By Attorney Thomas B. Mooney, Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut

The "Legal Question of the Week" is a regular feature of the CAS Weekly NewsBlast. We invite readers to submit short, law-related questions of practical concern to school administrators. Each week, we will select a question and publish an answer. While these answers cannot be considered formal legal advice, they may be of help to you and your colleagues. We may edit your questions, and we will not identify the authors. Please submit your questions to: legalmailbag@casciac.org.

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Dear Legal Mailbag:

One of the parents in my school has it out for a fifth grade teacher who gave his son a bad grade on a paper. He has made various Freedom of Information Act requests concerning this teacher, including his attendance record, resume, complaint letters and the like. I released all of this information to the parent. However, now the parent wants copies of the teacher’s lesson plans. I am in a box on this one. If the teacher doesn’t have lesson plans, the parent will make a big deal out of that. But if the teacher does have lesson plans, the parent will surely hold them up to ridicule. Can I try to discourage the parent by charging the parent $0.50 per page? What if the copies are two-sided? Can I charge him $1.00?

Signed,
Fed Up


Dear Fed:

Let’s start with a more basic question: are lesson plans public records under the Freedom of Information Act? The answer is (sadly) maybe . . . . Public “records” that are subject to disclosure under the FOIA are records related to the public’s business that are maintained by the public agency. If you collect lesson plans, they would be public records maintained by the school district, and you would be obligated to provide access and copies of the lesson plans as may be requested. However, if you do not collect and maintain lesson plans (as is likely the case), they would not be public records subject to public disclosure. Individual teachers are not public officials under the FOIA, and records that they make are not necessarily public records under the law.

If the lesson plans are public records, you can charge $0.50 per page. Interestingly, it would be more accurate to describe the permissible charges as $0.50 per side; one copy of a single two-sided document is considered two copies. You can even require advance payment of the copying charges when they will exceed $10.00. However, you should follow whatever practice your district has for copying records, because charging copying fees only to people you don’t like could be a constitutional problem.