Fairfax Wants $1,575 to Show Its Superintendent’s Calendar. Prince William Quoted $123.

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) and Prince William County Public Schools (PWCS) are the two largest districts in Virginia. Central office administrators in each district appear to value transparency about their superintendents’ calendars very differently.

On Sept. 30, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the calendar of Fairfax County Superintendent Michelle Reid, who makes $469,936 this year, plus a $12,000 car allowance, and has a four-person personal security detail. Specifically, I requested:

“The calendar of Superintendent Michelle Reid for the period Aug. 17, 2026, through the date you begin your search for responsive records [Sept. 30, 2026]. This includes all calendar entries for meetings, appointments, events, calls, travel, and speaking engagements, as well as any version of the calendar maintained by staff on her behalf, regardless of the calendar system used (e.g., Outlook or Google Calendar).

For each entry, please include, to the extent it appears in the record: the date; start and end times; title or subject line; location or virtual meeting information; listed attendees or invitees; and any description, agenda, or notes contained in the entry.”

Those who have never filed a FOIA request in Virginia may not know that it is fairly common to be required to pay a fee to cover at least part of the employee time spent collecting, duplicating, and communicating requested information.

The district’s FOIA office, managed by Division Counsel John Foster—whom FCPS pays $305,694 this year—estimated the cost at $1,575: 45 hours of labor at $35 per hour.

In an Oct. 14 email, the FOIA officer explained, “Each calendar entry must be reviewed for potential records concerning Student Information, Personnel information, Attorney-Client Privilege and Legal Work Product, Working papers of the Superintendent, Security and Safety Information, and Contract Negotiations.”

That works out to one hour of redaction time for each of the 45 days in the requested period, weekends included. The estimated work required seems excessive to me, given the nature of the records requested.

Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA) is a state law that gives any citizen the right to inspect and copy records held by public bodies. It covers nearly everything a public school system creates or keeps in the course of business: emails, memos, budget documents, meeting minutes, contracts, spending records, board materials, and more. 

The purpose of VFOIA is transparency: to make government operate in the open. School districts that charge obstructive fees for records that belong to the public may be violating the law. In my experience, FCPS, in particular, has a history of charging high fees, claiming no responsive records exist, and redacting or withholding information that attorney-client privilege seemingly should not protect.

For comparison, I submitted the same request for the superintendent’s calendar in Prince William County. The PWCS FOIA officer responded promptly with an estimate of $122.93. That covers 30 minutes of a deputy FOIA officer’s time at $51.95 per hour and two hours from an executive administrative assistant at $48.48 per hour.

FCPS’s hourly rate is actually lower than PWCS’s. The difference is in the number of hours: 45 hours for Fairfax versus 2.5 for Prince William, which makes Fairfax’s estimate about 13 times higher for the same request.

Redacting student information or privileged legal advice from a calendar is a legitimate task. But a calendar is a structured list of dates, times, and titles, and most entries on it are likely to need little or no redaction. A one-hour-per-day estimate raises the question of whether the cost reflects the work required.

That matters because fees can function as a barrier. Virginia law is meant to give any citizen access to public records, and an estimate above $1,500 likely puts those records out of reach for most residents.

Taxpayers already pay a high price for Superintendent Reid’s time. They should not have to pay again to see how it’s spent.

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