How Parkway School District Responds to a Growing Volume of Records Requests 50% Faster Without Increasing Headcount

With years of experience running the public records process at Parkway, Jason Rooks, Chief Operations Officer at Parkway School District, has watched as both the workload and technology to manage records requests have shifted over time. For most of his tenure, records requests arrived in waves. A cluster would land, usually tied to a specific event or time of year, the team would clear it, and then things would go quiet.

By 2026, that rhythm disappeared, and a quiet week of public records became a pipe dream. Now Parkway receives a steady stream of requests from every direction: FOIA and Sunshine requests, data collection requests, and a growing wave of parents pulling electronic student records for custody battles and divorce proceedings.

"Everyone has kind of jumped onto this. Email and other electronic documents are important no matter what the situation is, and it's become a constant thing we're having to respond to."— Jason Rooks, Chief Operations Officer, Parkway School District

Rooks handles requests of every type, with the volume steadily growing, while still meeting the three-business-day response clock required by Missouri's Sunshine Law. As Rooks put it, the work "becomes very intricate very quickly."

Before Logikcull: A Manual, Disconnected Process

When Rooks found Logikcull, he was the one doing most of this work, and the volume was climbing toward a breaking point. As a Google Workspace organization, responding to a FOIA request started in the trenches of Google Vault. Rooks would run a search through thousands of emails, print the relevant ones as PDFs, and hand the stack to the district's legal team for redaction.

Everything was manual and slow: click in, scroll through, print, redact by hand, across every email. The process worked because Rooks poured his hours into it until the volume increase made it unsustainable.  

"I had to go find a product if we were going to survive." — Jason Rooks, Chief Operations Officer, Parkway School District

Response got so time-consuming that he started talking with his director about dedicating a full-time employee to records response. On a lean public-school budget, that was not an ideal use of funds.

That was years ago. When asked to estimate how many employees it would take to absorb today's volume without Logikcull, Rooks figured it would "probably be like four or five people at this point just to keep up." Rather than adding an FTE that would drain the budget and still not scale with the volume, Rooks went looking for a tool. He found Logikcull.

Rooks' Public Records Software Checklist:

When evaluating the offerings on the market, Rooks was looking for a tool that met these criteria.

• Strong Google Workspace integration

• Flexibility to work with other systems (Microsoft 365, Slack, and others)

• A gentle learning curve that got the team up and running quickly

• Ability to scale with request volume

• Collaboration features that let the work span departments

And Logikcull checked every box.

After Logikcull: One Platform, Half the Time

With Logikcull up and running, their existing manual process converged into one connected workflow, from collection through production:

1. A Sunshine request comes in through the communications department.

2. The Communications department shares it with IT, who opens a project in Logikcull.

3. Documents are collected straight from Google Vault through the integration.

4. Logikcull runs the processing: deduplication, plus Inclusive Email to collapse long reply-all chains down to their unique content.

5. Rooks's team handles mass redactions (bulk redaction and PII detection) and initial tagging.

6. The legal team joins the same Logikcull environment for final review.

7. The district produces the request.

Everyone works on one platform, student data stays within a single secure environment, and the entire handoff moves without friction. And beyond that, Rooks affirms that "It's cut down the time we're spending on requests. It's cut down the money we're spending for our legal team to review requests. And I would say we're producing better records for the requester."

Per request, the time savings are stark. A single request that once ate four or five of Rooks's days now takes about half the time.

The Bigger Picture

With a substantial rise in requests as the background to Rooks' Logikcull experience, the platform has scaled with the volume, saving Parkway money and time. Yet, the cost and time savings only tell part of the story. Logikcull let Rooks hand the day-to-day off to his IT team without friction, refocus his own attention on higher-impact work, and trust the quality of the district's compliance and transparency. That effort now goes where it belongs, back to students.

In Rooks' own words:  

"Even if you're a small rural district, a suburban district, or an urban district, to accurately and effectively respond to these requests, you need to have a tool like Logikcull to support your team."— Jason Rooks, Chief Operations Officer, Parkway School District

Rooks's point lands because he lived it. The districts that stay ahead of the records surge are the ones with the right tool behind them.

Logikcull is the AI-powered eDiscovery and public records response platform built for the high-frequency requests agencies face every day. Essential to 1,500+ organizations including the largest state and local government agencies, higher education institutions, and school districts, Logikcull lets customers kick off responses in seconds, find critical documents in minutes, and predict spend to the penny, all with drag-and-drop ease. That means you never miss another FOIA or PRA deadline.