Below is a draft of my FOIL/FOIA request letter that I plan to send to the NYC Department of Education. I am requesting the number of overage middle school students in New York City organized by both school and borough. In order to show how evident the problem of overage middle school students is in NYC, I need these statistics in my story.
March 2, 2009
Ms. Christine Kicinski
Records Access Officer
New York City Department of Education
(212) 374-6888
FOIL@schools.nyc.gov
Dear Ms. Kicinski:
Under the Freedom of Information Law, N.Y. Public Officers Law Section 87 et seq., I am requesting documents showing the following statistics:
- The number of overage middle school students in New York City organized by borough (overage middle school students are students who are in grades six through eight and have been held back one or more times.)
- The number of overage middle school students in New York City organized by school
I am a freelance reporter and graduate journalism student at New York University writing a story about overage middle school students in New York City. Please telephone me at 443-812-2241 if you have any further questions.
Thank you very much for your time.
Sincerely,
Sarah R. Kaufman
Graduate Student
Department of Journalism
New York University
(443) 812-2241
SarahRKaufman@gmail.com
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Sarah: I'm wondering whether there's a way to articulate the request that would help ensure results - as phrased, the requests looks unlikely to yield timely results, since you're putting the onus on the information officer to figure out exactly how to pull together this data, which may or may not exist in the form in which you're requesting it.
ReplyDeleteWere you able to get information about how exactly the Dept of Ed organizes and aggregates its data tracking student progress over time? Is there a specific data report that you can be confident the Dept produces and that you can ask for? If you've done that legwork already and feel assured that your FOIL request as drafted is targeted as much as it can be to get results, great; it's just extremely important to hone these requests down to a sharp point.