On Board Online • December 15, 2025
By Shubh N. McTague
Staff Counsel
New York's Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requires governmental bodies and agencies, including school districts, to allow the public to access official documents and records, subject to certain exemptions. Two important questions that school districts and other public bodies must consider in response to FOIL requests are:
1. Are the requested records "reasonably described" in the FOIL request?
2. Can the requested records be retrieved "with reasonable effort"?
In Wagner v. N.Y. City Dep’t of Educ., the New York Court of Appeals clarified that those are separate questions, and one is not dependent on the other.
Pursuant to the Public Officers Law, a person making a FOIL request must reasonably describe the records sought, so as to enable the district or agency to locate the documents. If they are reasonably described and maintained in a computer storage system, then a district or agency is required to retrieve or extract a record or data if they have the ability to do so with reasonable effort.
In Wagner, an individual requested all emails between the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) and a certain domain name for a certain period of time. The NYCDOE stated that the documents requested were "not reasonably described" because it could not "launch an effective search to locate and identify the records sought with reasonable effort." Specifically, an attempted electronic search of its emails "failed to execute" using the parameters of the request.
NYCDOE asked the individual to "focus" his request, but he did not do so. On administrative appeal, the NYCDOE admitted it understood the request but, because its electronic searches would not execute, it deemed the request not reasonably described.
After the individual filed a lawsuit, the Appellate Division found in favor of NYCDOE, stating that the request was not reasonably described because the descriptions given were insufficient to extract or retrieve the documents in an electronic word search.
The Court of Appeals - New York's highest court - reversed. It stated that "[w]hether a requestor has reasonably described an electronic record does not turn on the degree of effort necessary to retrieve it, and the inability of an agency to retrieve a document with reasonable effort does not implicate whether the description in the request was sufficient to allow the agency to locate it." Because the Appellate Division had improperly combined these two requirements, the court remanded the case back for a determination based on the standard it laid out.