Federal Judge Kathryn H. Vratil has ordered USD 497 Lawrence to pay over $113,000 in attorneys’ fees for a group of student plaintiffs after the district was found to have violated KORA (the Kansas Open Records Act).
According to the Lawrence Times, the ruling is part of “a broader dispute that began with the district’s use of Gaggle, an AI tool that sifts through anything attached to the district’s Google Workspace and flags content it deems a safety risk.”
The Times reported that nine current and former students sued over the tool saying it was a privacy violation..
In November 2025, the plaintiffs added a list of Kansas Open Records Act complaints after the district failed to follow Kansas law in responding to requests related to Gaggle and its switch to ManagedMethods, which is a tool similar to Gaggle.
In April of 2026, Vratil found the district had violated KORA by not acting quickly on the plaintiff’s requests and set a deadline for the district to do so.
According to the Times, Vratil ruled that delaying the fulfillment of the request for months and attempting to charge a “go-away” price of $13,000 for the records was “not in good faith.”
On Monday, July 27, 2025, Vratil ruled the district must pay 113,480 — $112,425 in attorney fees for nearly 250 hours of work, and $1,055 in costs — by Aug. 23, 2026.
According to the Times, plaintiff attorney Harrison Rosenthal said the ruling is important because the plaintiffs were forced to go to federal court for public records. Moreover, the district appeared to have changed its KORA policy after the lawsuit was filed, having previously provided public records to students at no charge.
“Whatever the stated rationale, turning straightforward electronic searches into expensive administrative and legal projects predictably prices students, reporters, parents, and other members of the public out of public information,” he said.
KORA reforms finally passed in 2025
As The Sentinel has previously reported, exorbitant fees to fill open records requests are fairly standard practice across the country and in Kansas. Known as a “go-away price,” the hope is that if a news organization or resident is quoted an outrageous sum for records, they’ll simply drop the request.
It’s a situation that has prevailed for decades, and that previous changes to the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) have attempted to combat — indeed, as recently as 2015, Kansas has ranked 43rd overall in transparency.
Legislation to fix some of the deficiencies in KORA failed in the Legislature in 2022. Finally, legislation was passed in 2025 to prevent government entities from charging excess fees to obtain public records.
Indeed, while KORA allows agencies to charge for records, hourly rates are supposed to be for the lowest-paid employee capable of performing the search, which Rosenthal said did not appear to be the case here.
“A public agency that uses automated tools to scan student content at scale should not treat a narrow keyword search for public records as a premium legal project,” he told the Times. “USD 497 should immediately resume its longstanding practice of not charging student journalists, adopt a written public-interest and news-media fee-waiver policy modeled on federal FOIA, and commit to using the least costly and most efficient means available to produce public records. Students, reporters, and parents should not need a litigation budget to understand what their public school district is doing.”
According to The Times, the lawsuit stems from the fact that student journalists’ notes could be accessed by Gaggle.
“Students’ journalism drafts were intercepted before publication, mental health emails to trusted teachers disappeared, and original artwork was seized from school accounts without warning or explanation,” Rosenthal said.
The Kansas Reporter’s Shield law, which protects journalists’ private notes and sources, makes no distinction between professional and student journalists, and the Kansas Student Publications Act protects student journalists at public schools from censorship by school principals, administrators or school boards.
