Westfield, Saugus, Dartmouth, Milton, Wilmington and Wakefield all answered the same settlement-records request on Oct. 7. Two had never replied at all.
October 7, 2026 was the single busiest day of the Student Settlement Records Project. Six districts sent a substantive answer on one date. Two of the six — Saugus and Milton — had never replied to the request in any form; a third, Wakefield, had done nothing but have the request forwarded internally by the Town Clerk in September, and October 7 brought its first actual answer. One district cut its own estimate toward zero after its search came back smaller than it assumed. One demanded $3,000 and was appealed the same day.
All six received the identical request — final or executed student settlement, resolution, mediation and related agreements from September 18, 2021 forward, with student information redacted and staff and employment records expressly excluded.
Nothing below is a characterization. Each figure is the district’s own, taken from the letter or attachment it sent.
Westfield Public Schools: the estimate contradicted by the search
Westfield is the interesting one, because the district argued with itself and won.
On October 5, in response to our appeal, the Records Access officer put the job at 26 documents and 212 pages: 10 documents (84 pages) already located from July 1, 2025 forward, plus an estimated 16 more (about 128 pages) for 2021 through mid-2025. Two hours of collection and 3.5 hours of review, the first two hours free, at the lowest rate able to do the work — a revised $87.50, down from an earlier $200.
On October 7 the district reported that it had found “far fewer settlement agreements from 2021–2025 than anticipated based on the quantity we found from 7/25 to the current time, which brought the total down to 68 pages.” Redaction, it said, “will take approximately an hour,” and because “the first 2 hours are free, the total billable time likely falls below the threshold.”
The estimate of 128 pages for that period came out at roughly 68. The assumption that drove $87.50 did not survive the search that was priced on it, and the district said so on the record, unprompted, while its own appeal was still open. Nothing has been delivered to us yet; the district expects to finish by the end of the week.
Two determinations also issued against Westfield that day. In SPR26/4111 the Supervisor granted the district a 30-business-day extension and permission to charge up to $75.00 an hour for attorney review, holding every other task to $25 and finding the request was not for a commercial purpose. In SPR26/4117 the Supervisor closed our appeal as moot, because Westfield answered again on October 5 and October 7 after the appeal opened, with leave to appeal the newer responses within 90 days.
A fee estimate is a prediction about volume. When the volume comes in lower, the estimate is not a floor — it is wrong. Westfield’s own numbers show that plainly, which is more than the arithmetic in most of these letters does.
Saugus Public Schools: six agreements, no charge
Saugus had never responded. On October 7 its Compliance Officer and Title IX Coordinator, Jon P. Krichman, identified six documents from September 18, 2021 to present responsive to our September 23 request and enclosed them as a 14-page redacted PDF, stating that they were “being provided electronically at no charge.”
The production is held pending our own page-level review and nothing has been added to the records library. Our review is what caught 39 files elsewhere in this project, so a district’s own word that it redacted properly is a starting point here, not a clearance.
Dartmouth Public Schools: seven agreements, and a narrow reading of Champa
Dartmouth’s answer came from the same desk that acknowledged it: Kathleen Genthner, administrative assistant to the Superintendent, who confirmed receipt on September 23 and signed this response as Records Access Officer. It arrived with a three-page letter and a 35-page set of redacted agreements.
The District identified approximately seven settlement agreements covering out-of-district private placements from June 1, 2022 through August 31, 2026 and produced them free, with no fee and no petition.
Its letter also takes a legal position worth marking. Dartmouth reads Champa v. Weston Public Schools, 473 Mass. 86 (2015), as reaching only agreements about placement in out-of-district private institutions, and concludes that agreements outside that category “remain exempt from disclosure … for the reason that they are student records.” That is the same narrow reading Newburyport and Andover have advanced, and the Supervisor rejected it in Alexander v. Wellesley Public Schools, SPR17/661 (May 25, 2017). Production is held pending our own review.
Milton Public Schools: 259 pages compiled, offered free, and a date
Milton had not answered. On October 7, RAO Charlene M. Roche reported that District employees had searched and compiled 259 pages of responsive documents, that every one must be reviewed and redacted for student identifiers under Exemption (a), and that the redacted documents will be provided “at no charge.”
The District invoked G.L. c. 66, § 10(b)(vi) to take up to 25 business days from its September 23 receipt — to October 29, 2026 — and offered to answer sooner if it can. Two hundred and fifty-nine pages is the second-largest responsive volume any district has stated in this project, and Milton is asking nothing for it.
Wilmington Public Schools: 52 agreements for $165.00
Wilmington had acknowledged receipt in September through Superintendent Matthew Poska. On October 7 the district’s actual answer came from RAO Lauren Celi in the records office, in a five-page letter with a fee: about 52 potentially responsive agreements, each one to eight pages, five minutes of segregation and five minutes of review and redaction per agreement, 8.6 hours total, the first two hours excluded, and the remaining 6.6 hours at $25 an hour — $165.00.
This is the most methodical estimate the project has received. It states a document count, a page range, a per-task minute rate, and it shows the two free hours being netted out rather than assumed. It also refuses the fee waiver, on the ground that our public-interest statement is “generalized … without more,” and it says the District holds no responsive log, index or database export. Payment is demanded before production begins.
Sixty-six dollars more than Dartmouth’s zero. And Wilmington is not alone in that posture: across this project 29 districts have now stated a fee and delivered no record at all, while three — Andover, Brockton and Northampton — priced the request and produced anyway.
Wakefield Public Schools: $3,000.00, a petition, and our appeal the same day
Wakefield’s only prior contact was Town Clerk Betsy Sheeran forwarding our request to the Superintendent’s office on September 23. On October 7, RAO Deidre Sandonato sent the District’s first substantive answer — a fee estimate — together with a petition to the Supervisor, filed the same day, asking to charge above $25 an hour and for an additional 30 business days.
The estimate: approximately 50-100 responsive documents, 40 hours of review at “one minute per page,” at $75 an hour for attorney review = $3,000.00. The letter states that the District Office of Counsel is the lowest-paid person with the necessary skill, and that counsel’s actual hourly rate is “in or around $270.”
We appealed the response and filed our opposition to the petition the same day. No docket number has been assigned. Our opposition makes four points, all drawn from the district’s own documents:
- The $3,000 figure never shows where the two free hours went. Wakefield’s population in the 2020 census exceeds 20,000, so the first two hours may not be charged. Even accepting the requested rate for every review hour, 38 billable hours at $75 is $2,850, not $3,000.
- Forty hours at one minute per page implies roughly 2,400 pages. The letter gives no page count at all — only a range of documents — so the factual premise of the estimate cannot be tested.
- Nothing separates search, compilation, segregation, privilege review, redaction or reproduction. G.L. c. 66, § 10(b)(viii) requires an itemized good-faith estimate, and a single undifferentiated 40-hour block does not permit the requester or the Supervisor to determine which work is being done at $75.
- The petition recites that “each page of the invoices sought in the request must be reviewed.” No invoices were requested. The identical sentence appeared in East Bridgewater’s and Natick’s petitions, which is the template pattern documented at Two Districts, One Petition.
The comparator evidence we filed with it: Shrewsbury Public Schools read the same request, identified about 14 agreements, estimated 1.5 hours for the whole job and assessed no fee; Tantasqua Regional School District produced records two days after receiving it without stating a fee.
The request for additional time rests substantially on the fact that Parent Data Force sent similar requests to many districts and Wakefield’s outside counsel must process them all. We are not asking the Supervisor to refuse any extension Wakefield can demonstrate it needs for its own volume. We are asking that any extension be tied to Wakefield’s facts, and that agreements already reviewed be produced on a rolling basis instead of being held until a multi-client workload finishes.
Also on October 7
- Amherst-Pelham Regional School District sent a revised invoice reducing its estimate from $100 to $50, stating that a portion of the fees “has been waived in this instance” — 2.0 hours of segregation and redaction at $25.
- Northampton Public Schools answered our appeal acknowledgment by writing that its $950.00 estimate “stems from not being able to itemize the cost,” and stated it holds 50 Special Education settlement agreements of varying sizes requiring redaction, attaching a Student Services document that identifies the fiscal year and amount of each settlement. The Supervisor docketed our appeal as SPR26/4259.
- Grafton Public Schools: special-education director Nicole MacDonald, following the Superintendent’s referral, confirmed she is reviewing the redaction questions we raised and expects to answer by October 13. Grafton’s 70-page production stays withheld until then.
- Dover-Sherborn Regional School District sent a further letter linking documents hosted on the District’s own drive. We have not verified those files against the 92-page set we reviewed, so nothing was added to the records library.
Where the day left the project
| | Before Oct. 7 | After | |—|—|—| | Districts answered in any way | 55 | 57 | | Substantive responses | 53 | 56 | | No response at all | 10 | 8 | | Routing-only replies | 2 | 1 | | District fee petitions filed | 10 | 11 | | Demanded in fee estimates | $41,476.20 | $44,641.20 |
Every figure is derived from the same tracker rows the page shows, so the table and the tracker cannot disagree. Wakefield accounts for the routing drop and one petition; Saugus and Milton account for the two newly-answered districts, and both answered free.
Each district’s status, fee figure, hours, docket and note is on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project tracker, where the same numbers headline the page. For the districts that answered on October 6 rather than the 7th, see Four More Districts Priced the Same Request, and for the two that produced free and stayed offline because of what our review found in their files, see 183 Free Pages, Two Districts.
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
- Westfield Public Schools, response to appeal SPR26/4117 (Oct. 5, 2026) and update (Oct. 7, 2026); Supervisor’s determinations SPR26/4111 and SPR26/4117, both Oct. 7, 2026.
- Saugus Public Schools email, Oct. 7, 2026, with 14-page production of six agreements.
- Dartmouth Public Schools response letter and 35-page production, Oct. 7, 2026.
- Milton Public Schools response letter, Oct. 7, 2026, signed Charlene M. Roche, Records Access Officer.
- Wilmington Public Schools response letter, Oct. 7, 2026, signed Lauren Celi, Records Access Officer.
- Wakefield Public Schools fee estimate and fee and time petition, Oct. 7, 2026, signed Deidre Sandonato, Records Access Officer; Parent Data Force appeal and opposition, Oct. 7, 2026.
- Amherst-Pelham Regional School District revised invoice, Oct. 7, 2026; Northampton Public Schools email of Oct. 7, 2026; Supervisor’s SPR26/4259 appeal acknowledgment, Oct. 7, 2026.
- Champa v. Weston Public Schools, 473 Mass. 86 (2015); Alexander v. Wellesley Public Schools, SPR17/661 (May 25, 2017).
- G.L. c. 66, § 10(b)(vi) (extension), § 10(b)(viii) (itemized estimate), § 10(d)(iii) (two free hours), § 10A (appeal).
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