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Don Bubolz of Vesper, Wis., wanted to know how much time teachers in the local Wisconsin Rapids School District spend sending personal emails from their classroom computers. It was a simple question.

So he filed a records request for all the emails sent on five workstations assigned to five teachers during a six week period in 2007. His request, it turned out, called for the release of 3,944 messages.

The ensuing legal tussle with the teachers whose emails he sought to peruse went all the way to the state Supreme Court, where justices ruled 5-2 last year that personal emails, although sent on public computers, aren’t subject to Wisconsin’s open records law.

According to the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, the district has now estimated that answering Bubolz’s request (and a similar one filed by the newspaper) would cost $2,061. The fee, according to the district, would cover the staff hours spent reviewing the emails and selecting only the non-personal ones for release.

According to the newspaper, simply printing off the 3,944 messages (and not reviewing them per the Supreme Court decision) “wouldn’t have cost much more than $200 in photocopy fees.”

Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, tells the newspaper that the ruling “created a burdensome and costly obstacle of going over (email) records.”

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