“State Sponsored Grooming?” An Ugly Battle Over Schools and FOIA Requests
Conservative activists have increasingly used FOIA requests to target LGBTQ+ teachers for harassment online. One Connecticut law that would limit this practice has been described with an anti-LGBTQ+ slur.
by Evan Urquhart
Spurious accusations of grooming are being deployed in the ongoing battle over FOIA requests targeting public schools. A Fox News story amplified the use of this vicious slur, one that is increasingly used by extremists to suggest that any discussion with a child about non-cisgender gender identities or non-hetero sexualities, including the mere mention of the existence of people who are LGBTQ+, is the same thing as child sexual abuse.
Nicole Solas of the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative anti-feminist group, used the slur in reference to proposed legislation in Connecticut. The bill seeks to limit the ability of members of the public to request information involving “communication between a teacher and a student regarding sensitive topics such as sexual orientation, gender identity, and race.” Solas called this “state sponsored grooming.”
screenshot from Fox News
The question of FOIA requests targeting public schools is a complicated one. A FOIA request, also called a Freedom of Information request, allows journalists and members of the public to legally obtain copies of government records. Such requests are vital to helping journalists and the public understand the workings of the government, uncover corruption, and ammass the information needed to participate in the democratic process, and of course conservatives are every bit as entitled to public information as anyone else. The ability to use FOIA to understand the policies and decision-making process of school boards and school administrators is similarly vital, and has been used by parents of students with disabilities, as well as journalists, to hold schools accountable in various ways. FOIA requests in schools have an extra layer of complexity though, because, well, children attend schools. So there’s a compelling need to protect confidential or personal information about students from being publicly shared, which can sometimes be in tension with the need for transparency around how schools function. In addition, teachers aren’t elected officials, and whether FOIA should allow members of the public to monitor their every word while on the job is an area of open debate.
In recent years, conservatives have begun to use FOIA requests in novel ways, They’ve widely spread information about making FOIA requests to activists, and in many districts the number of requests made to public schools has dramatically increased as a result. In the hands of some conservative activists, FOIAs have at times become a tool for harassment, intimidation, and public mockery of teachers, and this harassment has often targeted teachers who identify as LGBTQ+. In a larger article about how increased requests had resulted in a need for an increased budget to handle the volume in Fairfax, Virginia, a reporter for DCist (the website for the WAMU public radio station) spoke with a gay teacher who felt personally targeted by FOIA requests, which he said had been used to harass him online and factored into his decision to retire.
screenshot from DCist
It’s something of an open question exactly how much information schools are required to provide. In Michigan, a judge recently ruled that teachers aren’t public bodies and therefore their curricula should not be covered by FOIA requests. But in other states very granular information about teachers has been provided, and the question of whether teachers (as opposed to administrators or school board members) can be subject to these requests has not been definitively settled yet.
In addition to concerns about FOIA requests being used to harass teachers, there are also ongoing concerns about protecting student privacy in an environment where a huge number of requests are being made by a much larger number of people, many of whom may not live in the community or have any direct connection to the school. The proposed legislation in Connecticut is concerned with teacher-student communications around gender and race, and there may be a need to protect students’ ability to communicate with teachers around topics like this. Assigned has contacted the legislators associated with the bill in Connecticut, and will update this post with any official comment from Connecticut lawmakers that may result.