Introduction: These pages came from my second attempt via FOIA to obtain answers from the US Department of Education regarding the situation of the Leadership Institute of Seattle and related questions. Their response, labeled "09-00023-A Response" on a 122-megabyte pdf file, 848 pages long, arrived to my home about six years after my initial request. Most of the contents of their official response have been redacted by themselves. Because some of the content came from e-mail threads, the US DoEd repeated things that they had copied previously to show varying responses to parts of these various conversations.
I have pasted 22 pages from this file (the entirety of which any member of the public may obtain via FOIA) and commented beneath each.
Many of the pages that I have received from the Department of Education have been redacted ("censored") like this one. I doubt that there are any legitimate "National Security" reasons for withholding such information. Why did they wait six years to tell me that they weren't going to tell me?
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This is a redacted version of page 28 (of 43) of the original FOIA response that the Department of Education sent to me. If there was no legitimate reason to redact what was written on the document when they first provided it to me, why should there be a reason now?
Like before, the department demonstrates that they knew of the accreditation problem with the school in 1993. Why didn't they resolve the issue until 2010?
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This page immediately follows the one above it. Note that they're discussing the culpability of the institution in question for "Student Loans" and offered some suggestions to explore. My questions to the US Department of Education pertained to student loans, Title IV Financial Aid.
Some questions that a lot of people might ask: if the educational institution wasn't following the rules for accredited schools, and the US Department of Education was telling them this, then why were the students not informed? If the US Department of Education knew about the problem in 1993 and didn't resolve it until 2010 when it compelled Bastyr University to remove its association with the Leadership Institute of Seattle, then shouldn't the students who were misled about the accreditation status of their school be absolved of having to repay their student loans?
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This is one example of my asking via FOIA for, among other things, some sort of explanation about how the US Department of Education will use the knowledge of wrongdoing that it had for several years, to rectify the situation of LIOS students who received financial aid.
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Why is the US Department of Education keeping tabs on my activities that aren't directly related to what's their business?
The Department of Health of the State of Washington was the body responsible for issuing licenses to practicing psychologists. At that time, they were still reeling from a controversy involving their not properly vetting those who applied for "counselor" licenses, not screening out sex offenders. I asked them why they were licensing people who had not attended a properly accredited master's degree program.
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This, plus what I wrote in January of that year, as shown above, should in a very clear manner, describe what I have requested via the Freedom of Information Act. Yet later we shall see that they claim that they have already answered my questions in the previous FOIA reply. But it was the information that I gained from that first request that enabled me to ask the questions of my second request.
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The above e-mail came from the LIOS student who also presented at the Department of Health when I disclosed to them my concerned about their licensure of students from an unaccredited institution. She was able to contact me because the US Department of Education gave my e-mail address to her when she requested information about LIOS via FOIA.
Note that her complaint involves the Financial Aid issue.
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Julie Arthur e-mail discussing the fact that I had complained to Senator Patty Murray's office about the US Department of Education's non-response to my FOIA, the one which I received about six years later. Even though they're claiming that there is nothing more they can do for me, they eventually do provide about a third of what I ask from them. Perhaps some of what I sent was temporarily lost in their vast bureaucracy?
I don't know if Julie Arthur had received the FOIA request pages that I have previously posted in this article; perhaps she was misled. My experience implies that the modus operandi of this bureaucratic system involves avoiding accountability by saying untrue things about people.
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I would have preferred that this person had taken one of the obvious alternatives to complaining about having to do work on an FOIA request. From this, we can conclude that in the US Department of Education people get to declare a premature end to a project if they find it tedious, instead of actually finishing projects.
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If they had "already exhausted all avenues of assistance" for me, why did it take them another six years to get the FOIA response to me?
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Obviously, I was not the only person bringing these complaints about the school. Of course, I'm not going to divulge the personal stories of other people. But as I understand it, part of the reason that we have accrediting organizations is to prevent abuses to those who seek higher education.
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Here are some clearly-stated Financial Aid related questions again.
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Wouldn't it have been appropriate for the US Department of Education to compel the schools with the unacceptable relationship to pass this letter along to their students?
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I know that some of these people inherited the problem from their predecessors who did not properly address it in 1993, which is why it eventually became so convoluted. By pushing issues like the financial aid problems under the rug, they have passed a lot of problems on to other people. I imagine that it's worse now.
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I did receive a letter from Fernandez-Rosario saying that my complaint did not apply in this instance, which seems to contradict what was written in 1993. If policies changed, then it would have applied for at least some of the students.
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The fact that in some cases students may, by policy, not have their loans discharged in cases when a program may not have been eligible does not absolve the US Department of Education for its negligence in allowing the situation to continue after knowing of its existence in 1993. Because the US Department of Education was at fault, the students who trusted it should not be faulted.
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Eric Fosker may have been the person who contacted me a couple of years after my FOIA request to ask if I was still interested in receiving it. I told him that I definitely did want to receive their response.
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Kay Gilcher, the Director of the Accreditation Division of the US Department of Education, did converse with me on the phone, at length, to discuss some of these complex issues. I did ask her about the fact that people from whom I had sought answers seemed to be retiring soon after, and she told me that "it looks like they're cleaning house." According to what the department has sent to me, what she implied was not the case, which isn't a big deal, but does tell me how those running the department talk about some of the people who make FOIA requests.
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Julie Arthur correctly understood that there was some information that I did not understand, hence my request for information via the Freedom of Information Act. Perhaps she was not given the itemized list that I sent to Kay Gilcher (Director of Accreditation) and Arne Duncan (Secretary of Education)?
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After so many years of waiting, I was amazed to actually receive even their heavily-redacted and incomplete response. Perhaps they did want to wait for some people to retire before providing this to me; they knew of problems that they passed on to other people. Perhaps I have helped the US Department of Education to resolve a bad situation.
