The Daily Signal By Tony Kinnett
A mother of a middle school student was shocked when the Joshua Independent School District in Joshua, Texas, charged her over $7,000 in public records fees to disclose how many bullying reports the district had received since 2015. The Goldwater Institute first reported this outrageous demand for a simple sum of documents. The mother is combatting the exorbitant fee via an appeal to the Texas Attorney General’s Office.
The mother, Terrie Chumchal, filed the request following the district’s lack of aid over a two-year period of vicious bullying in which her son repeatedly tried to obtain help from his school, Loflin Middle School. Chumchal told The Daily Signal that her son suffered several severe instances of bullying, often regarding his Korean heritage, over his sixth and seventh grade years—including a violent choking and sustaining a ruptured eardrum.
After receiving word of these incidents, Chumchal learned that the school’s closed-circuit television cameras had recorded some of these instances. Chumchal’s first response was to ask the assistant principal, Emma Rogers, if she could see the videos of her son being bullied to gain a better understanding of the situation. Rogers refused, informing Chumchal that she had no right to see the footage and that showing her would violate the offending students’ privacy.
