Superintendent Pat Hopkins listens during the public comment period of a Sept. 5 Maine School Administrative District 11 board of directors meeting in Gardiner. The district will now include all public records requests online. Anna Chadwick/Morning Sentinel

GARDINER — Maine School Administrative District 11 is now placing all public record requests online, as officials aim to cut down on the amount of time spent responding to such requests, which are now coming mainly from right-of-center groups from outside the district. 

Superintendent Patricia Hopkins told the Gardiner-area school board last week that the decision was made so members of the public could see the types of requests that have been made and determine if their question has already been answered.

Several school districts across the state, including MSAD 11, have faced an uptick in public record requests made by right-leaning political groups under the state’s Freedom of Access Act on topics and policies relating to gender identity, sexuality and sexual orientation. Though the requests are public information, schools rarely post them online.

By doing so, the district hopes to cut back on duplicative requests.

“Recently, MSAD 11 has been inundated with public records requests. Searching for and assembling records in accordance with state law is very time intensive and expensive for the school district,” Hopkins wrote on the school website. “In the name of transparency and the hope that this effort can reduce the number of public records requests pertaining to the same matters, we have decided to make public all record requests, along with the corresponding records that were shared with the individual or groups making the request.”  

Since the start of the school year in August, the district has received seven FOAA requests, including two from the Kennebec Journal to ask for surveillance video after a recent school board meeting and the public records request log from the start of the year until mid-October.

Several other requests were made from people and organizations outside of the school district, including state Rep. Mike Soboleski, R-Phillips, as well as members of political organizations: Allen Sarvinas, from the Maine chapter of the national nonprofit Parent’s Rights in Education; and Lawrence Lockman from his nonprofit Maine First Project, which endorsed several members on the MSAD 11 board of directors.

The school district encompasses Gardiner, West Gardiner, Pittston and Randolph.

The requests are mostly related to gender identity and policies.

Gardiner-area schools have faced turmoil from several members of the public and members on the school board over the district’s policy for transgender students. To address parent concerns, the school board extensively modified the policy and included a Gender Support Plan with guidance on how to address a student’s gender identity in and out of school. The district also installed $70,000 bathrooms with floor-to-ceiling doors. 

The transgender policy is not unique to the Gardiner schools as other schools in central Maine, such as Hallowell-based Regional School Unit 2 and Waterville Public Schools, have a specific policy for transgender students.

For schools that do not have a policy, the rights of transgender students are protected under new Title IX rules and the Maine Human Rights Act. The new Title IX guidelines are facing an injunction in federal court and affecting several central Maine schools.

Anyone can make a public records request to a public entity, such as a school district or government department. But there are specific guidelines under federal and state laws on what constitutes a public record. Entities have a right to charge money for the time spent preparing the request.

Hopkins said that from Jan. 1 through September, the requests have cost the district $933 in legal fees, not including the time spent responding to the requests.

In southern Maine, the Gorham School Department began receiving an unprecedented number of public records requests in 2023, so many that it hired a part-time staff member and went well over its legal expense budget.

One parent, Eric Lane, made a majority of the requests — 90% of the 103 requests — that often related to transgender student policies and pronouns. The request have slowed down this year, said Gorham Superintendent Heather Perry, who said that the district no longer employs a part-time staffer to deal with the volume of requests.

The Gorham schools also put the district’s FOAA requests on the website.

Sarvinas, from Parents Rights in Education, requested from MSAD 11 legal correspondences about the school district’s transgender policy, including the cost of a “gender plan”; any reports for a child’s lost time in the classroom while developing a “gender plan”; and correspondences between Hopkins and the LGBTQ resource OUT Maine.

His group encourages transparency in the classroom on behalf of parents, Sarvinas said, and helps parents know how to request information in the right areas. He said the nonprofit has helped parents make requests in Turner-based MSAD 52, Freeport-area RSU 5 and Cumberland-area MSAD 51.

“It’s an attempt to intimidate parents from processing FOAA requests because they don’t want their name on the website,” Sarvinas said on the district’s decision to put the public records on the school website. “It’s a bullying tactic to keep parents from processing FOAA requests, whether it’s true or not, that’s (the parents) initial reaction and how they feel.”

Soboleski, who represents House District 73 in the Carrabassett Valley area, requested emails and correspondences between Hopkins and the board Chairperson Becky Fles in regard to “following the law” with the school district’s policy around transgender students.

“If it’s the law, then every school district in the state would institute the same policy, but they aren’t. It’s selective enforcement of a policy that they have created, which I believe is in violation of state law,” Soboleski said.

Soboleski has spoken out against Gardiner’s policy during public comment sessions in the school board meetings and said he has done so at Oxford-based MSAD 17, Union-based RSU 40 and Phillips-based MSAD 58, but hasn’t made public records requests to other districts.

Portland Press Herald staff writer Riley Board contributed to this article.