Behind the scenes: How Open Records Act requests can build a story

It’s a reporter’s aim that when people finish reading a story he or she has written, they have no lingering questions on an issue, that the story is complete.

But what readers don’t often know is what happens behind the scenes, how a reporter gets a story.

Last month, I saw that it’d been nearly a year since an 8-year-old’s spanking at Macon’s Motivating Youth Foundation’s after-school program prompted criminal and regulatory investigations, along with a lawsuit.

The reporting that led to the April 25 story about the case resulted from several Open Records Act requests, a review of about 100 pages of state investigators’ files, several phone calls and interviews.

Here’s how I gathered information for the story:

I started by reviewing Bibb County State Court documents showing that the lawsuit — filed against the foundation’s director, Roger Jackson, an employee, and the foundation itself — had ended in a confidential settlement.

Parties are often barred from discussing details when a case is settled confidentially.

But when one of the parties is subject to disclosing records under Georgia’s sunshine laws, the details are often available when a request is filed citing the act.

Nonprofit groups that receive at least a third of their funding from public money are subject to the law’s disclosure requirements.

Unsure of Motivating Youth’s funding, I filed an Open Records request with the state asking how much food supplement funding and other public money the foundation received. I also requested documents from the state’s regulatory investigation.

Meanwhile, I also filed Open Record requests with lawyers representing Motivating Youth, asking for the settlement information.

Three days later, the state emailed records showing that Motivating Youth had received more than $915,000 in federal and state funding since 2013. After comparing the totals to a publicly available tax form showing the foundation’s total funding, it became clear that Motivating Youth met the threshold for providing the documents I’d requested.

That same day, one of Motivating Youth’s lawyers sent me a copy of the settlement agreement in which the girl’s mother agreed to receive $7,500 in exchange for dropping the suit.

It took a few more days to track down another attorney representing the foundation to ask for information about the girl’s portion of the settlement. Court records indicated that it’s an amount north of $15,000.

That attorney responded that the litigation was still pending — an exception to the law’s disclosure requirements — and didn’t provide the documents.

Monday, a week after the story was published and soon after prosecutors announced they were dismissing a misdemeanor charge filed against the center’s director, I submitted a renewed request for documents.

I’m awaiting a reply.

This story was originally published May 4, 2016 at 6:34 PM with the headline "Behind the scenes: How Open Records Act requests can build a story."