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When the Star asked local school districts for information about students' grades, eight out of nine districts provided the data. The result was an investigative series into local districts' practice of promoting students to higher grades even though they failed academic classes.

Amphitheater Public Schools has refused to provide the public records with students' names removed and replaced with unique but anonymous IDs that could be used to track which classes a particular student passed or failed while not knowing that student's name.

We call on Amphi to release its data in the same way the other local districts did — in a format that protects individual student privacy while serving the public good by giving parents and the community an indepth look at how their children's schools operate. The taxpayers deserve to know, parents deserve to know and the community at large has a right to this information.

Doing so is possible: It meets the spirit of Arizona public records law and it's the right thing to do.

Amphi did provide some grades to the Star, but because it refused to replace individual names — because students' grades are protected by federal student privacy laws — with what's known as a "unique identifier," it was impossible to know if Student A failed math but passed English. This level of detail is necessary to do the kind of big-picture analysis the Star undertook.

Todd Jaeger, the attorney for Amphi, said in an interview Wednesday that replacing names with a unique identifier would require the district to create a new record, which he said the district is not legally obligated to do.

"It's creating a new record. We don't do that, because we couldn't do that for everyone," he said.

We disagree with Jaeger's argument, as well as that of Amphi Superintendent Vicki Balentine, who said in a Friday interview that she believes releasing the requested data to the Star could open the door for potential violations of student privacy.

"It could lead people, in some circumstances, to reveal which student it is the information is reflecting," she said.

Amphi's arguments are flimsy at best. No students are identifiable in the data the Star has requested — as the eight other districts realized.

By trying to guard against a phantom future request for information where a student could maybe possibly be identified — a request that we emphasize does not exist today — Amphi is making a bad decision to withhold public records.

Should that theoretical request ever come to Amphi's door, the district should evaluate it on its own merits and act. Amphi is trying to prevent a what-if-one-day situation by ignoring public records law today.

Amphi is hurting its reputation by refusing to release public information. Parents and grandparents are asking what the district is hiding. Amphi must release the public records now and allow the public a look inside its schools, while protecting student privacy.