State Education Department fails to turn over charter schools data to Minnesota Star Tribune

The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has refused to turn over more than 2,000 files involving complaints and state oversight of charter schools to the Minnesota Star Tribune, despite publicly acknowledging that the complaints are a matter of public record.

The Star Tribune requested the charter school records Feb. 1, when it was in the early stages of reporting on Minnesota’s groundbreaking experiment with charter schools. The Star Tribune published a three-part series detailing oversight problems and widespread failures among Minnesota’s charter schools last week.

Though MDE routinely has provided records to the Star Tribune within weeks or months in prior requests for public records, the department hasn’t provided the bulk of the material covered in the newspaper’s Feb. 1 request. Within seven months, MDE has turned over just seven of the requested records.

Sam Snuggerud, the spokeswoman for the department, said in a statement that it is a complicated issue, spanning decades of data, and the agency “plans to produce another portion” of the request by the end of this month.

She added that the department receives hundreds of data requests each year and must review data to protect the privacy of students, families and teachers.

“MDE does not delay responding to data requests – in fact, the agency continues to work on the thousands of pages of data that may be responsive to this specific request,” she said in a statement. “The more complicated the request, the longer a response can take. Several months is not an unreasonable amount of time to respond to a complicated request.”

Attorney Leita Walker, who represents the Star Tribune, asked the department to turn over the records by the end of September or face a lawsuit over what she called the department’s “constructive denial” of the request, which she said constituted a violation of the Minnesota Data Practices Act.

“Star Tribune is deeply disappointed in MDE’s lack of transparency over the past year and what appears to be a strategy of delay in disclosing data of significant public interest and concern,” Walker said in a Sept. 11 letter to MDE Staff Attorney Adam Heuett, who previously identified himself as MDE’s “data practices compliance official.”

On MDE’s website, the department says that all complaints involving possible violations of the rules governing charter schools are a matter of public record. In a six-page document titled “How to File a Charter School-Authorizer Complaint,” MDE notes that “subject matter in complaints will not be treated as confidential, but will be used to investigate and take action upon complaints.”

In a previous interview with the Star Tribune, department officials acknowledged receiving dozens of complaints annually involving possible violations of state rules by charter school leaders and 12 so-called authorizers who oversee the schools on behalf of the state. Those authorizers include nonprofit groups and educational organizations.

Such complaints sometimes expose illegal activity, such as the fraudulent billing practices that were revealed when several employees at the Minnesota Internship Center charter school alerted MDE to the deliberate falsification of enrollment data in 2018. In other cases, parents have complained about their children’s lack of academic progress or about financial mismanagement, which sometimes has triggered action by school authorizers.

In October, for instance, Rosa Parks Charter High School in Rochester is shutting down after parents’ complaints triggered a revocation of the school’s charter by the Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools.

“You gave them every chance to do something, and they essentially constructively denied your request,” said Don Gemberling, spokesman for the nonprofit Minnesota Coalition on Government Information.

Gemberling said state agencies are drawing an increasing number of complaints about slow responses to record requests, noting the nonpartisan group Public Records Media (PRM) recently sued the Minnesota Department of Public Safety for failing to turn over records showing how state officials responded to protests and rioting in 2020.

Public Records Media blamed the administration of Gov. Tim Walz for trying to exercise “narrative control” over what public records have to say about the performance of state agencies.

“I can’t stress enough that we have seen these kinds of problems growing over time, especially in this administration,” PRM member Matt Ehling said at the time of the lawsuit’s filing.

A Walz spokeswoman previously said the governor takes transparency seriously, noting the administration has turned over “tens of thousands of pages of data” in response to various record requests.