Word of God. I was there when they told several other parents to go the FOIA route. It was a public meeting for any parents to come in and talk to the principal. They came in as a group. I know at least one mother in the hostile group had moved her daughter to an entirely different school years before. She got loudly indignant when the principal suggested that there might be some sort of cultural clash in communication styles between what the woman expected and what was normal for the principal.

The school's location meant that there was a large disparity in terms of the poorest families and the wealthiest, and the principal put a lot of energy into support for the families with more limited resources and for students who were lagging behind, something that makes sense to me even if my family wasn't one of those. (The school district as a whole does some of this because the state penalizes school systems that have too large a gap between the test scores of the highest achieving students and the test scores of the lowest achieving students.)

I had a lot more sympathy for the mother who didn't like the principal and who told me why-- The principal's response to a report of this mother's daughter being bullied was 'well, there's no proof.' That's an entirely reasonable cause for being pissed off.

Saying you have grounds but won't tell me because you don't want to? No. That makes me damned certain that it's something really ugly about you.