The cost of transparency: District demands six figures to provide anti-Kirk teacher's curriculum

Educators who celebrated the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk put their school districts in a bind, caught between the outrage of parents and elected officials and the constitutional rights of public employees to speak on matters of public concern separate from their official duties.

Districts have now paid the bind forward to the educators' critics, throwing up roadblocks to transparency in teaching materials and public participation in school governance related to its employees' Kirk comments.

Rhode Island's Barrington Public Schools demanded six figures just to turn over one social studies teacher's curriculum in response to Access to Public Records Act requests to discern whether Benjamin Fillo's classroom lessons reflected the viewpoints in his once-public TikTok video that said the "piece of garbage" Kirk got what he deserved.

The district separately estimated that producing Fillo's roughly 2,200 work emails going back to 2016 that include the word "Trump," the other APRA request, would cost about $1,100.

It's the latest in parent-activist Nicole Solas's four years of transparency battles with the Ocean State's educational and political establishments over ideologically tinged curricula, activists given access to children and censorship of criticism from the public, which started with a $75,000 cost estimate to learn what her daughter would be taught in kindergarten.

In correspondence shared with Just the News, the district blamed the now-$116,000 estimate on the scope of what Solas requested, Fillo's curriculum for his full 15 years, and offered $5,500 if Solas would narrow her request to the past five years. To justify its estimate for Fillo's emails, it cited an opinion by a recurring Solas foe, state Attorney General Peter Neronha.

Facing First Amendment litigation, two California school districts in the past month stopped blocking education activists from their social media accounts who had criticized or asked for district responses to teachers who seemingly celebrated Kirk's murder.

The Konocti Unified School District told the Liberty Justice Center last week that it had unblocked its clients Corey DeAngelis, an LJC board member, and Moms for Liberty local chapter president Beth Bourne following an Oct. 24 legal threat. LJC didn't answer a query about whether it would seek retrospective relief for the eight days they were blocked.

Officials could face personal liability for allegedly violating clearly established law, a widely adopted 2019 federal appeals court ruling that ordered first-term President Trump to stop blocking critics from his Twitter account, though the Supreme Court dismissed the ruling as moot when Trump left office. The district didn't answer Just the News queries.

Last month, LJC said the San Jacinto School District agreed to viewpoint-neutral treatment of social media interactions following its similar threat over DeAngelis, voluntarily accepting the conditions mandated in a federal consent decree on Kentucky's Pulaski County School District this summer to resolve an LJC lawsuit on behalf of DeAngelis.

Cost estimate "inflated by a series of unrealistic assumptions"

Shortly after Kirk's assassination, Fillo said he felt as empathetic for the slain father as he did for farmers "who want socialist handouts," apparently referring to federal agricultural bailouts. Kirk "hated" LGBTQ people, women's rights and "democracy," the TikTok video said. 

Referring to Kirk's campus debates with college students, Fillo said "the big man … thought he proved how tough he was with his words that he studied ahead of time," but "this is what happens" in a nation awash with white men with guns. "Bye Charlie!" he ended.

Barrington Public Schools responded quickly, with Superintendent Chris Ashley announcing an unidentified teacher had been put on paid administrative leave and an outside investigation had been commissioned "into concerns related to alleged social media activity." 

At a school board meeting days later, the local teachers union said it removed Fillo as co-president and a student testified that Fillo had told her class in a Civil War lesson that today's Republicans would support slavery and that he tried to change the topic of her paper from a conservative perspective but not a classmate's liberal paper.

The district's Oct. 24 cost estimates said it would take more than 70 hours to "retrieve, review, redact and compile" Fillo's emails dating to Jan. 1, 2016, and more than 7,700 hours for his 157 courses, "stored on three (3) different learning management systems," with an estimated 270 "resources per class," at an hourly rate of $15.

Solas lawyer James McGlone, a member of the Goldwater Institute's pro bono American Freedom Network, told the district's outside counsel Deidre Carreno Oct. 24 the cost estimates were "prohibitive and facially unreasonable."

The curriculum estimate appears "inflated by a series of unrealistic assumptions," that Fillo kept "entirely unique class materials for each separate, simultaneous section of the same course," the district would search three or 10 minutes for "each individual document" and that each would require a 3-minute review without any indication of confidential information.

As for Fillo's emails, the district doesn't claim any are "actual personnel files," contain information "highly personal in nature" or are even "deemed confidential by federal or state law or regulation," McGlone said. "Moreover, a reviewing court would likely waive costs altogether" given the "high public interest" in his comments and the district's thorough response.

McGlone said the Supreme Court would "likely" find the district in violation of APRA, "order full production of the Records at no cost" to Solas, make the districts pay her attorney's fees and "potentially assess civil fines as well," without a "drastic revision" of the estimate.

"Public records aren’t really public at all if the cost to obtain them is more than a luxury car or a downpayment on a house," the Goldwater Institute said.

Carreno's Oct. 31 response letter did not fully rebut McGlone's claims about the "unrealistic assumptions" in the district's cost estimate, but emphasized it didn't have a "learning management system" until 2020, a decade into Fillo's tenure, which is why it suggested a five-year search for $5,500.

"The District has spent a significant amount of time trying to determine a more expeditious way" to complete the request, but it must search through individual files on two drives, "match the individual documents to a course, and ascertain whether Mr. Fillo accessed the particular document," before considering whether he "actually used" that document in class.

Carreno said Fillo himself can't help "in identifying any or all of the curriculum materials he may have used" in 100-plus courses he taught before the district switched to the Canvas app, and he is "not available to identify any sources or materials he may have referenced during his tenure that do not appear on Canvas."

Fillo's LinkedIn profile remains live as of Tuesday, as does his name and contact information on the Barrington High School staff page, though the district has removed his headshot since Solas captured the page. An email bounced back when Just the News tried to reach Fillo.

The district's estimate for Fillo's work emails that mention "Trump" is based on two minutes per email to retrieve, review, redact and compile, which is less time than AG Neronha permitted in a 2022 APRA opinion that also justified redaction time based on information protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, Carreno said. 

Goldwater spokesperson Ryan Mills emphasized to Just the News the district's counteroffer was "still a very large bill" and did not cover "nearly all of" the records Solas wants.