Responding to a public-records request by the Raleigh News and Observer for school board members' eMail messages regarding proposed changes in student assignments recently cost Wake County, N.C., schools a whopping $17,000, primarily in staff time. Think it can't happen to you? Think again. Journalists routinely mine school and district data looking for virtual smoking guns.

Superintendent contracts, administrator salaries, teacher turnover rates, on-campus crime, student discipline incidents, credit card use, and school board travel are common Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Recent FOIA-driven stories across the country include a school district secretary in Dallas who rang up $383,788 in credit charges and didn't save any receipts, and how dozens of New York school districts failed to make superintendent contracts available in a timely fashion, if at all.

In New Mexico, the attorney general had to weigh in when a local school district refused to release controversial vending machine records.

Wake County's epic FOIA quest started fairly routinely, with an apparently verbal request from a reporter asking for access to school board and administrator eMails.

According to the Raleigh News and Observer, "miscommunication" and computer glitches, however, soon turned the request into a nightmare when Wake staffers had to hand-sort through 3,000 eMails to find the 219 involving student assignments and black out information that could identify individual students.

Wake officials have since purchased new software to make sorting through past eMail messages easier, but their 15-week odyssey shows why school leaders need to review their readiness for handling similar requests.

While asking journalists and citizens to file written requests might help cut down on misunderstandings, rework, and investigative fishing expeditions, keep in mind that filing written requests is a courtesy, not a legal obligation.

Many--if not most--state statutes don't require written notice, nor are citizens required to provide personal information such as their place of employment. Reporters shouldn't get preferential treatment.

Open government, the intent behind FOIA and other "sunshine" laws, is to keep elected officials and public-sector employees honest by giving ordinary citizens access to information regarding how taxpayer dollars are spent and the public's business is conducted.

Indeed, the Wake County story was prompted by questions about how much influence political and parental pressure outside of public meetings had on student assignment changes that moved more than 9,300 students from one school to another.

While no one involved in the Wake County public-records request debacle seems to believe the district was purposefully withholding information, public school officials nationwide are often slow to respond to routine public-records requests.