Two districts produced records this week without charging for them, four Supervisor’s determinations issued, and seven Massachusetts districts readers asked for in September finally reached the queue.
October 8 through October 10 produced the first full week of this project where a district delivered documents and nothing else had to be argued. Gloucester Public Schools closed its public records portal request and released twelve redacted settlement agreements. Ashland Public Schools answered with fourteen documents in a shared folder, then answered three follow-up questions about completeness before the day was out. Both charged nothing.
Alongside them, four determinations came down from the Supervisor of Records, and the project’s reader queue — where a parent can ask that their district be added — grew by seven districts that had been waiting since the last week of September.
Every figure below is the district’s own, taken from the letter, portal notice or determination it sent.
Gloucester Public Schools: twelve agreements, and a portal that hid them for thirteen minutes
Gloucester had acknowledged receipt through its NextRequest portal in September and then taken a ten-business-day extension. On October 9 the district closed portal request #26-683 and released twelve redacted settlement agreements, numbered 1 through 12.
The release notice landed at 10:37 a.m. with the document list attached. At 10:58 a.m. the portal’s documents tab displayed no results at all — a release notice listing twelve files and an empty tab is the kind of defect that quietly becomes a lost production, because the district has already marked the request closed. Parent Data Force raised it with district staff at 10:58 and the district resolved it by 11:11 a.m.
Those files live inside Gloucester’s portal, not in our mailbox, so nothing has been uploaded here. The tracker row records the receipt and the count; getting the documents out of the portal and onto this site is a separate piece of work, and the row will not claim “Published” until the files are actually here and reviewed. Every producing district’s history is in one place on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project tracker.
Ashland Public Schools: fourteen documents, a folder, and three honest answers
Ashland’s response came from Executive Assistant to the Superintendent Gretchen King at 7:48 a.m. on October 9, ahead of the agreed date. The District’s own count, since September 2021:
- Nine settlement agreements
- Three Special Ed. Mediation Agreements
- Zero Special Ed. Memoranda of Understanding
- Zero Special Ed. Resolution Agreements
The documents came through a Google Drive folder the District controls, not as attachments. That distinction matters and it is why the tracker says “District’s own copy” on this row instead of “Published.” We did not host these files, so we have not reviewed them page by page, and we do not claim to have. The same rule already applies to Northborough-Southborough’s production.
We reviewed the folder anyway and asked four questions at 8:12 a.m. The District answered all four the same morning:
- One scanned agreement jumped from page 1 to page 4. The district explained the original was front-to-back and the scan had missed pages 2 and 3, and reuploaded it with them.
- Two mediation agreements referenced earlier documents — one dated July 25, 2024, one dated February 3, 2026 — that were not in the production. The District said neither was fully executed, that the later agreements were drafted days later and signed a couple of weeks after, and uploaded both for transparency. The count moved from twelve to fourteen.
- The District confirmed it is checking the general-education side of the request with the Superintendent, the building principals and district counsel, and will produce anything additional by close of business on October 13.
That last answer is the one to hold the district to. Our request covered general-education disputes as well as special-education ones, and the folder headings only showed special-education categories.
Two districts, twenty-six documents, no charge, and both sets stored where this site does not control them. Every producing district’s status and document history is on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project tracker.
A folder link is not a publication. The district’s redaction is its own claim; the only clearance that means anything in this project is our own page-level review, and we have not reviewed these.
Four determinations, and one of them is a district’s fee estimate coming apart
Whitman-Hanson Regional School District drew SPR26/4161, decided October 9. The Supervisor found good cause for the district’s requested 30-business-day extension and approved a fee limited to $75.00 an hour for attorney review of segregation and redaction, holding every other task to the statutory $25.
Bridgewater-Raynham Regional School District drew SPR26/4166, decided October 8, with the same result: 30 business days, attorney review capped at $75.00 an hour. That district’s estimate is the largest in the project by a wide margin — $27,550.00 for roughly 18,900 identified documents.
Natick Public Schools drew SPR26/4063, decided October 9, and it is the unusual one. The Supervisor found it uncertain whether the September 28 filing was intended as an appeal of the District’s response, and invited a clarification within ninety days. We filed that clarification the same afternoon under G.L. c. 66, § 10A(a) and 950 C.M.R. 32.08(1), stating our objections to the September 28 response. A record should not be dismissed on an ambiguity we can close in a paragraph.
Dracut Public Schools drew SPR26/4024, decided October 9, and the Supervisor found for us. The District’s $2,950.00 estimate — 120 hours of “search, segregation and redaction” plus six hours for verification — was ordered to be revised or fully explained within ten business days. The determination requires the District to break out search hours from segregation and redaction hours, state how many pages it holds, say how many minutes per page it will take, explain whether the six verification hours are inside the estimate and why they are chargeable at all, and state the basis on which it intends to redact.
Also in this window: the Supervisor acknowledged our appeal of Wakefield Public Schools’ $3,000.00 estimate and our opposition to its petition, docketed SPR26/4277 and SPR26/4271 on October 8. The acknowledgement for the petition arrived as a corrupt file and was re-sent October 9. One message to a Natick mailbox bounced on October 9 as an inactive account; we are re-establishing that channel.
Seven districts readers asked for in September, and never got
The reader queue is the part of this project that runs on mail rather than on portals, and this week it produced its own finding.
Seven Massachusetts districts were asked for by readers between September 26 and October 10 and had never been added to the queue. Six of them were waiting three weeks or more. The backlog happened because the sweep that finds reader asks was matching on the shape of the queue form — a “District name:” line and a “Town/City:” line — and these readers wrote in prose instead. Norfolk County Agricultural High School’s request carried the subject line “Please add my districts” and named the school in the body, which is exactly the shape a form-shaped matcher drops.
Now on the queue, with the date each reader wrote:
- Norfolk County Agricultural High School (Walpole) — asked September 26
- Medford Public Schools (Medford) — asked September 26
- Malcolm White Elementary School (Woburn) — asked September 27
- Chicopee Public Schools (Chicopee) — asked September 28
- Mansfield Public Schools / Roland Green Preschool (Mansfield) — asked September 28
- Marlborough Public Schools (Marlborough) — asked October 9
- Wareham Public Schools (Wareham) — asked October 10
A further twenty-eight readers voted on districts already on the queue, and one more reader asked for Mendon-Upton Regional School District, which is already on it, taking that district to two requests.
Two fixes went in alongside the data. The queue ingest had been reading only the first hundred notes in the mailbox, so any ask or vote filed after that point was invisible to the queue — it now reads every page, and all 168 notes are in scope for the next sweep. And the sweep now runs on both axes, subject text and body shape, because neither one alone finds every ask.
The queue holds 46 districts. The tracker holds 65, and each of those is listed on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project tracker with its status, fee figure, claimed hours, docket number and production history.
What the week did to the project totals
- 65 districts requested. 57 have answered in some form; 56 substantively; 8 have never responded; 1 is still in portal routing.
- 18 districts have now produced records. 15 of those produced with no charge at all.
- 32 districts have stated a fee, totalling $44,641.20 and 1,057.32 claimed hours. Those totals have not moved this week, because nothing was priced this week.
- 11 fee-and-time petitions are docketed before the Supervisor; 101 letters have gone out from us.
- 4 productions are published here. Both new sets are off-host, which is why that number did not move.
Every one of those numbers is computed from the tracker rows rather than collected by hand. For the districts that answered on October 6 and 7, see Six Districts Answered on Oct. 7, Four More Districts Priced the Same Request and Three Districts, One Ruling on the $75 attorney-review cap that decided two of this week’s dockets.
The project is parent-led and grows by request. If your district is not on the tracker, write to the project and it becomes another row on the board.
What This Means for Parents
- Two districts just showed what a good answer looks like. Gloucester produced twelve agreements free, and when its portal displayed nothing it got fixed the same morning. Ashland answered four completeness questions in one morning, corrected its own scan, and volunteered two documents it had not been asked for again. That is the standard, and it is now on the record.
- A production is not automatically a publication. Both sets this week arrived as links into storage the districts control. Until the files are actually retrieved and reviewed page by page, this site will not claim “Published” or “PII-reviewed” for them. Ashland’s row says “District’s own copy” because that is exactly what it is.
- A released file can disappear. Gloucester’s portal told us twelve files existed and then showed none. If your district uses a portal, save the release notice. The closure notice is the only thing standing between you and a closed request with nothing in it.
- The $75 an hour attorney rate keeps winning, and it keeps being a narrow exception. Two more districts this week were capped at $75 for attorney review only, with every other task held to $25. Read a fee petition for what it does not say about the hours that are not attorney review.
- Asking is not enough if nobody is reading. Seven readers who asked for their district between September 26 and October 9 were not added to the queue for three weeks. The queue ingest now reads every page of the mailbox and the sweep runs on subject text as well as form shape — but the durable fix is that this project’s backlog is a systems problem, and it is worth naming when a parent asks what happened to their email.
Sources
- Gloucester Public Schools, NextRequest portal request #26-683 closure and document release, Oct. 9, 2026; Parent Data Force portal inquiry and district resolution, same day.
- Ashland Public Schools, response to public records request 26-548, Oct. 9, 2026; District follow-up on four completeness questions, same day.
- Supervisor of Records determination, Whitman-Hanson Regional School District, SPR26/4161, Oct. 9, 2026.
- Supervisor of Records determination, Bridgewater-Raynham Regional School District, SPR26/4166, Oct. 8, 2026.
- Supervisor of Records determination, Natick Public Schools, SPR26/4063, Oct. 9, 2026; Parent Data Force clarification of appeal, Oct. 9, 2026.
- Supervisor of Records determination, Dracut Public Schools, SPR26/4024, Oct. 9, 2026.
- Supervisor of Records appeal acknowledgement, Wakefield Public Schools, SPR26/4277 and SPR26/4271, Oct. 8, 2026.
- Reader requests for the district queue, Sept. 26 through Oct. 10, 2026, as recorded in the project’s queue.
- District fee estimates, hours and status as computed from the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records tracker on October 10, 2026.
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