The Seattle Times

Julie Gunter was trying to get appropriate services from the Seattle School District for her daughter and other students with disabilities, but hit a major snag: past records of how other school districts handled similar situations were not available — not even in the state archives. The records Gunter wanted, called Special Education Community Complaint decisions, are commonly used to help argue for better services for students with disabilities. In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and later in 2024, the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) quietly changed its policy for how those documents are stored, allowing even decisions that disability advocates say have precedential value to be deleted after six years. Rep. Gerry Pollet, D-Seattle, said he finds the destruction of the records after a short timeframe “mind-boggling.” He compared OSPI’s decision to the destruction of police misconduct records, which would hamper any effort to find patterns of civil rights violations.