Swansea Cut Its Fee $175 and Got Appealed Anyway; Westwood Was Ordered to Rebuild Its $300

A district priced its own search-and-dedup hours at $175 with no page count in sight, cut the bill after we narrowed the period, and received an appeal the same evening. A second district got ten business days to explain sixty records it has never counted. And the reader queue picked up two more towns in one morning.

October 13 and 14, 2026 gave this project one appeal filed, one appeal answered, and two districts asking to be asked — four events, one pattern: districts would rather estimate than count.

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Swansea: the $175 cut that bought nothing

Swansea Public Schools answered our September 23 request with a $500 estimate on October 6 — twenty claimed hours. We did not appeal it. Instead we offered to trade: narrow the period to end at the cutoff of Swansea’s own prior Boston Globe production, in exchange for a workload the district could actually support.

On October 13, the District’s answer landed at 9:09 in the evening: $325, thirteen hours at $25, itemized across six tasks — one hour to identify sources, three to search, three to identify and deduplicate, two to review protected student information, three to segregate and redact, one to quality-check and produce electronically, $0 for reproduction. A genuine concession, honestly itemized, with the District promising the final charge would fall if the work ran short.

At 10:14 that same evening, we appealed both estimates. The full breakdown, all seven objections and the two Supervisor determinations attached as exhibits are in Swansea’s $325 Estimate Under Appeal; the short version is that the cut shrank hours without ever producing a number of records or pages, left the new starting date “to be confirmed,” and kept seven hours and $175 priced before any redaction question is even reached. A fee cut answers arithmetic. It does not answer a workload. Swansea’s row on the tracker now reads Appeal filed, docket pending.

Westwood: the second estimate, ordered revised

An hour north, Westwood Public Schools had already fought this fight once — the $520 estimate quoted at $40 an hour while the District’s own acknowledgment promised $25 — and had reissued it at $300 after the appeal opened. On October 14 the Supervisor of Records handed down her determination in SPR26/4078, covered in full in Westwood’s $300 Estimate Ordered Revised or Explained.

The rate survives: $25 is the municipal ceiling and Westwood says nothing capable of the work costs less. The first two hours are billable there — Westwood has 16,266 people, under the line where the law gives free search time. But the twelve hours do not: ten of them are ten minutes per record times sixty records nobody has counted by page, plus one scanning hour the District never explained. The School must revise the estimate or show its consistency with the statute, respond to the request within ten business days, and file a copy with the Public Records Division. Westwood’s tracker row keeps its Appeal filed status and gains its determination.

Two more towns join the queue

The reader queue — the waiting room for districts that have not been asked yet — gained two rows on October 14:

• West Springfield Public Schools (West Springfield) — asked by email through the project’s add-my-district form on the morning of Oct. 14.
• Dighton-Rehoboth (Dighton) — submitted through the site’s queue form late on Oct. 13.

The queue now holds 50 districts. Three interest votes also landed since the last refresh — Methuen and Belmont upped their tallies, and Watertown’s ▲ climbed one more, which matters because Watertown’s production is already on the board: readers keep voting for districts whose records exist, as if to say more of this, please.

What the two days 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 produced records; 15 of those produced at no charge.
• 32 districts have stated a fee, totalling $44,466.20 across 1,051.82 claimed hours. The total fell by exactly Swansea’s cut — the only repricing of this window.
• 30 districts stand in the appeal bucket, with 11 fee-and-time petitions on record. 104 letters have gone out from us.
• 5 productions are published here; that number did not move, because neither event was a production.
• Highest single estimate still Bridgewater-Raynham’s $27,550.00 for 470 hours.

Every one of those numbers is computed from the tracker rows. Each district’s status, fee figure, claimed hours, docket and document file — including Swansea’s revised estimate and the appeal as filed, both published on its row — sit on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project tracker.

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.

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What This Means for Parents

• You can negotiate scope and still appeal price. We narrowed Swansea’s window, took the $175 cut — and appealed the same night. Conceding scope is not conceding that the remaining hours are real.
• Ask for the record count before the hour count. Every defect the Supervisor found this week traces to the same missing sentence: how many records, how many pages. A district that can’t say can’t charge, however tidy its itemization looks.
• Know your town’s population bracket. Municipalities under 20,000 residents may bill the first two hours; larger ones must give them free. Westwood’s 16,266 people just became the most expensive fact in its estimate.
• A determination is a deadline. Both the Weymouth and Westwood orders run ten business days. When your district’s clock is up, the next letter writes itself.
• The queue is how a district gets asked. West Springfield and Dighton-Rehoboth are on it this week because readers said so. See the ordering, and add yours, on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project tracker.

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Sources

• Swansea Public Schools, Records Access Officer Scott Holcomb, revised good-faith fee estimate of Oct. 13, 2026: $500 (20 hours) estimate of Oct. 6, 2026 revised to $325 (13 hours at $25 per hour, itemized six tasks, $0 electronic reproduction), start date pending confirmation.
• Parent Data Force, public records appeal of both Swansea estimates filed Oct. 13, 2026 under G.L. c. 66, § 10A, with determinations in SPR26/4024 (Dracut) and SPR26/4062 (Weymouth) attached as exhibits; docket pending acknowledgment.
• Supervisor of Records, determination SPR26/4078, Oct. 14, 2026 — Westwood Public Schools ordered to revise its $300, 12-hour estimate or explain its consistency with G.L. c. 66, § 10(d) and to respond within ten business days; rate and first-two-hours charge held lawful for a municipality of 16,266.
• Reader queue requests received Oct. 13-14, 2026 for Dighton-Rehoboth and West Springfield Public Schools; interest votes recorded for Methuen, Belmont and Watertown.
• Tracker statistics for Oct. 14, 2026, computed from all 65 district rows on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project.