Peabody Wants $300 Before It Looks

The district’s records officer says 14 hours of searching, segregating and redacting must be paid for before Peabody’s settlement records move; the invoice came with the letter.

Peabody’s letter arrived September 25, 2026 under the name of Lily Bettencourt, the district’s Records Access Officer, and it came with company — a printed invoice riding along in the same envelope, itemizing the $300 toll before the tollbooth: fourteen hours of search, segregation, redaction and production at $25 an hour, the first two hours free, the whole thing payable in advance. That’s the third-largest demand of the project’s first substantive responses: less than Amesbury’s 30-hour/$750 letter and Dracut’s 120-hour/$2,950 wall of arithmetic, more than Pentucket’s carefully itemized $150, and roughly four times the $75 estimate this request drew in Berlin-Boylston the same week.

The Numbers First

• $300. Peabody’s fee estimate — 14 hours at the statutory rate of $25 an hour, minus the first two free.
• 14 hours is the labor claim: the second-largest hours figure on the board after Dracut’s 120 and Amesbury’s 30, and exactly twice Pentucket’s 6.
• $25 an hour, the statutory rate that every responding district bills — which means Peabody’s letter, like every other fee-estimate letter so far, is actually an argument about hours, not rates.
• First 2 hours free: the district’s own discount line, shared this week only with Dracut. Not a Peabody signature move — a Massachusetts Rate Cap default.
• 3 days from the project’s September 22 request (acknowledged September 23) to the September 25 letter plus invoice. A full response cycle, receipt to bill, inside one school week.
• 0 records: no production has moved yet, because the work starts after the money does. Peabody’s itemized bill pays out only after the total is paid.

What Peabody Said

The letter from Records Access Officer Lily Bettencourt is the first of the project’s substantive responses to arrive as a letter-plus-invoice set: the response explains the work, the invoice states the total. Fourteen hours of “search, segregation, redaction and production” at $25 an hour, the first two hours free, with work to begin upon receipt of payment. The full letter as it arrived: Peabody PRR response (PDF).

The structural difference between Peabody’s letter and Berlin-Boylston’s is not the rate but the accounting: Berlin-Boylston itemizes — one hour to search and compile, two hours to review and redact — while Peabody’s letter and invoice speak in aggregate: fourteen hours, four verbs, one invoice. It is the difference between a use tax and a box-store receipt. Compare Peabody’s position to Pentucket’s half-hour precision — two point zero hours of search time plus four point zero hours of redaction — and the point is hard to miss: at the same $25 rate on the same request, the districts differ in accounting, not rates. Dracut’s 120-hour, $2,950 estimate is four times this one; Amesbury’s 30-hour, $750 letter took the same request to appeal. And the first records ever produced were produced free: Tantasqua’s 45 pages, $0, published the same day Peabody’s invoice arrived.

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.
• Peabody — $300, fourteen hours at $25, invoice with the letter: Peabody wants $300 before it looks.
• Amesbury — $750, thirty hours billed, under appeal to the Supervisor of Public Records.
• Dracut — $2,950, 120 hours, 45 agreements, payment first.

What Peabody’s placement tells you: the board now has five priced districts spanning $75 to $2,950 and one at zero, and Peabody is the mile-marked middle where the letters are undiscounted but the math is anonymous — no per-verb line-item, no per-claim clocks, an aggregate figure at a statutory rate. The patterns firm up around it: the same $25 rate everywhere; the first-two-hours giveaway surfacing in some letters but not others; itemized bills at the low end of the board, aggregate totals further up; and exactly one district charged nothing, because it did the work rather than the estimate.

The full board — every district’s fee, hours, and holdings: Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project, where the Peabody row now carries both the estimate and the invoice date. And the running dispatch on how the first districts priced this same request is the project’s update from the first records week.

What This Means for Parents

• The rate is flat; the hours are the story. Every district bills the statutory $25. Peabody used 14; Berlin-Boylston used 3 on the same request. If a district’s hours seem unknowable, ask which verbs the hours are buying.
• An invoice with a letter is a quote, not a law. Peabody’s $300 is an estimate, payable ahead of any production. Estimates can be questioned, negotiated, narrowed, or appealed — that’s what the statute is for.
• The first two hours are free in some districts and unbudgeted in others. Peabody and Dracut discount them; elsewhere they’re billed from hour one. Knowing the pattern before you request is the edge.
• Compare before you pay. The same standardized request has now produced $0, $75, $150, $300, $750 and $2,950 estimates in one week. The board lives on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project, and it’s exactly the kind of check you want before you send a check.
• Payment-first producers set the pace. Peabody’s work starts after payment; Tantasqua turned the same request around in two days with no charge at all. Tracking that difference is the project’s job, and the tracker does it.

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Sources

• Peabody Public Schools, response letter from Records Access Officer Lily Bettencourt with invoice, received September 25, 2026, estimating 14 hours at $25/hr (first two hours free); self-hosted PDF, published as received.
• Parent Data Force, standardized public-records request to Peabody Public Schools, sent September 22, 2026; acknowledgment logged September 23, 2026 on the project tracker.

• Massachusetts Public Records Law, G.L. c. 66, § 10; 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.