photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Superintendent Jeanice Swift is pictured on Monday, March 9, 2026.

A federal judge has determined that the Lawrence school district must pay approximately $113,000 in attorney fees and costs to a group of student plaintiffs who demonstrated that the district violated the Kansas Open Records Act.

The Kansas Open Records Act, commonly known as KORA, is a state law that gives the public the right to access government records, with some statutorily defined exceptions, and which details a framework for compliance. The intent of the law is to promote transparency in government.

U.S. District Judge Kathryn Vratil, based in Kansas City, Kansas, ruled in June that the school district did not act in good faith when it failed to respond within the required timeframe to the students’ KORA requests. The requests were in connection with a lawsuit over the district’s use of monitoring software. This week, Vratil approved the exact amount to be paid to the plaintiffs: $112,425 in fees and $1,055 in costs.

The district argued that the amount exceeded prevailing market rates for attorneys, but Vratil disagreed, finding the rates reasonable for attorneys in the Kansas City market. The district also argued that the number of hours billed exceeded the scope of the litigation related to KORA, which Vratil also disagreed with.

“In sum,” she wrote in the July 27 order, “plaintiffs’ attorneys successfully litigated plaintiffs’ KORA claims, and defendant has not shown that the requested fees are excessive, redundant or improperly billed.”

As the Journal-World reported, the subject of the KORA requests was from student journalists inquiring about the safety management and monitoring software Gaggle, and the district’s switch to a similar program, ManagedMethods, which the school board did not vote on.

Current and former Lawrence and Free State High School students filed the lawsuit in August 2025, alleging that the school district had been violating their First and Fourth Amendment rights by conducting illegal searches of the digital files the student journalists produce.

The school district had sought to charge the students almost $13,000 to process the KORA requests.

The lawsuit is ongoing.

The district must pay the $113,000 no later than Aug. 23, Vratil ruled.