The Inquirer waged a 3-year legal battle to see attendance data for Philly district schools.

The School District of Philadelphia publicly shares school attendance reports to let the community know how well each school is doing getting children into the classroom.

In summer 2019, after Inquirer reporters learned more fully about the ways the district maintained attendance records of middle and high school students across class periods, they crafted Right-to-Know requests in order to get a complete picture of absenteeism. The reporter who submitted the requests, Jessica Calefati, now at the Baltimore Banner, made it clear in writing that the newspaper sought only records that had no student names or identifying details of any kind.

The district rejected the requests, arguing that turning over the data involved creating new records, which the state public records law says agencies are not required to do.

» READ MORE: Chronic absenteeism is surging in Philly’s early grades, putting thousands more at risk of lasting academic harm

The Inquirer appealed to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records (OOR), a quasi-judicial, independent state agency that rules on thousands of public requests a year — a first step in what would turn into a three-year legal dispute.

In September 2019, the agency ruled for the newspaper, telling the district to provide the attendance data with no identifying details attached because it was a public record and that redacting names and other personal information from a data set was not creating a new record.

The district appealed that decision a month later in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, arguing, for the first time, that releasing the data also would violate student privacy.

In August 2020, a Common Pleas judge affirmed the OOR decision and said the district “shall produce the requested data with student identifiers redacted.”

» READ MORE: How one Philly high school reveals the district’s dire attendance problems

The district appealed that order to the state Commonwealth Court. But in January 2022, a panel of Commonwealth Court judges found for the newspaper. Open government and First Amendment groups hailed the decision.

“The decision allows the general public to scrutinize and hold school officials accountable for educational administration, while at the same time protecting student privacy,” said lawyer Joshua Bonn, of Harrisburg, who handled the case for The Inquirer.

The district decided not to appeal the case to the state Supreme Court and settled with The Inquirer.

The newspaper has several million daily attendance records that it will continue to analyze. It will share its findings with the district, as it did before the publication of Unexcused: Philly schools’ chronic absence crisis.

— James Neff, investigations editor