The Supervisor granted a district more time and warned it about the deadline it does not extend. Grafton reissued six corrected pages and became the first Grafton document on this site. Ashland closed the general-education question. Beverly explained forty days of silence with one word: spam.
October 13, 2026 was the kind of day this project was built to survive: four districts, four different answers, and exactly one of them a production we could publish without an argument.
The Supervisor of Records granted Shrewsbury’s request for more time. Grafton Public Schools sent back the pages it had corrected after our own review caught a case-file identifier left legible. Ashland Public Schools’ Superintendent closed the last open question on its production. And Beverly’s Superintendent said our September 18 request had been sitting in his spam folder the entire time.
Every figure below is the district’s own or the Supervisor’s, and the tracker totals at the end are computed from the tracker rows rather than collected by hand.
Shrewsbury: five more business days, and an argument about the whole project
Shrewsbury Public Schools did not ask for secrecy. It asked for time, and it said why in the petition its Records Access Officer, Chris Girardi, filed with the Public Records Division on October 5, 2026: “Parent Data Force appears to have made an identical request to numerous school districts in the state. As a result, legal counsel will have to complete the necessary redactions for each of the districts it represents.”
That is an accurate description of the project’s method. One request, sent to every district in the state, is the point — a parent in one town can see what every other town settles and for how much. The petition asked for 5 additional business days. The determination, SPR26/4207, granted them, citing the factors the law tells the Supervisor to weigh: the need to search for, collect, segregate or examine records, the scope of redaction required to prevent unlawful disclosure, and the municipality’s capacity to produce without an extension.
The same determination restates the deadline a petition does not move: “The filing of a petition does not affect the requirement that a Records Access Officer must provide an initial response to a requestor within ten business days after receipt of a request for public records.” Time to produce is negotiable. Time to say something back is not.
Shrewsbury’s response to the request itself was a fee estimate of $0. The District located about 14 responsive documents and estimated 1.5 hours of work, which sits inside the two free hours a municipality gets before it may charge anything. So this is not a fee dispute. It is a district with fourteen documents, no bill, and a lawyer who has the same fourteen-document problems in several other towns at once.
One detail worth recording, because it is the sort of thing that ends up in a district’s file: the request paragraph reprinted in the determination that decides Shrewsbury’s petition names Westfield Public Schools. The petition, the docket and the parties are Shrewsbury’s.
Grafton: the six pages that were reissued, and the one document now on this site
Grafton Public Schools produced a 70-page scanned set on October 6, 2026, with no fee and no petition. We withheld it from publication the next day, and the reason was specific: on the BSEA-form pages, student names and docket numbers were barred, but the BSEA “Doc ID” case-file identifier — a long alphanumeric string that ties a page to one student’s case file — was left unredacted and fully legible on pages 5 and 9, two inches below a name that had been redacted on the same page, and partly legible on page 38. The same footer was correctly barred on page 68, which is what made the omission an inconsistency rather than a policy.
On October 13 the District reissued the corrected pages. The identifier is barred on pages 5, 9 and 38, and the District confirmed that the material withheld at page 14, Paragraph 15(A)-(B) consists solely of identifying information.
We reviewed the six reissued pages ourselves, page by page, found them clean, and published them. Grafton’s row on the tracker now carries the first Grafton document on this site. What the District reissued is the corrected pages, not the full 70-page compilation — the rest of that set is still withheld here, and the row says so.
That is the whole cycle this project runs on, and it is worth naming plainly: a district produces records, we find a specific defect with a page number attached, the district fixes exactly that defect, and the corrected pages go up. Nobody had to be accused of anything.
Ashland: the general-education question, closed with no new documents
Ashland Public Schools produced 14 documents on October 9 — nine settlement agreements and five Special Ed. Mediation Agreements — through a Google Drive folder the District controls. When we reviewed the folder we put the same question to the District that this project always puts: the request covered general-education disputes as well as special-education ones, and the folder headings only showed special-education categories.
On October 13 the Superintendent closed it. The search, he confirmed, covered general-education student disputes and the other final written student-related resolutions — MOAs, stipulations, side letters, material amendments and extensions. And then the sentence that ends a line of inquiry: “upon further review of all documents, there are no other agreements outside of special education.”
No new documents came with that answer, and none were promised. The production stands at fourteen.
They are also not published here, and will not be. The files live in a folder the District controls rather than on this site, so nobody here has reviewed them page by page, and the tracker labels that row “District’s own copy” instead of claiming a review we did not perform. The same rule already applies to Northborough-Southborough’s production.
Beverly: the request was in a spam folder for forty days
Beverly Public Schools never acknowledged the September 18 request. On October 5 the District confirmed it had not received it, and processing began; the matter is docketed as SPR26/4190 for no timely response. On October 13 the Superintendent explained where it had been: diverted to his spam folder.
He also said the District’s Records Officer is preparing a response and that our address is now allowed through. We asked for something broader than one mailbox fixed: that the District whitelist the parentdataforce.com domain across all of its mailboxes, so the next request from this project is not one filter rule away from forty more days of silence. Any parent who has filed a records request by email and heard nothing for a month knows the shape of that failure, and it usually ends without an explanation.
A spam-folder bounce is not a records-law violation, and it is not nothing either. The appeal was docketed because the District never responded; the District never responded because a filter ate the message. Both are true. The fix that matters is a domain allowed at the mail server, not a requestor who keeps re-sending and hoping.
Two more readers, and a district that was already on the board
The reader queue is the part of this project that runs on mail rather than on portals. On October 12 two readers asked for their districts to be added:
- Taft Elementary School (Uxbridge) — asked October 12
- Framingham Public Schools (Framingham) — asked October 12
Both readers wrote by email rather than through the queue form, and both are now on the queue. The queue holds 48 districts.
A third reader asked for Brookline that same day and did not get a row, because Brookline is already on the tracker as Public Schools of Brookline. The queue exists to decide who gets asked next; a district that has already been asked belongs on the board, not back in the queue.
Sixteen more readers voted for districts already queued or already tracked on the same days, and those votes move the queue’s ordering rather than its length.
What the day 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 now produced records. 15 of those produced at no charge. Shrewsbury is the one district whose estimate came back at $0 — about 14 documents and 1.5 hours, inside the two free municipal hours — but an estimate is not a production, and Shrewsbury has not produced anything yet.
- 32 districts have stated a fee, totalling $44,641.20 across 1,058.82 claimed hours. Neither figure moved this week, because nothing new was priced.
- 30 SPR appeals are docketed, along with 11 fee-and-time petitions. 103 letters have gone out from us.
- 5 productions are published here. That number moved by one: Grafton’s corrected pages. The other new sets — Ashland’s fourteen documents, and everything sitting in a district’s portal or folder — still are not.
Every one of those numbers comes from the tracker rows. Each district’s status, fee figure, claimed hours, docket number and production history is listed on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project tracker. The Weymouth determination that came down the same day is covered separately in Weymouth’s $350 Estimate Ordered Revised.
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.
What This Means for Parents
- One request per district is what makes this work. Shrewsbury’s petition said it out loud: the same request went to districts all over the state, and its lawyers have the same redaction job in several towns at once. That repetition is the pressure, and it is also why a district with fourteen documents still asks for five more days.
- Ask for the page, not the principle. Grafton fixed the three pages we named — the identifier that was legible on pages 5 and 9 and partly on page 38 — and reissued them. A records request that ends in a specific, correctable defect gets fixed. One that ends in “your redaction is inadequate” usually does not.
- “No other documents exist” is an answer you can use. Ashland’s Superintendent put in writing that the search covered general-education disputes, MOAs, stipulations, side letters, amendments and extensions, and that nothing else responsive exists. If a later production contradicts that, you have the sentence to point at.
- If you have heard nothing, ask why before you conclude they are ignoring you. Beverly’s request spent forty days in a spam folder. The appeal was still the right move — it produced both the explanation and a processing date — but the fix is at the mail server, and it is worth asking for the whole domain, not one mailbox.
- Where a document lives decides what this site can claim. Ashland’s fourteen documents sit in a folder the District controls, so the row says “District’s own copy,” not “Reviewed.” Grafton’s corrected pages sit here, so that row says published. The distinction is on the tracker for every district, and it never gets blurred to make a number look better.
Sources
- Supervisor of Records, determination SPR26/4207, Oct. 13, 2026 — petition of Shrewsbury Public Schools for an extension of time; good cause found, extension of 5 business days granted; restates the ten-business-day initial response duty under 950 C.M.R. 36.06(4)(b).
- Shrewsbury Public Schools, petition for extension of time filed by Records Access Officer Chris Girardi, received Oct. 5, 2026; fee estimate of $0 for approximately 14 responsive documents and 1.5 estimated hours.
- Grafton Public Schools, production received Oct. 6, 2026 (70-page scanned set); Parent Data Force page-level review of Oct. 7, 2026 and reissued corrected pages of Oct. 13, 2026; District confirmation that the material withheld at page 14, Paragraph 15(A)-(B) is solely identifying information.
- Ashland Public Schools, Superintendent’s response of Oct. 13, 2026 closing the general-education completeness question; production of 14 documents (nine settlement agreements, five mediation agreements) in a District-controlled Drive folder.
- Beverly Public Schools, Superintendent’s explanation of Oct. 13, 2026 that the Sept. 18, 2026 request was diverted to a spam folder; docket SPR26/4190; Parent Data Force request that the parentdataforce.com domain be allowed at all district mailboxes.
- Reader queue: Taft Elementary School (Uxbridge) and Framingham Public Schools, both asked Oct. 12, 2026; queue total 48 districts.
- The Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project tracker — status, fee figure, claimed hours, docket number and production history for every district.
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