- April 25, 2024
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Getting answers from the Flagler County School District may soon be as easy as clicking a button.
District leaders are planning changes to the way the district handles public records requests, proposing adding a “records request” button to www.FlaglerSchools.com and handling all incoming requests in a systematic way to ensure there’s a record of each.
“What I would like to see is that we have somewhere on the website that people can go that’s identified as where people can go for a records request,” Chairman Andy Dance said at a School Board meeting Tuesday evening. “If anybody asks staff, it could just be, ‘Just go to the website, click on the public records button.’”
School District Attorney Kristy Gavin, who fields the district's incoming records requests, said having the requests submitted in the same place would be useful for the district, too, since many of the requests ask for the same information.
“By having it in one location, we're, No. 1, able to ensure that the same information is provided across the board, and, No. 2, that we're not reinventing the wheel,” she said.
Having everything in one place would also make it less likely that a request could get lost in the shuffle and remain unanswered, a potential liability for the district. Because government bodies are bound by law to respond to records requests, people who have requested information from the government and never received it have sometimes sued.
School Board member Colleen Conklin said the button-on-the-website approach may even be a bit too easy, inviting casual and ill-considered requests for information that would cost the district time and money to fulfill.
“You want to make it easy, but you want people to understand that there's time involved in doing that, and there's a cost to that,” she said.
Gavin said the district would need to make it clear to community members requesting information that completing a records request could take time. The district and other government agencies are bound by the Florida Public Records Act to respond to records requests, but can charge fees for requests that are costly to fulfill, and fulfill them within a “reasonable” frame of time for the request.
“Some things can have immediate turnaround, some things it may take 30 days to respond,” Gavin said.
The district tends to receive the most public records requests near the beginning of the school year and during public bargaining, Gavin said, and has received about 40 requests this year since mid-August.
