Data requests are a common part of government entities. From governing bodies to departments to schools, the free flow of information is a cornerstone of democracy; the public has every right to know what is going on in the government and public institutions it funds.
A specific data request discussed at the July 31 District 200 School Board meeting has raised questions about this bureaucratic practice. A data request was received in July by District 200 that is expected to be more than 100,000 pages long even after the material has been pared down for relevance. This staggering request has led many to question not only the process, but the cost incurred by the district when putting together such a large request.
What goes into compiling a data request and how much does that process cost?

The process
The process of compiling a data request varies drastically depending on the scale, scope, and topic of the request. Some can be small, about a specific meeting or subsection of a policy, while others, like the request discussed at the July 31 school board meeting, ask for massive swaths of data relating to keywords or the work of a specific committee and include emails, attachments, policies and handwritten notes. How the district goes about compiling requests depends on that scope.
According to District 200 Human Resources Director Cathy Moen, data requests normally begin with searching employee’s emails for keywords relevant to the request.
Generally, the data retrieved from the initial keyword search contains not only duplicate emails from different employees, but a lot of data that isn’t relevant to the request. Moen and district staff work to pare down the amount of data to what is actually relevant to the request.
“We try to bring that number down as best we can,” said Moen.
The district’s legal team then will go through the data in order to remove duplicates, make sure the data is relevant to the request and to redact sensitive information. Depending on the size of the request, this process can be expensive as well as time intensive.

The cost
Like the process of compiling requests, the cost of data requests vary. At the school board meeting and during subsequent interviews, Moen was hesitant to give any estimate of the cost of data requests because they can vary based on many factors including their size and scope.
“There really is not a set time for every 10 pages, it’s half an hour or anything,” said Moen.
Some larger data requests are faster to produce just because of what is relevant to it, while others can sprawl across several topics and therefore include a wide swath of information and take much more time.
The district tracks the amount of money paid for legal fees for deduplication, relevance, and redaction with a monthly total normally given at each school board meeting. The time district staff work on these requests is not totaled nor tracked.
At the May 22, 2024 meeting, Moen reported on the number of data requests for the year.
“The total cost of data requests is $892.24. The period of those data requests was Dec. 6 through Jan. 31. We have not had any additional bills related to data requests since that time.”
At the June 26 2024 meeting, there had been one additional data request, but the cost was not discussed. Since July 1, seven new data requests had been received with one of them estimated to be one of the largest data requests the district has ever gotten. According to Moen, four of these seven requests, including the 100,000-page request, are from the same anonymous source.
Another variable to the cost of data requests is printing out hard copies for the requester. The costs for getting hard copies from a data request is $0.25 per page for 100 pages or less. If the request is more than 100 pages, the district tracks the cost of the lowest level employee’s hours to compile the request, then the cost of labor and paper is divided by the number of pages to get the per page cost.
On the other hand, if no hard copies are taken by the requester, there is no cost associated with requesting data.
“If they don’t take any copies, they just look at the data, there is no cost to recoup. We eat the cost,” said Moen.
The district does not have a budget for data requests. The costs are paid as they appear for data requests and can vary year to year.

The request
The request spurning much of the discussion about data requests was discussed at the July 31 school board meeting and pertains to the policy committee with broad keywords such as the term itself “policy.”
“You pretty much have to search the word policy which gets a lot more than you need,” said Moen.
According to Moen at the meeting, “Just in the emails we have pulled alone, there are 115,000 pages that are going to be reviewed to see if they are responsive. And that’s emails, not the attachments and pages of the emails, just a number of emails.”
Many parent organizations including the Minnesota Parents Alliance recommend making requests, “as specific as possible,” according to their guide for requesting data from schools. Parameters to specifying requests include setting dates for the request and limiting broad, ambiguous requests like single keywords that can appear in a number of contexts unrelated to what the requester is looking for.
Making specific requests not only saves the district time and money in preparation and legal fees, but can make finding the information a requester is looking for easier, which is why it is widely recommended.
“This is probably one of the bigger initial pulls we’ve received just because of the way it was worded,” said Moen.
Part of the reason many have bristled at various data requests to the district is because they can be anonymous. When requesting data from the district, the only identifying information required is a phone number and email. Especially if the requester does not pick up hard copies of the requested data in person, it isn’t difficult to be entirely anonymous through the data request process.
For Moen, this isn’t an issue: “the reason and who it is, isn’t important. They have access to that data.”
For others, given the recent context of data requests and the Hastings School b=Board, that right to anonymity can be a hard pill to swallow.

Data requests and ISD 200
Data requests once occurred only a handful of times each year and were often relegated specifically for union negotiations. Recently the number of data requests in District 200 and in school districts across the county have skyrocketed. District 200 itself has had issues with the amount of data requests even in recent history.
In 2022, former school board member Mike Reis resigned from the school board after a standoff over policies regarding COVID-19. The school board censured Reis in part due to excessive data requests unrelated to school board activity which eventually led to his resignation.
An individual’s ability to inundate the district with data requests to the point that it must take action, as shown from the drama of 2022, showcases how the use and frequency of data requests has changed in recent years. Rather than odd requests throughout the year, districts can see dozens if not more than a hundred requests each year which can incur significant costs.
“The public absolutely has the right to all of this information, but now hearing the astronomical expense this is going to be, I would urge the public to reach out to the board with their questions first before taking this route. If there is anything that we can get clarified before going this route because that is concerning to me as a fiduciary for this district and for taxpayers,” said Tate at the meeting.
To watch the full discussion about the data request at the July 31 school board meeting visit Hastings Community TV’s YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjmhHhvHv90&t=3110s