our School District considers your request closed. So please know that we do now consider your request as having been fulfilled and closed.

Thank you,

Eliza Cornelison
Paralegal | Human Resources
Evergreen Public Schools
360–604-4049 | eliza.cornelison@evergreenps.org<mailto:eliza.cornelison@evergreenps.org>