YCS Superintendent addresses public records requests, anticipates attention to legislation on topic

Yelm Community Schools (YCS) Superintendent Chris Woods took some time during the “superintendent’s comments” portion of the YCS Board of Directors meeting on Thursday, Sept. 10, to address public records requests.

Woods previously spoke on the topic of public records requests during the Thursday, June 25, meeting, where he said that requests are becoming a hot topic at the local, state and federal levels of government.

“We’ve shared before how public records have increased,” Woods said, on Thursday, Sept. 10. “I think we hit over 100 for last year. 113 for last school year. I want to talk to you about the process for that. With our public records, we now work with our legal council on all of them. Because public records have become so challenging, we want to make sure that we are following all procedures and policies correctly, and law correctly. There are districts and state agencies that are getting sued, if, let’s say, you get a public records request and you provide some information. People are now coming back at a later date and asking for another public records request. If you give them information you should have given them in an earlier request, but you didn’t, you could be sued as a district.”

Woods added that the district goes through each public record request very carefully with its attorneys, and noted that YCS is using taxpayer dollars to pay the attorneys who assist with the requests.

“Each and every one is vetted by our attorneys,” Woods said. “Today, when I share with you the demand letter that was given to us by E. Wyatt Mendel, I also provided you the response that we sent to him. That was also crafted with our attorney. I want to make it very clear that all of our public records are fully vetted and make sure that we are following policies and procedures and law with each one.”

Woods said that as public employees, everything that they do is considered a public record.

“Everything on our devices, everything that we produce as Word Documents is public record,” Woods said. “And we know that. Everything we do, we do with a lens of, ‘Hey, this could be frontfacing. It could be in the newspaper. It could be on social media.’ That’s how we approach our work, that everything is available for the public to see.”

The superintendent said that YCS will continue to keep the community updated.

Additionally, he noted YCS has been soliciting feedback from a lot of school districts throughout Washington on the topic of public records. Woods said this is due to the “abuse and harassment” going on toward districts with people seeking public records “simply for the sake of asking for them.”

“I think there could be some attention paid to legislation around public records requests in the future,” Woods said. “We’ll continue to keep you updated. The unfortunate thing is we’re spending a lot of money on public records requests and responding to each and every one of them, which is unfortunate because those are taxpayer dollars that could be going to other places.”

Woods noted that he’ll continue to keep the community updated as more public records continue to roll in that are “bigger ones,” or records that are “more public.”