Berlin-Boylston Priced the Request at $75, Then Refused to Waive It

The project’s cheapest and first fee estimate — three itemized hours at $25 — came with a public-interest fee waiver request. The district said no in writing.

Berlin-Boylston Regional School District is the reason this project has a fee board at all. Its estimate landed September 23, 2026 — the first of the project, at 2:34 p.m., from the Superintendent’s office under the signature of Jennifer Fortune, Executive Assistant — itemizing three hours of staff time at the statutory $25 an hour and doing the multiplication in public: $75.00. The letter read like the textbook version of a bill. So the project did the textbook thing back and asked for the public-interest fee waiver the very same day, invoking G.L. c. 66, § 10(b)(viii): noncommercial request, statewide transparency project, every record produced going into a public library for parents, advocates, researchers, journalists, policymakers. On September 24, the district answered — in writing, with no hedging and no counter-offer: the waiver was denied. Cheapest price on the board, only outright fee-waiver denial on the board; Berlin-Boylston holds both records at once, and only one of them is a compliment.

The Numbers First

• $75. The project’s first and still cheapest fee estimate: three hours at $25 an hour.
• 3 hours, itemized as one hour to search for and compile responsive records and two hours to review and complete legally required redactions — the letter’s own breakdown, not the project’s.
• $25 an hour, stated in the letter as the rate of the lowest-paid employee capable of performing the work, subject to the statutory limit. The rate the law allows, billed the way the law describes.
• 4 days from the September 19 request to the September 23 estimate; the tracker logs the district’s receipt confirmation first (September 20 in the acknowledgement column).
• October 13 is the date the letter promised records by, upon payment. Berlin-Boylston is the only district so far to put a delivery date in the same paragraph as the dollar amount.
• September 24 is the day the fee waiver was denied in writing — the only outright waiver denial the project has logged. Amesbury fought its fee at the Supervisor of Public Records instead; Tantasqua never charged one.
• 36x is the spread between this letter and Dracut’s $2,950 for the same standardized request.

The operative paragraph of the estimate, verbatim from the letter:

“The District estimates that responding to your request will require approximately three (3) hours of staff time, consisting of one hour to search for and compile responsive records and two hours to review and complete legally required redactions. At an hourly rate of $25.00, the total estimated fee is $75.00.”

What Berlin-Boylston Said

The first thing the district did right was write a real letter. The response from Executive Assistant Jennifer Fortune describes what the work is — searching files, reviewing records, redacting confidential information — then itemizes where the hours go, then names the rate and the basis for it ($25.00, the lowest-paid employee capable of the work), then performs the arithmetic in front of the reader and calls the result a good-faith estimate. It commits to a delivery date — records by October 13, on payment — and hands the requester a genuine alternative: narrow the request with particular search terms, subject matters, record types or date ranges, and the fee can come down. The full letter as it arrived: Berlin-Boylston response (PDF), with the fee paragraph highlighted in the image above.

The second thing the district did, on September 24, was answer the waiver request in writing — and refuse it. Not “under review,” not “pending consultation,” not the silence that most districts answer with. A written no. The project’s ledger treats that as data rather than grievance: a waiver decision that arrives in writing is a documented, appealable administrative event, and it sits in the tracker next to the estimate it refused. The district’s handling of both ends of the exchange — the estimate and the refusal — is logged on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project, and the whole two-district comparison in which this letter first appeared is in the project’s dispatch on the ten-times-the-price week.

What the denial does not do is explain itself. The § 10(b)(viii) waiver turns on whether releasing the records serves the public interest — and a project that publishes everything it receives, free, to an audience of parents and researchers, is the case the waiver was written for. The district weighed that argument and passed on it in one working day. That speed cuts both ways: no district can be faulted for answering promptly, but a same-day rejection of a documented public-interest case is worth more than a sentence of explanation, and the district has so far declined to give one.

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: Berlin-Boylston prices the request at $75 and denies the waiver.
• Pentucket — $150, six hours itemized to the half-hour, no fee-waiver argument yet.
• Peabody — $300, fourteen hours in aggregate, invoice attached.
• Amesbury — $750, thirty hours billed at the ceiling, under appeal instead of a waiver.
• Dracut — $2,950, 120 hours for 45 agreements it won’t show before payment.

Berlin-Boylston’s slot is the floor of the priced board and the ceiling of the compliance question. The patterns around it, now firm across all five priced districts: every one bills the same statutory $25 rate, so hours are the variable — Pentucket shows 6, Peabody 14, Dracut 120; the first-two-hours giveaway surfaces only at Dracut and Peabody; itemization correlates with the low end of the board; and one district, Tantasqua, skipped pricing entirely and put 45 pages on the record at no charge. Against that board, a $75 estimate is defensible arithmetic — which is exactly what makes the written refusal of the fee-waiver request the interesting fact of this article: the district priced its diligence correctly and then declined the zero-cost route to publishing everything anyway.

The board is public and sortable: Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project.

What This Means for Parents

• This is what an itemized, defensible fee estimate looks like. Hours by task, the statutory rate, the basis for the rate, the delivery date, and a narrowing option — all in three sentences of the letter itself. Insist on this format when a district hands you a bare total.
• Public-interest fee waivers exist — and a prompt ‘no’ is still a ‘no’ you can work with. The district denied the waiver in writing on September 24. A written refusal ends one phase and starts another: the reasoning can be requested, revisited, or answered with realignment of the request. Silence gives you none of that.
• The cheapest fee on the board was not free. Seventy-five dollars buys three hours of a district’s cheapest capable employee. The only records on the board without a price tag are Tantasqua’s, produced at $0.
• Thirty-six dollars of spread per dollar of this letter. Dracut’s $2,950 for the same request is thirty-six times this estimate; Peabody’s $300 is four times it. The tracker’s fee column exists so that spread becomes a question a parent can ask out loud: what makes your district 36x the neighbor’s?
• The narrowing option is real and it works on paper. Berlin-Boylston offered to reduce the fee if the request were narrowed — search terms, record types, date windows. That invitation is the practical bargain on offer in most Massachusetts districts: specificity for economy.

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Sources

• Berlin-Boylston Regional School District, fee-estimate response received September 23, 2026 (2:34 p.m.), signed by Jennifer Fortune, Executive Assistant to the Superintendent; fee paragraph quoted verbatim above; self-hosted PDF published as received.
• Berlin-Boylston Regional School District, written denial of Parent Data Force’s public-interest fee-waiver request, September 24, 2026.
• Parent Data Force, public-interest fee-waiver request to Berlin-Boylston Regional School District, sent September 23, 2026, invoking G.L. c. 66, § 10(b)(viii).
• Parent Data Force, standardized public-records request to Berlin-Boylston Regional School District, sent September 19, 2026.
• Massachusetts Public Records Law, G.L. c. 66, § 10, including § 10(b)(viii) (public-interest fee waiver); 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.