Four Districts, One Day, Four Different Answers: What They Sent, What They Charged, and What We Refused to Publish

On Oct. 6, 2026, four Massachusetts districts answered our identical settlement-records requests on the same day. Two produced records and charged nothing. One produced records and charged for the redaction. One produced records we are not publishing.

This article covers four districts in four sections, because the useful comparison is between them rather than within any one of them. Two published their productions after our own review. Two are withheld from this site pending redaction of student identifiers the districts left legible.

No page image from any of the four productions appears in this article. Each finding below describes the category of identifier and the page on which it sits, and gives no value.

---

Andover Public Schools: $79.25 for 5.17 hours, and 14 agreements published

Andover Public Schools responded on Oct. 6, 2026 with two things: the records, and a bill.

The records are 14 previously redacted settlement agreements totaling 63 pages, delivered with the District’s response letter. The bill is a fee estimate of $79.25, covering 5.17 hours of attorney review at a published rate of $25.00/hour, with the first two hours charged at no cost.

The District’s own accounting concedes the production is partial. Andover states that roughly 31 responsive agreements exist, and that it is holding back approximately 17 of them pending resolution of the fee.

The 14 agreements Andover did send are now live on this site. Our own review checked them page by page, and the District’s earlier redactions hold.

• On every agreement, the date is barred, the parent names are barred, the student’s name is barred, and the names of out-of-district programs are barred.
• No signature ink protrudes past any redaction bar.
• The only names still legible are those of district officials signing in an official capacity.

That is what a compliant redaction looks like on the page. It is worth saying plainly, because the other three districts in this article did not produce work of this quality, and because a reader deciding whether to trust a district’s redaction should know what the finished product is supposed to look like.

For a published set at that standard, see Watertown’s 59 agreements, 58 of them published after the same review pass; for a production where the Supervisor of Records had to rule on what a district must search, see what East Bridgewater was held to after producing 2,243 pages.

What is not resolved: the 17 agreements Andover is withholding. The District has not stated a legal basis for withholding them in the response letter. They are responsive agreements, they are in the District’s possession, and they are being held for a fee dispute rather than for a redaction.

Grafton Public Schools: 70 pages, no fee, and an identifier in the footer

Grafton Public Schools responded on Oct. 6, 2026 with a 70-page scanned production.

There was no fee estimate, no petition, and no exemption rationale attached to it. Grafton produced and moved on.

We are withholding all 70 pages. Our review found the student names and the state special-education docket numbers correctly barred across all 18 of the BSEA-form pages in the set. It also found a specific failure of consistency:

• The state special-education case-file identifier printed in the page footer is left unredacted and fully legible on pages 5 and 9.
• On those same two pages, the identifier sits roughly two inches below a student name that was redacted.
• The same footer is partly legible on page 38.
• The same footer is correctly barred on page 68.

That last point matters. The redaction was not skipped document-wide, and it was not overlooked on every copy of the form. It was applied on some pages and not on others in the same production, on pages where the District was plainly redacting something. A parent holding pages 5 and 9 of this production holds a state case-file number that points to a single student’s due-process case.

Nothing from this production is published here.

Franklin Public Schools: 58 pages, no fee, one docket number in the clear

Franklin Public Schools responded on Oct. 6, 2026 with a 58-page scanned production. No fee estimate, no petition.

It is also withheld, for a related reason and a narrower one.

The Franklin redactions are mostly careful. Student names are properly redacted throughout. Parent names are properly redacted throughout. Parent signature ink is properly redacted throughout. The failure is a single identifier, repeated:

• One student’s state special-education due-process docket number is left fully unredacted on pages 2 and 3.
• On those pages it sits directly beneath a solid black bar covering that same student’s name.
• The case-file identifier footer is unredacted on pages 2 through 5.

The shape of it is the same as Grafton’s. A black bar over a name, and the number that resolves the name left sitting underneath it. The docket number is not reproduced in this article, and it is not reproduced on this site.

Plymouth Public Schools: 116 pages of special education, and the general-education half that never came

Plymouth Public Schools has produced in two installments, and only one of them has arrived.

The first, delivered on Sept. 28, 2026, covers the special-education portion of our request: 116 pages. The second, covering the general-education portion of the same request, was promised and has not been received.

The 116 pages we do have are withheld, and this is the most exposed material any district has sent this project.

Our review identified:

• A parent family name and two student first names, appearing alongside the parents’ personal email addresses.
• A signature-provider audit trail naming the parent signer, with personal email addresses and home IP addresses.
• A parent-side advocate named.
• An unredacted student name and two parent home addresses.
• Blank or partially completed state special-education consent forms carrying populated student name, date-of-birth, and state student-id fields.

None of those values appears in this article, and none of them appears on this site. Personal email addresses, home IP addresses, home addresses, dates of birth and state student identifiers are precisely the categories a settlement-records production exists to withhold, and they are the categories this production failed to withhold.

The unfulfilled second installment is its own finding. A district that produces half of a responsive set on one date is expected to produce the other half.

The identifier that keeps escaping

Three of these four productions share a failure, and it is not the same failure each time.

Grafton left the state case-file identifier legible in the footer on some pages and barred it on others. Franklin left a due-process docket number in the clear directly beneath the black bar covering the name it belongs to. Plymouth’s set is exposed at a different order of magnitude entirely, with names, addresses, email addresses and IP addresses left in place.

In Grafton and Franklin, the pattern is the same: the obvious identifier was barred, and the number that resolves it was not. A docket number is not a name. It does not look like a name on a page. But it is a unique key to one student’s due-process file, and a public records request that redacts the student and publishes the case number has not protected the student.

The same pattern has now appeared in Northborough-Southborough, where the case-file identifier in the production footer was the item that had to be raised before the production could be published.

That a docket number can be the whole case is the same point three districts priced: three districts, one $75 hourly rate, and the reasoning that followed sets out how little a request that returns thousands of pages is worth by the hour.

What the four districts have in common is not intent — this article makes no claim about why any of them redacted what they redacted — but a working method. Bar the name. Bar the obvious fields. Move on. The footer identifier sits at the bottom of the page, in a repeating element, in a small enough type that a reviewer scanning for names reads straight past it.

A requester who publishes a production without its own review pass inherits that review pass from the district. That is the practical lesson of Oct. 6, 2026, and it is why two of these four sets are live on this site and two are not.

What is published, and what is not

• Published: Andover Public Schools, 14 settlement agreements, 63 pages, after our own page-level review confirmed the District’s redactions. The remaining 17 agreements Andover identifies as responsive are not in that production, and the District is holding them pending the fee dispute.
• Withheld pending redaction: Grafton Public Schools, 70 pages, for a legible state case-file identifier in the page footer.
• Withheld pending redaction: Franklin Public Schools, 58 pages, for an unredacted due-process docket number beneath a redaction bar.
• Withheld pending redaction: Plymouth Public Schools, 116 pages, for unredacted parent and student names, personal email addresses, home IP addresses, home addresses, dates of birth and state student identifiers, plus an outstanding second installment.

The Massachusetts Student Settlement Records tracker, including every district’s current status, fee figures, appeal dockets and production history, is at the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project. The districts discussed here are recorded there alongside every other respondent.