Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Requests

FOIA and Access to OCS Information
FOIA Advisory Council
OCS’s Response to Your Request
Cost and Exemptions
Request Records

To request records from OCS, contact:

Office of Children’s Services
ATTN: FOIA Request
1604 Santa Rosa Rd., Ste 137
Richmond, Virginia 23229
Phone: 804-662-9815

The Office of Children’s Services (OCS) is committed to openness and transparency and strictly complies with FOIA (§2.2-3700 through §2.2-3714 of the Code of Virginia). In the interest of open government, OCS works in a spirit of cooperation with FOIA requesters.

OCS’s Response to Your Request
  • OCS must respond to your request within five working days of receiving it. The five-day period does not include the day the request is received, weekends, or holidays.
  • The reason behind your request for public records from OCS is not relevant, and public bodies cannot ask you why you want the records before we respond to your request. FOIA however, does allow OCS to ask you to provide your name and legal address.
  • FOIA requires that OCS make one of the following responses to your request within the five-day time period:
    1. We provide you with the records that you have requested in their entirety.
    2. We withhold all of the records that you have requested, because all of the records are subject to a specific statutory exemption. If all of the records are being withheld, we must send you a response in writing. That writing must identify the volume and subject matter of the records being withheld, and state the specific section of the Code of Virginia that allows us to withhold the records.
    3. We provide some of the records that you have requested, but withhold other records. We cannot withhold an entire record if only a portion of it is subject to an exemption. In that instance, we may redact the portion of the record that may be withheld, and must provide you with the remainder of the record. We must provide you with a written response stating the specific section of the Code of Virginia that allows portions of the requested records to be withheld.
    4. If it is practically impossible for OCS to respond to your request within the five-day period, we must state this in writing, explaining the conditions that make the response impossible. This will allow us seven additional working days to respond to your request, giving us a total of 12 working days to respond to your request.
  • If you make a request for a very large number of records, and we feel that we cannot provide the records to you within 12 days without disrupting our other organizational responsibilities, we may petition the court for additional time to respond to your request. However, FOIA requires that we make a reasonable effort to reach an agreement with you concerning the production or the records before we go to court to ask for more time.