Gimme your child's phone number and address ...

[Hoosier Daddy]

[quote]Why the Columbus Dispatch wants kids’ telephone numbers

The story behind an aggressive public-records grab

By Sara Smith / March 8, 2007


On Jan. 29, the people who run The Columbus Dispatch complicated the lives of the people who run Dublin City Schools. This week, it was payback time.

Dispatch Editor Ben Marrison was still agitated Tuesday morning over the indignant firestorm that engulfed him and his paper over its request that 17 Central Ohio school districts hand over the names, addresses, phone numbers and birth dates of virtually all their students.

The records grab covered all Franklin County districts along with Pickerington, which is based in Fairfield County. Though Columbus’s city school system has surrendered its student records to the Dispatch for years, January marked the first time smaller districts were confronted with the demand.

“We’ve had a similar database on Columbus Public Schools for four years,â€

[Tom Taggart]

I would think Federal laws on student privacy would control.

[Best Music]

Unbelievable.

Not only is this an abuse of FOIA (i.e., free data mining), but the schools are just rolling over instead of forcing the Dyspatch to take them to court. Doubtful, but just maybe a judge would have a stroke of sanity and disallow those records.