ST. LOUIS, MO – A document that has been in the hands of Kirkwood School District leadership since May of 2023, and which the District has wrongly withheld for almost a year of litigation, reveals precisely when Kirkwood High School students replied to explicit survey questions about their sexual behavior that later put the Kirkwood High School Yearbook on the national news. These timestamp details led immediately to confirmation that KHS students who were told in October of 2022 that the District could not send the explicit survey used the Kirkwood High School Yearbook Instagram account to circulate it anyway.  

The circumstances surrounding the distribution of the “Hook-Up Topical Survey” have been shrouded in secrecy since May 2023, when Kirkwood High School made national news for the resulting shocking yearbook spread, which published details of student sexual activity. Since May of 2023, Kirkwood School District has claimed to have no responsibility for the survey, but documents their lawyers turned over this week, which were sent to District leadership in May of 2023, detail the survey’s results and when they were submitted, which revealed precisely when the students made a still-publicly-available Kirkwood High School Yearbook Instagram post circulating the survey.

Local parents, represented by Thomas More Society, have filed a motion for sanctions in Rawlins v. Ulrich, after the District finally turned over revelatory attachments to a May 31, 2023, e-mail, including a file detailing the time and content of responses to the “Hook-Up Topical Survey,” that had been withheld for almost a year, despite repeated specific requests. Through their attorneys, Kirkwood School District repeatedly made false claims over at least 6 months to have already produced the documents, and even that the documents did not include survey results, before finally turning them over on March 5. In their March 5th communication, KSD attorneys blame a technological error for their months of delay.

“For three years, Kirkwood School District has claimed it didn’t know how this survey reached students,” said Mary Catherine Martin, Senior Counsel at Thomas More Society. “They have stonewalled parents and violated the Sunshine Law in order to avoid answering questions about the District’s role in how students got this survey. The withheld documents, which Kirkwood’s leaders received on May 31, 2023, demonstrate that, if they truly did not know, it’s because they did not want to. With these time details, it took less than 5 minutes on school social media accounts to find the post where students used school social media to circulate the survey.”  

“Students used a school social media account to circulate a survey that is illegal for a school to distribute to students without parental notice and consent,” Martin added. “This was a failure of supervision, and it should have been quickly acknowledged and remedied moving forward. Instead, three years later, the District is in litigation because of the laws they broke trying to keep parents in the dark. The fact that it took a year of litigation and two Motions to Compel to get these documents tells you everything about how this District treats parents’ right to know.”

The underlying lawsuit, Rawlins v. Ulrich, brought by two Kirkwood parents, alleges 10 knowing and purposeful violations of Missouri's Sunshine Law by Kirkwood School District, former Superintendent David Ulrich, and Custodian of Records Laura Heidenreich. Many of the parents’ records requests sought to uncover how the explicit survey and others were circulated, so Defendants’ failure to turn over the withheld documents led to unnecessary investigation and testimony on the subject of the Hook-Up Topical Survey.  

The motion also details how the District’s handling of these documents is consistent with the broader pattern alleged in the suit: delay, denial, and resistance to disclosure at every stage. The motion lays out how the District waited seven months to object to producing records from personal electronic devices—meanwhile agreeing to a court-ordered preservation instruction covering those devices—resulting in the likely destruction of communications that could bear on core claims in the case.

Among other relief, the newly-filed motion asks the court to require the District to compensate the parents for attorneys’ fees related to forcing Defendants to produce these documents. For potential spoliation of evidence, Plaintiffs ask the court to adopt an adverse inference that evidence likely destroyed on personal devices would have supported the parents’ claims against former Superintendent David Ulrich.