this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
20 points (100.0% liked)

Minneapolis - St. Paul Metro

555 readers
13 users here now

About

A community for leftists and progressives within the Minneapolis - St. Paul Metro Area, including all suburbs and exurbs.

Community banner courtesy of @maven@lemmy.zip ❤️

Guidelines

  1. Be nice

  2. Comment substantively

  3. Probably some other stuff

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Revolutionary_Code@midwest.social
m_f@midwest.social
20
Costly data demands leave some Minnesota school districts frustrated (www.mprnews.org)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by m_f@midwest.social to c/msp@midwest.social
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In general open governance is good. These requests look silly at the same time, e.g. asking about CRT. At the same same time,

The Owatonna People’s Press last month reported the Owatonna school district spent $300,000 to fulfill a data request related to an equity plan and assessment and a word search of district correspondence containing words and phrases such as “Black Lives Matter,” “systemic racism” and “critical race theory.”

It's crazy that it cost $300k to do that. I think ideally, requests like this wouldn't be an issue even if they're not really in good faith, because responding to them would take someone a few button clicks.

top 6 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] m_f@midwest.social 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

In general open governance is good. These requests look silly at the same time, e.g. asking about CRT. At the same same time,

The Owatonna People’s Press last month reported the Owatonna school district spent $300,000 to fulfill a data request related to an equity plan and assessment and a word search of district correspondence containing words and phrases such as “Black Lives Matter,” “systemic racism” and “critical race theory.”

It's crazy that it cost $300k to do that. I think ideally, requests like this wouldn't be an issue even if they're not really in good faith, because responding to them would take someone a few button clicks.

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The cost includes more than just the word search.

[–] m_f@midwest.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

I'm a little unclear on what exactly the work Owatonna had to do for the request mentioned for them. Other school districts mention doing more than just a keyword search, but what exactly is involved with "fulfill a data request related to an equity plan and assessment and a word search of district correspondence". The article they linked to has no additional information, or my adblocker is too aggressive. It shows people with piles of paper, but why are they printing all that out like that in the first place?

LLMs would actually make it very easy to address some of the issues, like this:

“Literally, they wanted, for instance, a review of every course with, quote, ‘a sociological theme for issues of equity.’ That’s not a keyword search,” Pekel said.

They're pretty good at taking in text and spitting out answers to questions like "Does this text address theme X?". Though when legal gets involved, maybe it requires a person to blame if a document gets missed.

[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I feel like the law would be best served where FOIA requests incurring more than $1k to school districts must waiver their right to anonymous requests and must pay 50% of the cost.

[–] dumples@midwest.social 1 points 2 weeks ago

Make it 100% if its over $1K. Since most real requests shouldn't be that much at all.

[–] JamesStallion@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I believe in open governance after all!

Yes minister..