Name: Issue #01: Mr. Sunshine & SSN-tinel VS The Backlog and Red Tape
Uploaded: 2026-08-12T17:46:09.759Z
Duration: 29 min 56 s
Description: Issue #01: Mr. Sunshine & SSN-tinel VS The Backlog and Red Tape

Transcript for "Issue #01: Mr. Sunshine & SSN-tinel VS The Backlog and Red Tape": Hello. Good morning and afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Grace Herman. I am the content marketing specialist here at Reveal and Logical. And today, I am joined by Jason Rooks from Parkway School District in Missouri and Emma Barringen from Poudre School District in Colorado. Thank you both so much for joining me today. Thank you. you. so today is going to be an awesome conversation. We're gonna talk with our lovely distinguished speakers about the main challenges they face when it comes to public record requests, how they've overcome them, and then how you can overcome them and become what we call a civil superhero by streamlining your records requests process from intake all the way through disclosure. Because here at Logical, we believe that the work that civil servants do in fulfilling public records requests and related FOIA requests is truly heroic. So one quick ask as we move through this webinar, please drop your questions in the q and a. Anything you have for Jason and Emma will take some time at the end to go through those and answer them. Okay. Now that housekeeping is done, let's get into it and meet our speakers. So first, we have Jason Rooks. He is the chief operations officer at Parkway School District in Missouri, where he's worked for, correct me if I'm wrong, Jason, twenty years in a variety of different roles. About about that? Yes. Oh, So so park yeah. Please. go ahead. No. You go ahead. So we let me get some context on Parkway. School District just so we have a sense of scope. It's in suburban St. Louis. It has 28 schools and enrollment sits around 17,000 students. Jason, you wanna talk a little bit more about your responsibilities and your team there? Yeah. At at Parkway, I started out on the IT side of the house. And now as chief operations officer, I oversee facilities, transportation, nutrition services, and technology. So really bringing the operations groups together to help serve our staff and students. Love it. And now across the country, we have Emma who is the records manager at Poudre Poudre School District in Northern Colorado. She where she was previously a teacher and then stepped into this district side role. Her district encompasses it's slightly bigger than the Parkway School District with 45 schools plus charters, and enrollment sits at 25,000 students. So, Emma, same question to you. What does your role look like and how is your team organized? Yeah. Absolutely. So we're actually 54 schools across the, 54. Northern Colorado school, Northern Colorado. But, the records department is under the legal division within Poudre School District. And so, as the records manager, I'm responsible for, processing requests for student educational records, employee personnel records, our public records request, and then also just gathering and producing records that are responsive to subpoenas, warrants, litigation matters, things of that sort. And while I'm probably the primary person that's doing that, request piece of it and, the formal request, I also have four records compliance specialist and then our district, general counsel and assistant general counsel, help to review and authorize our our prepared responses in records. That's awesome. And so as you'll see from the fun theme we have going on in the webinar and when you signed up, we have cast both Jason and Emma as superheroes and a part of our civil superheroes campaign. So Jason is our mister sunshine because he brings light to the records process at Parkway ensuring that compliance with sunshine law stays on track and Emma is our SS sentinel because of the work she does to make sure any personally identifiable information and records request doesn't get out, which is especially important when it comes to student, safety and privacy. So they're superheroes in my eyes. So from my seat here at Logical, I've been hearing from the news and from customers and in our conversations already that records requests have been at an all time high in the last couple of years, breaking records. I talked to one county that was saying every month had been a new record breaking high. This seems to generally track to increase political activity and also the widespread access to AI easing the barrier people face into submitting these records requests. It's way easier to draft an email, and find the information they need to do this. So my question for both of you is how is are you feeling this surge at your specific school district, and what's the type and volume of requests that you've been seeing? Jason, I'm gonna throw it to you first. Yeah. It it's I've been involved in producing the records for our district for a number of years. And what we've seen is it used to kind of come in these bursts. Like, we'd have a season. You get I always say they come in threes. Right? And what we've seen what we've seen in the last few years is that it's it's become a constant stream. So as opposed to getting them in these bursts, we are regularly getting them every month, and in a from a variety of sources. So we have our FOIA requests that you that you kind of hinted on that are associated with either the sociopolitical environment or, coming from, data collection, purely just wanting to know who what were our bid responses on this, what were our criteria, those types of things. We've also seen the continued uptick of parents as part of custody battles and divorce proceedings wanting electronic records related to their students. So all in all, everyone has kind of jumped on to this email, electronic documents are important no matter what the situation is, and it's become a constant thing that we're we're having to respond to. Yeah. So it's more of a load that someone has to handle every day and every week rather than once every two months or something is a big one that comes in. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Emma, what about you? What does it look look like at Rooter? Extremely similar. It it definitely sort of used to be, spurts and there were some years that were also really high spurts. But now it's just kinda that constant steady flow and, definitely within the request, sometimes even more specific or more even sometimes more broad and just, like, wanting a lot of information. So lots to work through. I think one of the challenges that we face here in Colorado is our, Colorado Open Records Act, CORA. It we have three business days to respond after receiving it. So it is. a constant. Like, every single day, you are probably doing something, and sometimes you might still get those bursts of five or six requests in that day and and making sure it's it's a manageable piece, to get them out within the allotted time frame. Yeah. Three days. That isn't it. That's a wild turnaround, especially because the data volume must just be sprawling. too. Yes. That's increasing. Jason, what does the timeline look like in Missouri? Yeah. So in Missouri, we call them sunshine requests, fitting for my superhero character. Not sure. And we have we have a three day response and a three day response time. And that I liked what Emma said that it it causes stress that three days of, like, we have to respond. And not that. we have to produce everything, but just keeping up with the responses and tracking who's been responded to, who hasn't, when did we say we would have we would produce the records, and then tracking all the bits and pieces, Mhmm. it. becomes very intricate very quickly. Cast. Yeah. It's a lot of moving pieces at once. And I know you both have found a way to take that volume and operationalize it, so it's a little bit more manageable. But can you walk us through what your process was in the past and what were the main challenges with that? I'm gonna start with you. I know you came on slightly after this, like, opera operationalization. Oh my gosh. Started. I know. But can you I got stuck there. But. can you talk through what that looked like? yes. Of course. I always say I'm very thankful that they, got logical before I came on because the previous way would have never worked for me. So what used to happen is the records would be printed out and sharpied and then recopied because you could still kinda see through the Sharpie and recopy to ensure the redaction actually took. And it was a very slow, methodical process. It was individual review of emails, like opening each one within a folder imported within Outlook, lots of duplicates within that process. And then also, our we had a very manual process. And this part, we added on after I have I have been here, but it's a very manual process for sending, our document document preservation notices and and our reminders to those custodians and then when litigation was released. And so now we've been able to, automate that through our services with Logical, which is, yeah. No kidding. So manually. how many Sharpies most of you have gone through in that process? Gosh. Running out of ink. Ink and energy. Jason, what about you? What does. that look like? Yeah. I lived in the pre logical world and and the post logical world. And so it's talking to, talking to the the k 12 geeks on this. You know, we've been on this webinar. We've we've been a a Google school district using Gmail for a very long time. And so our our pre logical process was going through Google Vault and manually reviewing thousands and thousands of emails, printing the PDF, each individual email that we thought was relevant or, applied to the request, and then trying to get all those PDFs over to our legal representation to then start digging in and doing redactions. And so there was a lot of time spent trying to deduplicate, having to in so many clicks, having to click in, scroll down, and go through all of those emails, a very, very time consuming and manual process. And pretty logical, this is when I I was primarily the one doing all this work. And I had to go to my supervisor at the time or my director. And and that's when we started having the conversation of this is reaching a volume where we need to put possibly dedicate an FTE to do this work because I I can't sustain it if this volume continues to increase. And that's what led us that conversation led us to a product like Logical, because. it was so manual, so time consuming to the point that we were seeing on the horizon having to dedicate a forty hour per week a forty hour per week employee to do nothing but this. What do you think that would have looked like if with the volume the way it's grown so far? Would one forty hour week employee been able to, like, absorb that cost without a solution? What do you think? In our in our old process, no. And actually. hearing. Emma describe her organization, I was getting jealous because, like, oh, I would love to have that type of staff doing nothing but the request right now. But in our old way in our old method, we would probably be, like, four or five people at this point. just to keep up. Emma and Jason, do you either like, how long. like, time wise would responding to one request take you within that three day window? Like, what percentage of your three days is spent heads down on a request? Well, that's also another piece I think with it is, we allot it's an hour that's free to request or if it's our public records request. And so then after that, it's a time and cost estimate. So really, the production actually could have was reduced because it was taking a longer time to go through those records and mark out the privilege and confidential information. So now we're actually able to be more transparent and to produce more and be more responsive in our initial response, than was previously able. Yeah. That's really interesting. Jason, anything to add? Yeah. I mean, pre logical, one request would easily take me four or five days. Hello? And then post post Logical, it cut that time in probably greater than half of, I mean, it saved me as an individual, the only one doing it at that time. We had to have a product, some product like Logical to help us with the with the way the volume was increasing. Yeah. So we've been hitting it on it already, but basically logical seemed like it came into your life and completely revolutionized your workflow. So I'm just gonna give some light context on what Logical is. So if anyone in the webinar hasn't heard of it before, Logical is a purpose built public records request tool that as of a month ago, completely streamlines the discovery process from intake all the way through disclosure. We recently recently added an intake portal that brings all of our features to the next level, but it has special built features to dedupe dedupe emails to thread emails so you're only reading the most responsive things with redactions and PEI detections, that runs alongside and is built on top of features and litigation level, capabilities. So some color on Logikcull. So sending it back over to you guys, how did you find Logikcull? And now what does your workflow look like? Emma, let's start with you. Yeah. So as mentioned, it was found prior to, me being in this role, and. it was actually a webinar similar to this. They were looking for something to make it more manageable because it was a very similar thing to what Jason was saying. They were it was either that or they were going to have to hire somebody specifically for, requests. So cost saving option was to, find a product that, actually helped us just to be more efficient in our in our role. So now, our typical kind of workflow is, I receive the request, I create a project within Logical, and, that's really our our hub for reviewing all of our records no matter what type of request it is. We have all of our templates set up depending on the type of request. That way, our our tags are, appropriate for the the request if it's FERPA or if it's, public record, if it's litigation related. And then, we definitely utilize that global duplication is my best friend, especially when it comes to emails. Bulk redaction, the auto tag to, highlight when we, are, like, employee IDs and our student IDs are the exact same, amount of numbers as a ZIP code. So we don't want it to always, redact all of that because ZIP codes can be public, but we want to make sure that, it kind of draws our eyes to it, and that's always very helpful. Another part of our workflow right now is I'm going through and I'm I'm reviewing any of the records prior, to a release and, tagging them. And what's great is we can I can tag it if it's a specific one I really want legal to look at and I have a question or a comment? And then they don't have to go in and rereview everything. They're just looking at those ones that I've tagged with with a question, and just it's a more automated, flow. It allows us a secure place to have, our sites add records to request if it's needed and just give them that project, authority to share with outside, counsel when necessary. So it just really it helps it flow from from start to finish. That's super cool. It's awesome that you are able to, like, collaborate with all these different teams within one place without having to send things over email and then losing stuff. in the here. It's here. It's here. It's like, yeah. nope. This is where it is. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's a lot less clicks from that original process. Yeah. Jason, what about you? I know you talked about that initial conversation, but any more. color on workflow? Yeah. So, I mean, for well, for me, it was I I had to go find a product if we were gonna survive. And so I'd I had to go through a formal RFP process and evaluate different tools, logical checked all the boxes that I was really looking for for a deep a a really strong integration with Google Workspace and, other but flexibility to work with others, systems as well. It also had it was very easy to learn. And so I needed something I could get up and running very quickly and not have to spend a whole lot didn't I didn't need a heavy learning a big learning curve. And so Logical is very easy for me to jump into, start using right away. And, it really it it it it checked all the boxes we needed for a solution and has scaled really well as, our requests have increased. And so our workflow, very similar to Emma's, involves multiple departments, and it comes in through our communications department who our chief, chief communications officer is actually our custodian of records. And then she shares that with our IT department who actually runs our logical environment. We get a project going. We start ingesting the the electronic documents. And it felt good to hear Emma's description because we were able to reduce the time that our lawyers or our legal team has spent working on things because we can go through, do those initial that initial deduplication. We go through and do the mass redactions. We go through and do that initial tagging, and then we bring our legal into the logical environment to work with us on that and start really refining the the product that we're gonna produce for the request. And so it's cut down on the time we're spending on requests. It's cut down the time we're spending for or the money we're spending for our legal team to review requests, and I would say we're producing better records for the requester. That's awesome. Quality going up and cost going down, that's a pretty dream scenario right there. That's what you want when. you invest in technology. Yeah. I love to hear that. And I know you said the learning curve and being able to jump into the platform quickly was a huge priority. How long do you think it took you to get set up and logical, and feel comfortable? Well, a, I had a really great onboarding team from Logical. They were there. Like, the the chat requests through the Logical interface was almost instantaneous. I had somebody who knew what they were doing. And I would say it was, like, two webinars and then a couple questions, and I was off and running. It it really was. a quick quick start up. That's super cool. I've heard people talk it's a pretty intuitive interface as well where. things are generally where you want them to be and customizable on where you want them to be be be in the UI. That's super cool. My other question is, Jason, I know you've you've done a webinar with us before back in the day, and so you've been on this product for a while. How has your the way you've used it, has it changed at all through the years, or, like, even, like, handing it off because I know you said you're not exactly running it anymore. What what has that experience been like? Yeah. Logic Logical was kinda my baby. It's so I've been very protective of it, and it's been it was tough to hand off. But going back to what we were saying, the the learning curve is so is so easy that it was easy to hand off. And so I get brought in on more of the the process and logistical questions around it. But I can trust my IT team to work within it, know how to use the tags, know how to use all the resources. And we've been scaling it's been interesting because we've been scaling up our usage into areas outside of your typical requests. So even. if it's if it's ediscovery around a student that may be doing something they shouldn't be doing, we're bringing it into logical so that we could parse the data and produce those results not for an outside requester, but for a principal that just wants, I need to see these emails and these chat logs. Okay. We're gonna we're gonna go into Logical and do that. So we're finding all these little kind of, unexpected uses and growing into those with Logical, and we're trying to start expanding that out to remove it from just being on our IT team to, okay, how do we hand this off to our communications department so that they can be part of this process in Logical? That's awesome. So spreading the ROI of the tool to other teams beyond you as well. Yes. Yeah. That's. awesome. Emma, is there any of that at Pooter at this point? I know you talked a. little bit about your litigation team using it. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, when you just said that, I was like, we are will you utilize it whenever we can? We're like, oh, I work harder. We can work smarter. We have logical. Let's let's put this in here and there you go, and we've done the exact same thing for principals. Yeah. I think the adding in the legal hold function, we probably did that about a year and a half ago, and that has been huge. Because before that, it was definitely it was like a spreadsheet and manual and okay. This is when that release went out over email and, oh, when have we sent our last reminder that, hey, custodians, you still need to retain these. Whereas now it's all automatic. We have our templates built out for that too and for different types if it's a state complaint, if it if it's, due process. And so then it just it helps speed up our ability to get that document preservation notice written out and then sent, and then we have our Microsoft integration. So it's very easy to just, plug in any employees that are on that hold. We can track and see when the hold maybe was paused, and reminders don't need to be sent, when it was released. So we just have all of that, evidence to back up, like, the work we were doing as well. And just the the time saving capabilities, I can't speak to enough. They're just feel very essential to to do my job effectively and timely. That's awesome. Yeah. I love having all of that in one trackable defensible place is huge for. both of your roles. So if for the people that are sitting on this webinar and are facing these huge levels of volumes, these complex datasets and are like pulling their hair out trying to respond to these three day, time meet these three day deadlines. What is the number one piece you advise you have for someone that is struggling with that when it comes to not being under resourced in a high resource requiring process? Jason, I'm gonna send it to you first. Oh, that's a that's a tough question. You know, I think I think in the general advice I would give is school districts, you know, our focus is on students and supporting supporting them and making sure they're successful. Rarely do we like to spend a lot of time looking at things like records requests. It's it's just not why it's not typically why we're here. And and so I would encourage districts, if you don't have a tool like Logical, you really we're reaching a point in time where every district needs to have something to help them manage this. Emma brought up due process requests that we've seen due process requests skyrocket in the last couple years, and and we wouldn't be able to support it without if we hadn't already had logical. And so even if you're a small rural district or suburban district or an urban district, To be able to accurately and effectively respond to these requests, and we wanna be transparent with our community, you need to have some type of tool like Logical to help support your team. What about you, Emma? Number one piece of advice. Yeah. I mean, I absolutely agree. And I think, we were probably both Jason and I were both hitting on it within our last, question. But, really, you can tailor it to, to your school or to your company to meet you as as best as you need. We don't use it for just one thing. It it really does, it it's in everything. It's in our our FERPA request, our public records, our litigation. It's in subpoenas and warrants. Everything is really making its way through logical to make it practical to get through the volume, and to make it, efficient and manageable and to have more eyes on. And, really, it allows us to have something that's secure, which is always, our priority as well. So I I just, echo what Jason already shared of if you don't have something like this, you you you have to in today's world to, effectively move forward and be transparent and be responsive, to requests. Those are both really great advice, and I really appreciate, like, the grounding and of, like, what is the purpose of why this process exists, and what we are doing to help uplift and protect these these students and transparency and, like, the larger democratic, implications of all of that. So we have we're gonna turn to the chat now. We have some questions from our listeners. So the first one is from Reyna who's in Chicago. I'm in Chicago as well, so love to see it. She wants to know if either of you have any tips for automating redactions, specifically repetitive redactions across files where it's like the same document structures, kind of to the, like, employee codes you were talking about, Emma, earlier. Do you wanna take that one then? Yeah. So we have it set. That's definitely one of our big ones, and it will highlight then for you anytime, something's matching that, like, feature you put in or that, oh, what's the word? The whatever part you put into that, and then it will highlight through the document, but it's not actually redacting it. So it'll show in a different color, like purple. And I'll be like, oh, and you can also go through and search and be like, oh, no. That's a ZIP code. I don't need that one. Or, oh, yeah. That is a employee ID. I'm gonna go ahead and and automatically redact that. So it helps just draw your eyes to it, quicker. But then also, for instance, if, I'm going through, certain emails or records that I know, like, this student's ID has populated multiple times, then I might just not go through at one at a time with the highlight, and I might just go to the bulk redact and type in that, and bulk redact all of them throughout all of the documents, which really saves a lot of time as well. Perfect. That's awesome. Jason, we're getting some questions about the deduplication, the email filters, which we call inclusive email. Can you talk a little bit about what your experience how that feature works for you and what the, like, results that unlocks for you guys? Yeah. What was nice about that is I was able to quickly in Google Vault, I can cast a broad net. So I could do a very broad search, bring it into logical, and there's that initial immediate automatic deduplication, which is great because it's pulling out all those repetitive emails that that Google Vault can't do. From there, I click that in that inclusive email filter, which automatically then kind of reduces that email string where it's the, you know, reply to reply reply reply into just that core that core all inclusive group of emails that then I need to go in and re review. And then one of the things I really loved about Logical was being able to play with all those filters. So once I've got it down to that group, I can really dig into the to this from this domain to this individual, from this person to this domain, and really start dissecting the data and getting to that core group of emails that I'm trying to produce for the requester. And then going with what Emma was talking about, then applying the mass, redaction tool makes it super easy because a lot of times our teachers are referencing the same two students in a lot of emails, Mhmm. but we're only searching for records from one student. So I can very easily go in and then apply mass redaction to that subset of emails that I'm now looking at. It really helps parse out the data into something manageable. That's awesome. Thank you for these great questions in the chat. I know there are more. Our our Jason at Logical is going through and answering them as well. But I'll just pause here so I can point you to some next steps before we get kicked off at 12:30. If you all if anyone wants to learn more about Logical for public records and check out our new intake portal, see these automatic redactions that we're talking about, this inclusive email feature, please click that demo button that's up at the top, and you'll be connected with an expert that can show you how this playbook for tackling records request would work for your specific workflow. And then you can leave work feeling like a superhero. And if you really wanna become a superhero, you can check out our civil superheroes page and take a test, and you'll see which civil superhero you are. Or you can reach out to marketing, and I'll be happy to come up with a superhero name for you. I with that, I wanna thank you all so much for spending time with us today, and a huge thank you for Jason and Emma for, number one, fighting the public record request villains and restoring sunshine in their district and giving some up some of their very precious time in this busy time of the year for this conversation. Thank you both. We'll follow-up with any questions we didn't get to. And, yes, we are recording this. So you will get it's sent in an email that you can replay and share with your team. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Jason, Emma. I hope, everyone. has a great rest of your day. Thank you, everybody. Bye.