An anonymous e-mail attacking two mothers of Eanes school district students has the tightknit Westlake community abuzz.

The e-mail, whose author claims to be an Eanes mom and writes under the alias "Mickey Mouse," criticizes Susan Bushart, an Eanes parent, for a grievance Bushart had filed against the principal at Hill Country Middle School.

It also attacks Bushart and fellow Eanes mom Dianna Pharr for the pair's enthusiastic use of the Texas Public Information Act. Together, Bushart and Pharr run a Web site, www.keepeanesinformed.com, created to offer detailed information about the Eanes district to parents and taxpayers.

To get their content — there's no editorializing on the site — they use the Texas Public Information Act, filing a majority of the more than 740 requests the district received last year.

At the Aug. 25 school board meeting, Superintendent Nola Wellman said that Austin, which has 10 times the enrollment of Eanes, was the only Central Texas district that came close to receiving so many requests. She said she is planing to hire someone to deal exclusively with open records. The e-mail, which by Tuesday could have reached the in-box of nearly every Eanes parent, ties the grievance and public information request issues together.

It ends by encouraging residents to attend tonight's school board meeting to support Hill Country Principal Cory Duty and to speak out against Bushart and Pharr "and their waste of our money which short changes our children and their education."

Bushart has since requested that the grievance hearing be taken off the meeting agenda because, she said, it involves her son and issues she doesn't want to discuss in an open forum. She said she will now take the matter to the Texas Education Agency.

"No one should have had access to the fact that it was me filing a grievance against Cory Duty until the board meeting," she said. "To my knowledge, only the superintendent, Board of Trustees and principal had that information."

The e-mail, which contains some claims that are easily shown to be false (Bushart has not, for example, filed a lawsuit against the district), states that Bushart would "not hesitate to interrupt a class to speak to a teacher," a claim that Bushart denies.

Bushart said she filed the grievance after receiving a letter from Duty before school started in August, saying that her access to the campus would be restricted for "disrupting the campus environment."

Bushart said she got no response when she requested evidence of such behavior. Duty declined to comment Tuesday but said she planned to attend tonight's meeting.

Bushart likened the e-mail, which also generally accuses her and Pharr of "giving our district hell over the past few months" to "character assassination."

She's not alone in that opinion.

The e-mail elicited harsh criticism in another e-mail from Westbank Community Library Director Beth Fox, who has linked the library's Web site to KeepEanesInformed.com.

In her e-mail, Fox begins, "Like hundreds, if not thousands of Eanes families, over the weekend I received an anonymous email that verbally attacked two members of our community. What on earth is going on?"

Fox writes that the anonymous e-mail "seems to say that if you request documents through the Open Record Act, you should be publicly vilified for asking the Trustees to review a decision by a principal."

Pharr defended herself Tuesday.

"I have advocated for integrity and open government and the rights of children who are not standard-issue round pegs," she said.. "I am saddened that someone or a group of people chose to distribute false information that was a violation of confidentiality and of our community."

Wellman, Eanes' superintendent, said she did not think it was appropriate to comment about the e-mail, the grievance hearing or the greater controversy.

"I think the less said the better in this circumstance," Wellman said.