Post updated at 9:06 p.m. Monday, July 27:
A federal judge has ordered Lawrence Public Schools to pay more than $113,000 in attorney fees and costs after finding the district violated the Kansas Open Records Act in bad faith in a case tied to use of student-monitoring software.
The ruling is the latest development in 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 tool flags content that includes allusions to self-harm, depression, drug use and violence, for instance, but it also censors “messages containing innocuous phrases such as ‘called me a,’ ‘called her a,’ ‘very uncomfortable,’ and ‘my mental health’,” a lawsuit filed last year by former and current district students alleges.
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In November, the plaintiffs added to the lawsuit 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.
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U.S. District Judge Kathryn H. Vratil ruled Monday that the district must pay $113,480: $112,425 in attorney fees for nearly 250 hours of work, and $1,055 in costs for court transcripts of previous hearings.
The order follows an earlier ruling in which Vratil found the district’s response to the students’ records request — delaying fulfillment of the request for months and attempting to charge $13,000 — was not in good faith and lacked a reasonable basis in fact or law.
In Monday’s memo and order, Vratil rejected the district’s arguments that the fees were too high or that the lawyers billed for work outside the scope of the case and found the requested billing rates and hours are reasonable.
The school district had argued that some of the work involved constitutional claims, a motion to dismiss and a protective order dispute rather than open records litigation, but the court said that work was tied to enforcing access to public records.
Under the order, the district must pay the full amount by Aug. 23.
Harrison Rosenthal, an attorney for the student plaintiffs, said the ruling is significant because the district forced the students to go to federal court for public records, and the court found the district responsible for the consequences. He said the district seemed to change its practice regarding public records after the lawsuit was filed, and it previously had 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.
He said KORA fees should reimburse “genuine, reasonable work.”
“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 continued. “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.”
Summer Workman, a spokesperson for the district, declined to comment on the pending litigation.
The lawsuit is still ongoing.
Read previous coverage of the case in the articles linked below and at this link.
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Courtney Lane (she/her), reporting correspondent, has worked with The Lawrence Times since April 2026. Originally from Arkansas, she’s a graduate of KU’s Journalism school, where she worked as a reporter, opinion section editor, and eventually editor-in-chief for The Kansan.
Read her work for the Times at this link, and see her photography for the Times at this link.
Related coverage:
Cuyler Dunn/Lawrence TimesJudge rules Lawrence school district must pay $113K in attorney fees tied to open records violations
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