The journey to find a fire inspection report on a Virginia school can take many directions: to the fire department, to the school, to city hall, to the state fire marshal's office, even to a lawn and garden store where the volunteer fire chief holds his day job.

And there's not always a document at the end of the roundabout route.

To test Virginia's Freedom of Information Act, representatives from newspapers across the state were dispatched to all 134 cities and counties last fall to ask for the most recent fire inspection reports for two schools in each jurisdiction. They found what they were looking for in 70 localities. That's a success rate of 52 percent. But for those who came back empty-handed, confusion about where to go to obtain the records was as much a problem as refusal by government officials to provide them.

In 18 cities or counties, local officials denied the request, but in 46 others, the media representatives' search was incomplete in some cases because the keeper of the records could not be located.

Half of the state's cities and counties have fire marshals who inspect schools annually and keep the records. The rest of the localities -- most of them smaller and more rural -- rely on the state fire marshal's office to do the inspections and maintain the records.

So when media representatives set out to check the more remote localities, they sometimes found volunteer fire halls empty and locked. Some went to schools and building inspection offices, where at times they were given the records. Others were bounced from office to office only to be told the records were at the state fire marshal's office.

State Fire Marshal Ed Altizer said that if the requesters had contacted his office in Richmond or one of five regional offices -- and most did not -- they should have been given the documents.

"Our records are open," he said. "We try to make it as easy as possible for people to get the information."

But for some local officials, "open" is subject to restrictions.

In 39 percent of the cases, media representatives were asked why they wanted the fire inspection reports. The representatives had been requested by project organizers not to identify themselves as newspaper employees because the goal was to check FOIA compliance for ordinary citizens, not journalists. When pressed, the data collectors were only to say that they were citizens interested in the community.

That spooked some government workers, particularly those in the 20-some schools that were visited.

At a Dickenson County elementary school, Wytheville Enterprise reporter Mary Beth Jackson was asked if she was with a company or the fire marshal's office. She recited the standard line about being a citizen interested in the community. A few minutes later, school Superintendent Damon Rasnick was summoned.

"I've never seen you before in this community, and I've been here for 34 years," Rasnick told Jackson. "I consider you a threat to my school."

Eventually, Jackson was allowed to see the fire inspection reports -- which showed no safety violations -- as the superintendent, the school principal and the maintenance supervisor all hovered around her.

Rasnick said he was wary of Jackson because she would not immediately give her name. Jackson said she gave her name when first asked.

"You people don't need to come in schools like that," Rasnick said later after being told that Jackson was part of a newspaper project. "We've had a lot of things go wrong in schools with people we don't know."

Although Rasnick said he regretted treating Jackson the way he did, "I felt I was protecting my children, and I have no regrets about that."

Even beyond school limits, red flags went up across Virginia when someone with vague intentions started asking for school records.

"With Columbine and everything else, people are understandably nervous about schools," said Lt. Keith Vida of the Richmond Fire-EMS Department. When Vida was asked for fire inspection reports as part of the project, he stalled long enough to do an Internet search that showed the "interested citizen" was an editorial assistant for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Only then did he offer to provide the documents.

While conceding that the records are public, Vida said government officials still have an obligation to check out a suspicious request.

As Sussex County Public Safety Coordinator Eddie Vick told the person who requested records from him: "How do I know you're not a terrorist looking for something?"

In two localities -- Buena Vista and Franklin County -- officials denied the requests because the fire inspection reports might reveal the layout of schools and the location of gasoline or hazardous chemicals.

Donna Bowman, manager of the Virginia Center for School Safety, applauded those who took precautions. In light of school shootings across the country, "there should be increased vigilance," Bowman said.

Although a government official can ask someone why they want to see a record, there's no obligation to answer, said Alan Gernhardt, staff attorney for Virginia's Freedom of Information Advisory Council. In 1988, the state Supreme Court ruled that under the open records law, "the requester's motivation nowhere comes into play."