32 districts have priced the same settlement-records request at $44,641.20 total, for 1,057 hours. Thirteen others answered for nothing.
Every district named below received the same request: final or executed student settlement, resolution, mediation and related agreements entered from September 18, 2021 forward, with personally identifiable student information redacted and staff, employment and vendor matters expressly excluded.
Thirty-two districts have answered that request with a number. Their estimates now total $44,641.20 and 1,057.32 claimed hours of public employee time. Thirteen districts in the same project produced records and asked for nothing.
Those figures are computed from the tracker, not collected by hand, and the totals below move whenever a district writes. The single largest number in the set belongs to one district and it is larger than the other 31 combined.
Where the money actually is
| District | Estimate | Hours claimed | |—|—|—| | Bridgewater-Raynham Regional School District | $27,550 | 470 | | Wakefield Public Schools | $3,000.00 | 40 | | Dracut Public Schools | $2,950 | 120 | | Fairhaven Public Schools | $1,125.00 | 45 | | Northampton Public Schools | $950.00 | 40 | | Whitman-Hanson Regional School District | $925 | 15 | | Hudson Public Schools | $850 | 34 | | Amesbury Public Schools | $750 | 30 | | Springfield Public Schools | $700 | 28 | | Silver Lake Regional School District | $650.00 | 26 | | Lexington Public Schools | $575 | 23 | | Swansea Public Schools | $500.00 | 20 | | Hopkinton Public Schools | $483.25 | 33 |
Bridgewater-Raynham alone accounts for 61.7 percent of everything demanded in this project. The three largest estimates together are 75.0 percent of the total. The middle of the distribution is a long way below that: the median estimate is $350.00, 11 districts are under $200, and four are at or above $1,000. The mean, dragged upward by one number, is $1,395.04.
When one district’s figure is bigger than everyone else’s added together, “public bodies charge too much for records” and “one district is testing how far it can go” are different complaints. They need different answers, and the aggregate hides which is which.
The largest estimate in the project
Bridgewater-Raynham Regional School District put its answer at $27,550 for roughly 18,900 responsive pages: 157 hours of search at $25 ($3,925) plus review at $75 an hour, the rate it asked the Supervisor to approve.
The letter’s own components do not sum to the figure it states. As written, they come to $27,400, and the total it quotes implies 315 review hours rather than the 313 its text gives. The district also filed a time petition seeking an additional 30 business days.
We appealed both the estimate and the petition; the Supervisor docketed them as SPR26/4157 and SPR26/4166. Our opposition asks the Supervisor to deny the elevated rate on this record, to reject the estimate as not itemized, and to weigh the public interest in affordable access along with the requester’s finances, which is what G.L. c. 66, § 10(d)(iv) requires of a municipality asking to charge above the statutory cap. The full arithmetic argument is at $27,550 for 18,900 Pages.
The estimate that arrived this week
Wakefield Public Schools answered on October 7 — its first substantive reply — with $3,000.00: approximately 50-100 documents, 40 hours at one minute per page, billed at $75 an hour for attorney review. The same letter states that District Counsel’s actual hourly rate is “in or around $270” and that the District will use $25 for search time.
Three things in that calculation do not survive being read closely, and they are the district’s own numbers, not ours:
- Wakefield’s 2020 census population exceeds 20,000, so G.L. c. 66, § 10(d)(iii)(B) forbids charging for the first two hours. The letter never says where those two hours went. On its own arithmetic, 38 billable hours at $75 is $2,850, not $3,000.
- Forty hours at one minute per page means roughly 2,400 pages. No page count appears anywhere in the estimate — only a document range — so the central factual premise cannot be checked.
- The petition recites a duty to review “each page of the invoices sought in the request.” No invoices were requested. The same sentence appeared in East Bridgewater’s petition and in Natick’s, documented at Two Districts, One Petition.
Wakefield filed a fee and time petition the same day, seeking the higher rate and 30 additional business days, resting the time request substantially on the fact that our project sent similar requests to many districts and its outside counsel serves several of them. We appealed the response and opposed the petition on October 7.
Two fee theories that are not about hours
Fairhaven Public Schools delivered a $1,125.00 estimate (45 hours at $25) on a letter dated October 6, received October 7. Our appeal, filed the same day, does not argue the rate. It argues that the fee is time-barred under G.L. c. 66, § 10(e): the request went in on September 21, the ten business days ran through October 5, and no substantive answer arrived until the 7th. A Superintendent’s out-of-office reply fired eleven seconds after our appeal was sent.
Cambridge is a different problem: not an hourly rate, but a search scope. The City petitioned for $38.46 an hour on 20 School Department hours plus $54.73 an hour on 25 Law Department hours, citing a search that returned 21 GB and about 185,000 items. That universe is far larger than “final or executed student agreements,” and a fee built on searching everything is a fee built on a search the request did not ask for. The City’s own $25-an-hour fallback is stated as $1,075 in one place in its papers and $1,200 in another.
Lexington Public Schools estimated $575 from 25 hours — 12 search, 8 segregation, 5 redaction — less two free, docketed as SPR26/4256. What the letter describes searching is the problem: an email corpus the District says “may yield student records, employee/personnel material and other private information.” Our request excludes staff and employment records by name. An estimate priced on a search the request forecloses is not an estimate of the work required, and no page or agreement count accompanies it.
The smallest numbers, and the cheapest way to be wrong
11 districts priced the request under $200. Three of them show what the whole range can look like in one week:
- Sudbury Public Schools: $25.00 for one hour of redaction. The public-interest waiver was refused in writing — “we are in a similarly limited position in terms of our resources … unable to grant a fee waiver.”
- Amherst-Pelham Regional School District: on October 7 sent a revised invoice cutting $100 to $50, stating that a portion of the fees had been waived.
- Westfield Public Schools: revised $200 down to $87.50, then reported on October 7 that it had found “far fewer settlement agreements from 2021–2025 than anticipated,” that redaction “will take approximately an hour,” and that the billable time therefore “likely falls below the threshold” — toward zero.
North Attleborough Public Schools went further than any of them: on October 1 it waived its entire $100 fee in writing, calling it a one-time exception. See North Attleborough Waived Its $100 Fee.
That sequence matters more than any single figure. A parent who is told $1,125 is a reasonable price for 45 hours of work can be shown four districts that did the same job for $25 or less, and one that priced it at $87.50 and then corrected itself downward on the record. Fee demands are not measurements. They are decisions, and the spread across districts that received the identical sentence proves it.
What the statute actually allows
The law is specific, which is why these numbers are checkable.
- G.L. c. 66, § 10(d)(i): a maximum of five cents a page for a black-and-white copy.
- § 10(d)(iii): no fee for the first two hours of employee time where the municipality has more than 20,000 people; no more than $25 an hour unless the Supervisor approves a higher rate; and no charge for time segregating or redacting unless that redaction is required by law or approved by the Supervisor.
- § 10(d)(iv): the Supervisor may approve a higher rate or chargeable redaction only where the request is for a commercial purpose, or the fee is an actual, good-faith attempt to comply, is necessary because the request could not prudently be completed without it, is reasonable in amount, and is not designed to limit, deter or prevent access — and must weigh the public interest in limiting the cost of access and the requester’s ability to pay.
- § 10(b)(viii): a written, good-faith estimate must be itemized.
- § 10(d)(v): the records access officer may waive or reduce a fee for public interest or inability to pay.
Redacting student identifiers is required by law, which is precisely why § 10(d)(iii)(C) does not let a municipality bill for it without the Supervisor’s approval. Several of these petitions ask for exactly that, which is why the Supervisor’s three October determinations capping attorney review at $75.00 an hour — and holding every other task to $25 — are worth reading together: Three Districts, One Ruling.
Where the Supervisor has ruled, the pattern is consistent: the request is not commercial; the elevated rate is permitted only for attorney review; other work stays at $25. Quincy’s $450 (375 pages, 6 search hours at $25 plus 4 hours at $75) and Natick’s $275 were both approved on that footing, and our requests for reconsideration in both cases challenge only the $75 rate, not the extensions granted. Amesbury’s $750 stands for a different reason — see The Supervisor Held Our Wording Unclear.
The districts that charged nothing
Thirteen districts produced responsive settlement records and demanded no money (produced to us — two of these sets are hosted here, several are withheld pending our own page-level review, and none of that changes what the districts charged):
Tantasqua Regional School District · Watertown Public Schools · Braintree Public Schools · Pembroke Public Schools · Holbrook Public Schools · Grafton Public Schools · Franklin Public Schools · Wachusett Regional School District · Dover-Sherborn Regional School District · Northborough-Southborough Public Schools · Plymouth Public Schools · Dartmouth Public Schools · Saugus Public Schools
Shrewsbury Public Schools belongs here in substance: it estimated 1.5 hours to process about 14 agreements and assessed $0, asking only more time to do the work. Its $0 is excluded from the $44,641.20 total above, because a district that asked for nothing did not demand anything.
Some of those productions are not published on this site — our own review found identifiers inside several of them, which cost us 39 files last week and is written up at 39 Records We Published Were Leaking. Two of the free sets, Wachusett’s 91 pages and Dover-Sherborn’s 92 pages, are withheld for exactly that reason, described at 183 Free Pages, Two Districts. Publication and cooperation are separate questions and we keep them separate on every row.
The point stands regardless of what we publish. Thirteen districts in one week’s worth of productions searched, reviewed, redacted and delivered settlement agreements to us without billing a family for it, at a time when the districts above were pricing the same task at up to $27,550. That is the comparison a parent should put in front of a records access officer who says the work cannot prudently be done at $25 an hour.
What the demands have produced
29 of the 32 districts that stated a fee have delivered no responsive records to us at all. Three priced the request and produced anyway — Andover (14 agreements for $79.25), Brockton (3 records for $312.50) and Northampton (1 agreement delivered alongside a $950.00 estimate) — which is the distinction worth keeping: a fee demand is not by itself proof of obstruction, though several of these letters do make payment a precondition to delivery. A fee estimate is not a determination under § 10(d); where a district prices access and then withholds the records until it is paid, whether that estimate was itemized and whether the elevated rate was necessary are questions the Supervisor answers, not the invoice.
Every district’s status, figure, claimed hours, docket and production history is on the tracker, computed from the same rows that produce the numbers in this article: the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project. October 7’s six district answers are described at Six Districts Answered on Oct. 7, and the October 6 estimates that preceded them at Four More Districts Priced the Same Request. Why ten districts could charge ten times what others did is at Same Records Request, Ten Times the Price.
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.
Sources
- District fee estimates, hours and status as recorded in the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records tracker, computed on October 7, 2026: 32 districts with a stated non-zero estimate, $44,641.20 total, 1,057.32 claimed hours, median $350.00.
- Bridgewater-Raynham Regional School District fee estimate and time petition, Oct. 2, 2026; appeals docketed SPR26/4157 and SPR26/4166.
- Wakefield Public Schools fee estimate and fee and time petition, Oct. 7, 2026; Parent Data Force appeal and opposition, Oct. 7, 2026.
- Dracut Public Schools response letter, Sept. 23, 2026; appeal docketed SPR26/4024.
- Fairhaven Public Schools fee estimate (letter dated Oct. 6, received Oct. 7, 2026) and Parent Data Force appeal, Oct. 7, 2026.
- Cambridge fee petition, Oct. 5, 2026, and Parent Data Force appeal and opposition, Oct. 6, 2026.
- Lexington Public Schools fee estimate, appealed Oct. 6, 2026, docketed SPR26/4256.
- Wilmington Public Schools fee estimate, Oct. 7, 2026; Sudbury, Amherst-Pelham, Westfield, North Attleborough and Shrewsbury figures as recorded in each district’s letter.
- Supervisor of Records determinations SPR26/4044 (Natick), SPR26/4087 (Quincy), SPR26/4069 (East Bridgewater), capping attorney review at $75.00 per hour; SPR26/4099 (Somerset) and SPR26/4111 (Westfield), Oct. 7, 2026.
- G.L. c. 66, § 10(b)(viii), § 10(d)(i), (iii), (iv), (v), § 10(e).
- Champa v. Weston Public Schools, 473 Mass. 86 (2015).
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.