True, good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us for this Illinois school district FOIA webinar. My name is Mandy Kolinsky and I'm the marketing coordinator here at Datumation. It is my pleasure to introduce our first speaker, Christine Walczak, a senior associate at Ressler LLP. Thank you, everyone, for being here today. Just a little bit about myself before we begin, I'm an associate at Ressler LLP and I've been advising public bodies on FOIA for the past six years. I've actually served as a FOIA officer for three years. I'm one of the few people who actually enjoys FOIA. But today, as we go through these slides, I'm gonna try and give you some helpful tips on FOIA so that it can make your lives a little bit easier. Right on the screen right now is an agenda of the topics that we're gonna be covering today. My presentation is going to go over the first four topics, and then Jim's gonna go over the last topic. The items that I'll be discussing today are: giving you a brief overview of the purpose of FOIA and why we have this statute, then some recent changes in FOIA, primarily a recent case that does affect school districts, and then the types of FOIA requests that public bodies receive and why they need to respond to FOIA requests, and finally, we're going to go over the proper procedure for denying a request. So, the reason why we have FOIA is to promote a transparent government, and the way that our legislature has said that we can promote a transparent government is by providing the public with access to public records. The statute defines what is considered a public record, and you may be surprised at how broad this definition is. A public record does...
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