'Patently absurd': School district demands $1.2M to see contracts before voters consider budget

A Rhode Island taxpayer asked to see contracts between her local schools and the regional authority on matters such as information technology and records management ahead of a March vote on the next budget, an historically explosive subject.

The Foster-Glocester Regional School District's response: It will cost $1.2 million and take more than 80,000 hours of labor to review and redact nearly 2.5 million emails.

The Access to Public Records Act conflict adds a wrinkle to years of animosity between Ocean State parent-activists and school districts, teachers unions, local officials, police and pugnacious Attorney General Peter Neronha, which has largely focused on culture-war issues such as school curricula, gender identity and who has access to students.

This latest conflict also pits onetime allies against each other: taxpayer Laurie Gaddis Barrett and district counsel Greg Piccirilli, who together fought a health regulation that would allow Rhode Island to resume mask mandates without scientific evidence, in alleged violation of an agreement that ended parents' lawsuit against COVID-19 school masking.

Barrett, known recently for lobbying to close a "passing the trash" loophole in state background checks that lets school employees accused of child-related misconduct easily move between districts, told Just the News she just wants to see "basic governance documents" denied by the district when she asked in December, prompting her January APRA request.

"Why aren’t shared-service agreements centrally maintained and readily accessible?" asked Barrett, who on X calls herself an "Unsolicited Accountability Partner for Elected Officials." "Is this how public bodies price citizens out of oversight?"

Superintendent Renee Palazzo didn't follow up on Barrett's offer, during a Feb. 5 "hallway conversation," to talk through her APRA request, according to Barrett. 

"If their math is accurate, production would take decades of full-time work" and make compliance "impossible even if someone paid the bill," she said. The district's Feb. 18 response is "deliberately flawed," turning a "request for contracts into an email dragnet" that didn't even follow the explicit limitations in Barrett's request.

Piccirilli, also known for getting teachers reinstated who were fired for refusing COVID vaccination, told Just the News that Barrett's request was so confusing that "she can't suddenly be surprised" about the estimates he gave her Wednesday.

"She professes to be an expert" on APRA "so she should know" how to compose an "understandable and reasonable" request, as required by the transparency law, Piccirilli said. Trying to divine Barrett's meaning from ambiguous language "would get us in trouble."

One of their novel disputes is about Barrett's use of artificial intelligence to write the request, which Piccirilli blamed for the "patently absurd" estimates he gave her. 

"What difference does it make if someone uses AI to draft public records requests?" Barrett told Just the News.

An auto-response from Superintendent Palazzo's email said she's out of the office, with no return date or backup contact.

District budget request slashed 40% by voters

Voters have a tense history with the regional district, whose components Foster and Glocester run their own K-5 systems but give grades 6-12 to the region, on budget issues. The arrangement is distinct from the "town tuitioning" programs used in sparsely populated parts of New England, the subject of a major Supreme Court precedent in 2022.

Last year, voters narrowly approved a budget 40% lower than the district's request, with "hotly" asked-and-answered questions at the March 2025 financial meeting, Northern Rhode Island News reported at the time. One taxpayer noted the fund balance in the small district inexplicably increased more than a million dollars annually for three years.

"There have been concerns for a long time" about cost-sharing arrangements between the regional and local districts, Barrett said. "One public body is conducting business on behalf of another" and "it gets very wiggly" on matters such as authority over email systems used by all three entities and whether one town is unwittingly subsidizing the other.

Barrett showed Just the News the 10 plain-language questions she sent her Glocester School Committee and regional counterpart Dec. 20, with a Jan. 9 deadline. 

She asked for email cost allocation between local and regional districts, any "written intergovernmental agreement or policy" authorizing K-5 to use the region's email infrastructure, who is the "legal custodian" of K-5 records on the regional system and how the commingling complies with federal student privacy law, among other queries.

Her last question: "Who is/are the designated official(s) responsible for ensuring APRA and records-retention compliance for Glocester K-5 records stored on Regional systems?" 

The deadline came and went, so Barrett fed her 10 plain-language questions into an AI agent to write an APRA request. 

She reviewed its proposed language – specifically limited to records from designated officials starting Jan. 1, 2020 – and ran it through a different AI agent to confirm an APRA reviewer could understand it. Barrett "felt that it clearly communicated what I was looking for were contracts," expecting to receive "maybe 10, 12" records.

As the district dragged its feet, Barrett said she talked to Superintendent Palazzo, who is "APRA-certified," at a town council meeting.

Palazzo allegedly said the district was wary about how to answer the "voluminous" request, so Barrett suggested they discuss over email or phone now to narrow it, but Palazzo never did, according to Barrett. She got the "outlandish" estimates two weeks later.

AI program 'makes your request unintelligible'

Piccirilli challenged Just the News to make heads or tails of Barrett's request, which is included in his exasperated response letter to her. While the questions are written plainly, the "series of targeted Google Vault queries" is written with long strings of Boolean operators.

One IT services query: ("MOU" OR "memorandum of understanding" OR "intergovernmental" OR "service sharing" OR "shared services" OR "shared personnel" OR "cost sharing") AND ("technology" OR "IT" OR "network" OR "systems" OR "helpdesk" OR "support").

"The wording of your request is the most extensive and obtuse the District and I have ever encountered,'' Piccirilli wrote. "The District’s IT department has determined that it is likely that your request was AI-generated to capture the broadest possible terms and close every possible loophole" in APRA.

All emails and attachments would have to be reviewed for responsiveness, then redacted or withheld if not permitted for release by law or APRA-exempt, at a cost of $15 an hour, he wrote. Barrett would have to pay more than $440,000 up front just for the district to start.

"We recognize that these estimates are patently absurd, however, so is the language of your request," Piccirrilli concluded. "You are free to resubmit your APRA request with a narrower scope" and "consider using direct, simple language and not an AI program which makes your request unintelligible."

The IT director took 10 hours just to run the Boolean searches to come up with the estimated email production and time to review them, Piccirilli told Just the News. The issue isn't AI but how Barrett used it "to make it extremely difficult and broad" to fulfill her request.

His scolding tone in the letter was "unnecessary, unprofessional," Barrett told Just the News. The Boolean queries he listed didn't include her time or personnel limits – a janitor's emails could be captured – and Piccirilli explicitly acknowledged they hadn't been "deduplicated," making the estimate obviously inflated.