A school district in Arizona is suing four taxpayers for being too dogged in pursuit of information about school operations and spending. Making too many requests for documents and then complaining to the state ombudsman about the district’s slow response to those requests constitutes harassment, according to attorneys for the Congress Elementary School District. The school district wants the court to block the defendants from filing any more public records requests, to rule that the district does not have to comply with previous requests, and to restrict the rights of defendants to complain to outside agencies.

This is a school district that twice since 2002 was found to have violated state open meeting laws. Last year, the state ombudsman’s office agreed with the four defendants that the school district had been too slow to respond to public records requests.  

Mark Flatten, investigative reporter for the Goldwater Institute, has more details on this case in a recent report. He notes that for the most part the records requested by the defendants were agendas and minutes of school board meetings, school spending reports, and documents relating to the defendants’ own children. In other words, they were requesting information that should routinely be made public anyway, or that they otherwise had a right to access. The Goldwater Institute, by the way, is representing the defendants.