Amesbury’s $750 Estimate Is Now an Appeal

Thirty hours at $25 an hour, a scope objection, and an appeal to the Supervisor of Public Records filed the same day — the project’s first test of the fee system’s upper register.

Amesbury Public Schools never says no in its September 23, 2026 response — it says thirty. Thirty hours of employee time at the statutory $25 ceiling for the same one-page request that Berlin-Boylston priced at three hours and $75, delivered in a six-page letter that builds its case the way a contractor builds an estimate: approximately 60 percent of the hours to search, 20 percent to compile, 20 percent to reproduce. Parent Data Force’s reply was filed before the sun went down — an appeal to the Massachusetts Supervisor of Public Records, submitted the same day, challenging the scope objection, the fee itemization, the production timeframe, the proposed charges for electronic copies, and the district’s handling of the fee-waiver request. No docket number yet. The project’s first test of what the fee system looks like at its upper register is now formally in motion.

The Numbers First

• $750. Amesbury’s total estimate — 30 hours billed at the statutory maximum of $25 an hour, the second-highest fee on the board and the project’s first real test of the appeal process.
• 30 hours of employee time: roughly 60 percent search, 20 percent compilation, 20 percent reproduction, per the letter’s own allocation. The same request drew 3 hours in Berlin-Boylston, 6 in Pentucket, 14 in Peabody, 120 in Dracut.
• $25 an hour, but the letter is explicit that it is a ceiling rather than a market rate: the district writes that the central-office staff who would perform the work are compensated at rates exceeding $25 per hour, so every employee hour is billed at the statutory maximum.
• 2 days from the September 21 request to the September 23 response; the appeal went up the same day the response arrived. Turn around a fee, get an appeal in the same news cycle.
• $75 is the cheapest estimate on the board, $2,950 the largest — Amesbury’s $750 sits second from the top. A 10x spread against Berlin-Boylston’s three hours; a 4x against this article’s own dollar figure per hour of claimed difference.
• 0 payments, 1 appeal. The district’s fork — pay and proceed, or narrow and re-price — now has a third prong the letter does not name: appeal.

The letter’s two operative sentences, verbatim:

“As such, we estimate it will take a total of 30 hours of employee time to complete the District’s search for, compilation, and reproduction of all requested records. The total fee estimate for this work is $750 (30 hours x $25/hour).”

What Amesbury Said

The full paper trail is public: the standardized request as sent (PDF), the district’s response letter (PDF), and the appeal as filed with the Supervisor of Public Records (PDF). The letter’s offer is the standard fork at ten times the altitude: pay the $750 and the district proceeds with search, compilation, review, segregation, redaction and reproduction — or narrow the request (particular or modified search terms, subject matters, record types, specific dates), and the fees may come down.

The appeal announces itself as a challenge to the whole frame, not one door of it: the district’s objection to parts of the request as insufficiently described, the estimate and its itemization, the timeframe before production, the proposed charges for electronic copies, and the handling of the fee-waiver request. Every objection the letter raised, the answer contests. The project’s accounting position is written into the tracker as the event made real: the response is on the board at $750, the appeal is logged, and the records request process in Amesbury is now a pending matter at the Supervisor of Public Records.

The wider week matters for what this means. Berlin-Boylston priced the identical request at $75 and denied its waiver in writing; Pentucket broke its $150 down to the half-hour; Peabody handed down 14 hours and an invoice; Dracut priced the same letter at $2,950 to look at 45 agreements; and Tantasqua produced the first actual records — 45 pages — for nothing. Amesbury’s letter is the argument the appeal structure was written for: an hours-claim nearly ten times one neighbor’s and, so far, unbudgeted in any independent discipline.

How It Compares

The running total, cheapest to most expensive:

• Tantasqua Regional — $0, no fee at all, first production: 45 pages, ten documents, published.
• Berlin-Boylston — $75, three itemized hours, waiver denied in writing.
• Pentucket — $150, six hours itemized to the half-hour.
• Peabody — $300, fourteen hours, invoice with the letter.
• Amesbury — $750, thirty hours at the ceiling, under appeal: Amesbury’s $750 estimate is now an appeal.
• Dracut — $2,950, 120 hours for 45 agreements, payment before records.

What Amesbury’s placement implies: it is the only fee-estimate district to be answered by the Supervisor of Public Records instead of paying; it is the only district whose letter itemizes by proportion rather than by task; and 30 hours at $25 an hour is the largest per-unit labor claim short of Dracut, whose 120 hours claim holds the ceiling. The patterns that the first week of fees shows now, with five districts on the board: everyone bills the same statutory $25 rate; first-two-hours discounts appear only in the Dracut and Peabody letters; the itemized letters cluster at the bottom of the price board, bare proportion totals at the top; Pentucket’s numbers are precise to the half-hour and Berlin-Boylston’s to the task; and the single outlier to the entire fee discussion is Tantasqua, $0, records in hand.

The whole board — fees, hours, productions, appeals: Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project. The two-district dispatch from the same week this letter arrived: same records request, ten times the price.

What This Means for Parents

• An appealable fee is the system’s off-ramp. Amesbury’s letter offered pay-or-narrow, and there is a third option in Massachusetts law: appeal to the Supervisor of Public Records — which Parent Data Force exercised the same day, and which any parent can invoke on a fee fight of their own.
• A $750 fee is not a final answer to nothing. It is an opening bid from a district with a six-page letter behind it. The appeal contests the hours, the itemization, the timeframe, the electronic-copy charges, the scope objection, and the waiver handling — not because one number is wrong, but because no number has been vetted.
• Not every district claims thirty hours. The same request drew three hours in Berlin-Boylston and six in Pentucket. A parent who quotes the board is no longer arguing in the dark.
• Statutory ceilings mean requests can cost their ceiling. Amesbury’s letter says its staff earn more than $25 an hour, so the district bills the maximum. That mechanism at scale produces the second-highest fee on the board without any misbehavior claim at all — which is why itemized hours, not rates, are the thing to contest.
• Nothing has been produced yet. The appeal awaits a docket, and the fee remains unpaid. The project tracker will log what the Supervisor does with it — and every district in the state now has a row it is being measured against.

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Sources

• Amesbury Public Schools, response letter dated September 23, 2026 (six pages), estimating thirty hours of employee time and a total fee of $750 (30 hours x $25/hour); the fee paragraph is quoted verbatim above; self-hosted PDF published as received.
• Amesbury Public Schools, scope objections to Parent Data Force’s request, contained in the September 23, 2026 response.
• Parent Data Force, standardized public-records request to Amesbury Public Schools, sent September 21, 2026.
• Parent Data Force, appeal to the Massachusetts Supervisor of Public Records concerning the Amesbury response, filed September 23, 2026; appeal pending, no docket number issued as of publication.
• Massachusetts Public Records Law, G.L. c. 66, § 10, including § 10(b)(viii) (public-interest fee waiver) and § 10(d) (fee administration); 950 C.M.R. 32.00.
• Champa v. Weston Public Schools, 473 Mass. 86 (2015).
• Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project tracker, current as of September 25, 2026: 65 districts, 18 acknowledged, 37 awaiting first response, 4 routed or re-sent, 4 fee-estimate responses, 1 appeal filed, 1 production published.

The project is parent-led and grows by request. If your district is not on the tracker yet, write to the project and it becomes another row on the board.