Laws and regulations require enforcement. If not, honest people have abide by them, but dishonest people do not.

If you're going to spend taxpayer money to enforce laws and regulations, it seems like you should take advantage of efficiencies.

It seems like using third party data (like that obtained from Thomson Reuters Clear) is a very cost-effective way to obtain information that's useful.

Some people in the comments here object that the district is over-relying on the third party data provider. But from the article we cannot tell what happened. We don't know whether this is a 'computer says no' situation or whether the information from third party sources was was tipped off the school district, and then they verified everything to their satisfaction.

In general, it's easy for parents to share a story about what happened to their child in school, and very hard for a school district to respond. Unless the parent signs some sort of waiver, the district can't easily respond, without breaking privacy laws. Even if the story is 100% false, the school district probably can't answer the journalist's questions without violating FERPA.