A school district answers public-records requests in-house — with a free tool
Canton Schools (Canton Union School District #66), Canton, Illinois
The challenge
Like every school district, Canton gets public-records (FOIA) requests — and most of what they have to produce is email. The records sit in Google Vault, and the job is to pull them out, find what’s responsive, and hand over clean PDFs. There was no purpose-built tool for it, and the enterprise eDiscovery platforms are cloud-based and priced well beyond a district’s budget.
The solution
Don Howell, Canton’s CIO and Director of Technology, turned to FreeEed — a free, open-source, self-hosted tool that runs on the district’s own machine, so nothing leaves the building. The workflow: export the email from Google Vault, bring it into FreeEed, search and narrow to what’s responsive, and produce the response as PDFs. When the Linux installer didn’t launch on Don’s Zorin setup, a quick call sorted it out in about ten minutes, and he was up and running the same day.
The results
- First FOIA response out the same day he got started.
- Now a regular tool — Don has used FreeEed several more times in the weeks since.
- Everything in-house — no cloud, no per-record fees, no budget approval needed.
“Such a great product. Once I figured it out and where to change the PDF output, my response to a FOIA request was good to go!”
— Don Howell, CIO/Director of Technology, Canton Schools, IL