Kyle York had a simple request. He asked the school department in Lexington, Massachusetts, to provide him with public records in order to bolster his request that the system provide support services for his daughter, who has dyslexia.
But thanks to the state’s notoriously weak public records law, school officials were able to stonewall him by demanding fees that were grossly excessive, essentially daring him to file an appeal. Fortunately for York, those officials were also sloppy — they documented their ruse in an email and included that email in a trove of records that they eventually provided to him without charge, Christopher Huffaker reports (sub. req.) in The Boston Globe.
In his story, he includes an incredibly blatant internal email sent to a school employee by Kristen McGrath, the executive administrative assistant for human resources:
Attached is a spreadsheet and it looks like a pdf of the spreadsheet. The dates are 2019-2025. Can you over estimate the time it would take to compile/copy the invoices requested and let me know when you have a chance? Hopefully, when I let them know the cost they will not want to do it.
Thank you!
Kristen
The subterfuge has earned a New England Muzzle Award for the Lexington Public Schools. As Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, tells the Globe, “It’s a symptom of our poor public records law that allows those in government agencies, whether it’s a school or some other public body, to play games with the law to withhold records that should be given to the public, and most of the time do so without any kind of accountability.”
York has been fighting for services to help his daughter for some time. In February 2024, Shannon Garrido of The Lexington Observer reported that he was one of a number of parents who were frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of support for their children.
“We probably spent in the last year like $20,000, between advocates, attorneys, [and] private tutors,” York told Garrido at that time.
As Huffaker reports in the Globe, York has received an apology from Schools Supt. Julie Hackett. But the article also notes that the public records law, despite some tightening up in 2016, remain grossly inadequate, with uncertain prospects for anyone who appeals to the secretary of state’s office and the attorney general, plus little in the way of penalties for offending government officials.