All Public Records requests must be directed to the Public Records Officers. The Public Records Officers may be contacted by mail, fax, email, or in-person, by appointment only, at the John Stanford Center.
Please include detailed information about your request.
If you are requesting lists of staff, please complete and sign the Declaration for Non-Commercial Use of List of Names Form and submit it along with your request to our Public Records Officers.
If you are requesting lists of students or Directory Information, please complete and sign the Directory Information Request Form and submit it along with your request to our Public Records Officers.
To obtain student-specific special education records, please contact the Special Education Department. Please make special education records requests via phone, fax, or email:
To obtain student-specific health records please contact the Health Services Department. Please make health records requests via phone or email:
If you are a former student requesting your transcript, diploma, graduation verification, or academic history, please do so on the Student Records Request site located Student Records Request.
The District has adopted the statutory Fee Schedule for public records requests and may charge as follows:
Information about the Disclosure of Public Records Policy and Procedure is available in the following SPS documents.
We are happy to help! Please review the FAQ below. For any additional questions please contact us at publicrecords@seattleschools.org.
No. The Family Educational and Privacy Rights Act (FERPA) outlines a separate process for parents and students to obtain student educational records. To obtain your own student records you must be at least eighteen.
You can obtain student records in several ways:
The District provides records electronically unless requested in a different format by the requestor. Where small enough, the District provides records via email. When records exceed the size allowed by email, we will place the records on a CD or flash drive for pick up or mailing.
In most instances, yes.
The law requires requestors to make requests for “identifiable” records. To the extent possible, we recommend providing as much detail as possible when making a records request to ensure that we find what you are seeking. Date ranges, keywords if requesting an email search, document names, and any other descriptive terms are all helpful in ensuring we find responsive items.
For example: A requestor is interested in documentation regarding a playground incident that occurred at their neighborhood school and that involved a specific staff member. Their request for all records from/to Employee A using the search term “playground incident” for the time period 1/1/18 to 8/31/18 will result in fewer, but more responsive items that can be provided more quickly to the requestor than if they were to ask for all emails District-wide using the search term “playground incident.”
If you have questions regarding how/what to provide, we are happy to help! You can reach us for further clarification or help at publicrecords@seattleschools.org.
No. Public records requests are, themselves, public records. Unless otherwise protected by the law, a requestor’s identity and information they have provided to the District (including emails, phone numbers, and home mailing addresses) are disclosable.
Most requests will not be fulfilled within five business days. Under the law, the District must acknowledge a request for records within 5 business days in one of the following ways:
On average, requests received by the District take longer than five business days to fulfill. As such, most requestors will receive an acknowledgment and an anticipated timeline for providing records in our initial five-day response to their request.
We appreciate that requestors would like to receive their documents as quickly as possible and do everything to provide records in a prompt manner. That said, there are a variety of factors that affect how quickly we can provide records. The most common factors are:
The Public Records Office is staffed by two employees who work only part-time on public records requests. We receive hundreds of requests every year, most with multiple questions. That number is growing in both volume and complexity.
Although every effort is made to answer requests as soon as possible, the Public Records Officers have to juggle gathering and review of records with other important District tasks. The process of locating and gathering records is a manual one, and each gathered record must be carefully inspected for confidential or protected information before release.
The best thing you can do to expedite receipt of requested records is to be very specific about what you want—giving a narrow date range and detailed description of the records you want will help the Public Records Officers quickly locate them and cut down on the time it takes to review unnecessary or unresponsive records.
To appeal the denial of your request, the search or production of your request, or items withheld in your request, you may submit an appeal in writing to the District.
You can do so via email by emailing our office at publicrecords@seattleschools.org. You may also submit an appeal via regular mail at the following address:
Public Records Office Office of the General Counsel
MS 32-151
P.O. Box 34165
Seattle, WA 98124-1165
Within your appeal, please include:
The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (“FERPA”) governs parental rights of access to educational records and protects a student’s privacy interests in his or her education records.
FERPA gives parents the right to inspect and review their children’s education records, the right to seek to have those records amended, and the right to have some control over the disclosure of information from those records.
Contact Robin Wyman, rwyman@seattleschools.org, or Amy Carter, amcarter@seattleschools.org, to obtain copies of special education records.