Two Virginia mothers are facing a lawsuit after filing a Freedom of Information Act request to their district school board.
The Goldwater Institute filed a motion to dismiss the Fairfax County School Board’s lawsuit against Debra Tisler and Callie Oettinger, who are mothers of students in the district. Tisler obtained files containing sensitive information through the FOIA request, and Oettinger published them on her website, according to a report.
“The ruling came after the school system learned that certain personal, sensitive and legally protected information was inadvertently released in response to a FOIA request,” said Fairfax County Public Schools Media Relations Manager Julie Moult. “We deeply regret that this error occurred, and we continue to pursue the matter because we are doing everything we can to mitigate the impact on students and employees. FCPS tries its hardest every day to do the right thing, including protecting the privacy of students and employees.”
The board gave Tisler hundreds of pages of information regarding a 2020 hacking incident, its virtual learning curriculum, the superintendent, and the school board, Fox News reported. The Goldwater Institute asked for the dismissal after the board’s Sept. 27 lawsuit, saying the board displayed a “shameful abuse of authority.”
“It’s a shameful abuse of authority and a form of bullying by school officials who are the employees of Callie and Debra,” said Timothy Sandefur, the Goldwater Institute’s vice president for litigation. “For the school board to turn around and sue them for trying to be engaged citizens concerned about what’s going on in public schools their tax dollars pay for — it’s disgraceful and the school board should be ashamed of its behavior.”
“When the school district realized it had handed over potentially embarrassing material, it demanded that Callie take the material down from her website, and when she refused, district officials sued her — notwithstanding the fact that the Constitution clearly protects her right to publish the information online,” Sandefur wrote on the Goldwater Institute’s website.
FAIRFAX COUNTY ACTIVIST ON PARENTS OPPOSING CRITICAL RACE THEORY: ‘LET THEM DIE’
BREAKING: Moms under Attack by Virginia School District – Goldwater Fights Back https://t.co/KCQNQosjyp pic.twitter.com/xSofts6YpG
— Goldwater Institute (@GoldwaterInst) October 7, 2021
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“The fact that they did not like what they had distributed — what they provided to me — and now, they’re trying to backtrack, and that’s the problem,” Tisler told WMAL on Friday.
Tisler was concerned about financial allocations for students in Fairfax Public Schools, saying she “noticed an increase in excessive use of attorneys and fees.”
The public has a right to publish government information for accountability when it’s lawfully obtained, Sandefur added.
“Here what you have is concerned citizens who think the government’s spending too much on their lawyers, so they ask to see the bill from the lawyers to the government, and then they post those online,” he said. “They did not ever disclose any kind of private or confidential information — although they would have a constitutional right even to do that if they had — and then the school district, embarrassed about this fact, demanded that they censor themselves.”
