How The Paradise Valley Unified School District Cut Its Public Records Fulfillment Time from Months to Days

The Situation

The Paradise Valley Unified School District (PVSchools) serves approximately 26,000 students in grades Pre-K through 12 across 41 schools throughout northeast Phoenix and north Scottsdale, Arizona. Mat Droge, the district’s director of marketing and communications, oversees a team responsible for managing the district website, crisis communications, and more in both English and Spanish.

In recent years, large and complex public records requests have consumed a significant amount of their time. Droge also realized PVSchools were at risk of being unable to fulfill requests involving social media content and metadata from any of more than 50 accounts affiliated with the district. Droge sought out a solution that would streamline the district’s public records request workflow while archiving social media content.

The Challenge: Months to Fulfill Requests with Time-Consuming Redactions and Disorganized Tracking

When Droge joined PVSchools in 2021, the school’s existing public records fulfillment process was labor-intensive and potentially error-prone. Families, community members, and the media sent all requests via email. A member of the communications team would then either forward the request to the department where the requested records were housed or call someone from the department. All requests were tracked in a spreadsheet.

After working with the district’s IT team to pull all relevant emails, one member of Droge’s team would spend up to their entire day reviewing emails and other documents for personal identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI), and other protected information under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and then redacting any mentions of it.

They would often end up reviewing the same email multiple times, since the batch of emails sent to them often included duplicates. In many cases, the task became too large for one person, forcing Droge to reassign other members of his team to help with reviewing and redacting documents.

Every document needed to be double- and even triple checked in some cases. Some requests took months to complete.

The Breaking Point

The start of Droge’s tenure in PVSchools coincided with a surge in public records requests. Unlike the ones the school district had received in the past, many of the new requests were broad and related to the topics within the national political discourse. Requests could, for example, ask for every email sent or received by school employees containing several keywords within a certain timeframe.

Each of these large requests took his team dozens of hours to complete. More importantly, however, they put his team at risk of releasing sensitive student, faculty, and staff information, causing multiple reviews of records.

He knew it was time for a change.

The Solution: Automating Manual Challenges with CivicPlus’ NextRequest

As Droge sought out a solution to PVSchools’ manual public records fulfillment process, there were several capabilities he prioritized. He wanted to shorten the amount of time spent reviewing and redacting records while preventing the release of sensitive information. He also needed a way to centralize request management since the district typically had multiple requests open at once.

Shortly after conversations began with CivicPlus’ NextRequest solution, he knew he had found a match. Three features stood out to him:

• Batch Redaction: Droge’s team is now able to review hundreds of documents for PII, PHI, and FERPA information in minutes. The system scans every document in a batch, flags PHI and PII, and automatically redacts it.
• De-duplication: Batches of emails frequently contain duplicates since IT teams pull every email someone sent and received or was copied or blind copied on. NextRequest removes duplicates so teams aren’t spending time reviewing the same email multiple times.
• Request dashboard: Droge can see which requests are open or closed, whether other departments have responded, communications between teams and the requester, and the deadlines for each request.

The Outcome: From Days to Hours Completing Requests

Since becoming NextRequest customers, Droge’s team is spending “significantly less” time on public records requests.

They would also typically dedicate entire days to completing requests. Now, with a more organized process for fulfilling requests, they can work on a request for a few hours and then step away to take on other tasks. And for large requests, Droge estimates it would take several months to complete. Today, they can often complete them in as little as a month.

The Challenge: A 24 Hour A Day Job Preserving Social Media Content

In Arizona, schools are required to preserve social media content and metadata for the public record if they choose to operate social media pages. Droge knows his team needs to be prepared for the day when they receive a public records request asking for content from any of the more than 50 social media pages affiliated with the district across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and X.

The Solution & Outcome: Comprehensive Archiving in Near Real-Time with CivicPlus’ Social Media Archiving

Today, Droge’s team is archiving content across all of their accounts in near real-time. On average, their Social Media Archiving account preserves more than 850 posts every month. PVSchools’ website is a part of the archive, as well, with an average of more than 2,300 web snapshots every six months.

Not only does Droge get peace of mind in knowing PVSchools’ social media content is archived for future public records requests, but he also has detailed records of activity on the district’s pages, including deleted posts and comments. On a few occasions, he has offered to share archived social media content to aid in investigations of incidents that originated online.

Beyond archiving content, Droge’s team also uses Social Media Archiving’s keyword alerts. Whenever someone asks a question on any of the district’s pages, or publishes a post containing a threat, his team immediately receives an email in their inbox so they can quickly respond.

“We don’t want to wait until we come into the office to see [the post]. I like to get the alert on my phone, in my email, and know about it at 5:30 when I wake up.”

Better Together with NextRequest and Social Media Archiving

Droge is confident NextRequest and Social Media Archiving will continue serving his team’s needs in the coming years. He’s especially excited to see how Social Media Archiving and NextRequest develop now that both are a part of CivicPlus’ suite of products.

“It gives me hope there’s going to be continued work put toward these programs to continue making them better, which ultimately just makes our use of it easier, more enjoyable, quicker, and efficient,” he says.