Louisiana school district tries to withhold data center bonus pay records

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(The Center Square) – A northeast Louisiana school system that paid out five-figure teacher bonuses this year thanks to a new Meta data center put up a fight when The Center Square asked for records of who received the money.

The Richland Parish School Board's defiant stance against the request for employee compensation records violated state law, said Virginia Hamrick, Louisiana staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Hamrick sent a demand letter, on behalf of the wire service, to the superintendent in September that convinced the district to release the records after a two-month battle.

The school board initially refused to provide its data in spreadsheet format, saying it would only print them out and mail them. The board's records custodian also demanded The Center Square agree in advance to pay unspecified hourly fees without revealing the price beforehand.

Richland Parish schools still has a public records fee schedule posted on its website claiming the right to charge requestors $30 per hour for "retrieval, review, and supervision," and $25 per hour for email searches. Those fees are not allowed under the Louisiana Public Records Law, Hamrick said.

"They're on notice that this doesn't comply with the law," she told The Center Square.

After receiving her letter, Richland Parish schools released records of employee bonuses in late September for a cost of $11.75.

The data shows the school system has already paid $13.76 million in bonuses this year, with 183 employees receiving $50,000 or more. Teachers received $50,935 bonuses, as did principals, assistant principals, school counselors and administrators, according to the records.

Superintendent Sheldon Jones, whose base salary tops $191,000, according to a 2024 audited financial report, also received a $50,935 bonus. Another 124 support staffers received $17,472 bonuses, the data shows.

The financial windfall came to the small rural parish this year through construction of a new 4 million-square-foot, $10 billion Meta Platforms AI data center named Hyperion. The payments are not direct bonuses from Meta but rather distributions of dedicated local sales-tax revenue that spiked as thousands of workers and contractors descended on the parish to build the data center. By ordinance, the school board collects a 1% sales tax to fund teacher bonuses.

Superintendent Jones, school board President Chris Pruitt, school board Vice President Emily Ogden and Personnel Director Rebecca Freeland, who personally handled the public records request, did not respond to requests for comment.

Blowback against data centers may have made the rural school board skittish about releasing detailed payout information, said David Cuillier, director of the Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida. Residents and environmentalists across the country have fought against them, claiming data centers increase electricity bills, use too much water for cooling and receive unfair tax breaks while creating few permanent jobs.

The Louisiana community of fewer than 20,000 people might also be unaccustomed to public records requests from outside media, Cuillier told The Center Square.

"The fact you have to get an attorney to find out what the government's doing is wrong," he said. "It's just reflective of what's happening all over."

Hard copies only

The Center Square requested pay records on July 28 after The Wall Street Journal reported that Richland Parish teachers would receive bonuses of more than $50,000, which would be more than double some of their salaries and up from a maximum of $10,200 last year.

At one point, the school board's records custodian—Personnel Director Freeland, who the data shows received a $50,935 bonus herself—cut off communication with a reporter, no longer answering emails and refusing to discuss the matter when contacted by phone.

Freeland also refused to release the records in a format where they could be easily analyzed, emailing that the district does not provide electronic records.

The Center Square sought assistance from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a Washington. D.C.-based nonprofit that provides pro bono legal services and guidance to reporters.

Louisiana law doesn't allow hourly labor fees, but rather "reasonable fees for making copies of public records," Hamrick said. The law also says that if records exist in electronic format, governments must provide them in that form, she said.

"There is absolutely nothing in the Public Records Laws that requires records to be produced in hard copy format," Hamrick's Sept. 14 letter to Superintendent Jones said.

The school board agreed to provide the records in spreadsheet format four days later.

Cuillier said Louisiana consistently comes in low on transparency rankings. In a 2025 study of states' compliance with their own sunshine laws by the government transparency group MuckRock, Louisiana ranked 44th for percentage of requests fulfilled and for days to complete requests. It also ranked 42nd for percentage of requests that came with copying fees.

"Agencies are often ghosting people, just ignoring their requests, which is a constructive denial and frankly it's a liability for government and taxpayers," Cuillier said. "If someone actually does get an attorney and sues them, then that's a lot of wasted tax dollars because some bureaucrats decided to ignore the law."