Rochester Community Schools board members will have to ask for district data and documents collectively as a board rather than seek them individually after the board approved a change to its bylaws.
The board voted 5-1 during its Monday meeting to approve the proposal over the ojbections of Trustee Carol Beth Litkouhi, who cast the sole no vote. Litkouhi’s colleagues on the board said the first-term trustee made several excessive requests for information. Fulfilling the requests, board members said, would limit the administrators and staff’s ability to carry out other district functions.
“Each one of those (requests) would take an incredible amount of time. … These are not things that we have, to my understanding, that we have sitting in a PDF that we can just send in email,” said board Secretary Jayson Blake.
During a board meeting last month, Litkouhi said that in September she made 34 requests for documents or sets of data, ranging in topics from Human Resources practices to three years’ worth of statistics on the number of students who require academic intervention.
On Monday, she noted that she made those requests only after officials asked the trustees whether they desired any particular information to complete an evaluation of the district superintendent. Normally, Litkouhi said, her requests are no more voluminous than those of other trustees.
“I ask for things as it comes up,” Litkouhi said Monday. “I don’t try to be unreasonable.”
Litkouhi asserted that limiting board members’ immediate access to district records will create more “delays, confusion and time wasted.”
Her colleagues said just the opposite is true.
Blake said the information Litkouhi has requested would take “weeks and weeks and weeks” to compile since it would come from different buildings and different grade levels across the district, which is one of the largest in the state.
“It’s data from all over the place that can’t be easily synthesized,” he said.
Like any member of the public, individual trustees still can request district records through Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act rules. And Blake said the rest of the board may well agree with Litkouhi that some of the information she wants is worth the time required to compile it.
“Some of this is interesting stuff, some of this I might want to see,” he said. “And if so, make a request and we’ll talk about which of these things do we think are important in order to practice oversight over this district.”
The legal counsel for the Michigan Association of School Boards has said individual board members don’t have legal authority to direct administrators to provide information outside of the public records process.
Brad Banasik, legal counsel for the MASB, said boards may choose to limit one member’s ability to seek district records, especially if they believe the requests are taking up a substantial part of administrators’ workday.
Litkouhi, who has served on the board since 2022, has also sued the district over access to a class curriculum. She’d also been censured by the board and removed from her committee assignments after penning an op-ed for The Detroit News about Oakland County school boards being asked to support a ballot measure next year that would increase millage in all Oakland County public school districts.
mreinhart@detroitnews.com
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