NYC Public School Parents: Our inBloom email saga Part I: Waiting for John King to respond to the FOIL

NYC Public School Parents: Our inBloom email saga Part I: Waiting for John King to respond to the FOIL:

Our inBloom email saga Part I: Waiting for John King to respond to the FOIL

I have taken  time during this holiday break to finally write up my experiences with my attempt to FOIL communications of the NY State Education Department regarding inBloom Inc.  Below is Part I.  Part II with excerpts from those emails will follow soon.

John King, now Acting US Secretary of Education

Fighting inBloom took a long time, especially here in New York;  we were the first state to organize a campaign against this data-grabbing project of the Gates Foundation, starting in January 2012,  and  the last state to pull out, in April 2014, due to the amazing ability of our Commissioner, John King, to ignore the vehement opposition from the State legislature, including the leaders of both parties, the school boards, the state superintendents, the teacher union, emails from thousands of parents, and finally the Governor.   (Background on the inBloom controversy is provided on the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy here; newsclips here.)

While in other states, it took only a few months to a year of  protests for their State Education chiefs to feel the pressure and pull out of inBloom, here in NY it took two and a half years and an act of the State Legislature as part of the budget deal on March 31, 2014 to convince our Commissioner this data-sharing arrangement was now illegal and thus could not be sustained.  (Here is a timeline of events.) 

But nothing was more frustrating than the year and half wait we had to endure, even after inBloom had closed its doors, to receive the emails between State Education Department officials and the private entities with whom they intended to share our most sensitive student data.   Here is that story.

On June 17, 2013, with the help of attorney Norman Siegel, we requested all email communications between officials of the NY State Education Department and the Gates Foundation, inBloom, the Shared Learning Collaborative LLC (inBloom's name before it became a separate corporation) , Wireless Generation (the major subcontractor for inBloom, hired to build the data system), and Amplify (Wireless Gen's new name after it was bought by Rupert Murdoch and hired Joel Klein to run this company as a division of News Corporation.) 

We asked for the communications between January 1, 2011 and May 1, 2013 through a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request.  Actually, the request was made on behalf of the PS 75 PTA in District 3 in Manhattan and the Community Education Council in District 14 Brooklyn, whose members were very concerned about the inBloom plan and agreed that this was important information that parents had a right to know.    

In NYC and throughout the state, as well as in all the other nine inBloom states and districts, parents were understandably concerned about the decision of their State Education Departments to share the highly sensitive personal information of their children with all these private NYC Public School Parents: Our inBloom email saga Part I: Waiting for John King to respond to the FOIL: