Tantasqua Handed Over the Records: 45 Pages, No Fee

The first district to actually produce settlement records asked for nothing: 45 pages of agreements from 2022 through 2026, reviewed and published free — with a staff retirement agreement tucked inside that the request never asked for.

On the morning of September 25, 2026, while most of the tracker was still sitting on the zero button — sixty-odd districts humming, four of them pricing the same letter at $75, $150, $300 and $750 — an email arrived from a place called the Tantasqua Regional School District that broke the whole ledger open in one line: no invoice. No fee estimate. No payment demand. Kim Andre, Benefits Coordinator for Tantasqua Regional and Union 61, had read the request — the same standardized public-records letter that sixty-five Massachusetts school districts received this month — and she had simply done what it asked. Attached: 45 pages of final, executed settlement and resolution agreements, dated November 2022 through early 2026. No charge. The first substantive production of the entire project, and the only one so far that did not involve lawyers exchanging invoices before anyone saw a page.

The Numbers First

• $0. What Tantasqua charged for the first records production of the project. Total. Not “free after the first two hours.” Not “itemized at $25 an hour.” Nothing.
• 45 pages. The size of the production: settlement agreements and mediation agreements from November 2022 through early 2026, resolving student special-education disputes at the BSEA and with the district directly.
• 10 documents sit in the envelope — nine settlement and mediation agreements, plus one staff retirement agreement that had no business being there.
• 2 days from the district’s own September 23 acknowledgment date to the September 25 production. The same request that drew a 30-hour estimate in Amesbury and a 120-hour estimate in Dracut produced records here in the time it takes some districts to route a letter to a portal.
• $75 to $2,950 is what four other districts have wanted for the same request. Tantasqua charged nothing for the actual records; Berlin-Boylston wants $75 just to look, Peabody wants $300, and Dracut wants $2,950 for 45 agreements it refuses to show first.
• 2.7 hours per agreement is what Dracut claims the same kind of working file costs to search. Tantasqua produced ten comparable documents without claiming a single hour of anything, and the records arrived with names intact and a promise of PII review before publication.

What Tantasqua Said

What Tantasqua said, in effect, was nothing at all: the email that arrived September 25, 2026 contained no fee paragraph, no scope objection, no appeal to the district’s own importance — just the records themselves, sent by Kim Andre, Benefits Coordinator for the Tantasqua Regional School District/Union 61, with the fee line left blank — the whole exchange logged on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project. The letter that other districts have been writing paragraphs around, Tantasqua filled with pages.

Before publication, every page was reviewed for student personally identifiable information — the reviewed copy is the published one, available as the PII-reviewed public copy (PDF). Parent Data Force’s own view of the district’s raw file is not published; the reviewed version is.

The production reads like a small terror of Massachusetts special education, laid out year by year: a confidential settlement agreement funding placement at the Bancroft School; an agreement with Sturbridge and Grafton over a Futures placement; a three-year White Oak settlement; three BSEA mediation agreements from November 2022 through February 2026; a settlement funding Eagle Hill summer programming from October 2025; a 2023 Eagle Hill settlement; and a memorandum of agreement from October 2024. That is nine agreements — and then the tenth document, the one that gives this dispatch its tell: a staff retirement agreement, although the request expressly excluded staff and employment records. Tantasqua appears to have included it in error. It is published as received and flagged here for exactly that reason: the same kind of over-inclusion that inflates a number like Dracut’s, in this case harmless to the requester and useful to the record.

How It Compares

The board now reads like this, cheapest to most expensive, one district’s fee per line:

• Tantasqua Regional — $0, no fee at all, for the only actual records production of the project: the first 45 pages, free.
• Berlin-Boylston — $75, three itemized hours at $25, and the project’s first public-interest fee-waiver denial.
• Pentucket — $150, half-hour precision on six itemized hours in a plain email with no acknowledgment ahead of it.
• Peabody — $300, fourteen hours with the first two free, invoice attached to the letter.
• Amesbury — $750, thirty hours billed at the statutory maximum, now under appeal to the Supervisor of Public Records.
• Dracut — $2,950, 120 hours for 45 agreements it will not show anyone before payment.

What Tantasqua’s placement tells you is where the extremes land: here is a district that produced actual records for nothing while four districts are still pricing the act of looking, and the gap between the zero and the largest estimate is nearly forty times. The pattern so far: every district that has priced the request bills the same statutory $25 hourly rate — which tells you the hourly rate is not the story; the hours claimed is the story. Dracut and Peabody discount the first two hours. Some letters itemize, some hand down totals. And the one district that skipped the fee discussion entirely is the only district with records on the board.

The full board — all 65 districts, fees, hours, and the records library — is the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project, and the project’s running dispatch on how these responses compare is first records arrive free. Before you pay anything, check both.

What This Means for Parents

• If your child’s dispute is one of the nine in this bag, the terms are now public. The Tantasqua production is published in full: no fee, no request of your own required, reviewed for personal information before posting.
• A district can fill this very request at no cost. Tantasqua answered the same letter that drew $75, $150, $300, $750 and $2,950 elsewhere — and charged nothing. The hours a district claims are the variable, not the rate.
• The records arrive PII-reviewed, not raw. Every page was checked for student information before publication, so the copy you read is the reviewed one; the district’s own raw file is not what is on offer.
• Productions can contain records outside your request. A staff retirement agreement rode along despite the request’s express exclusion. When you receive a production, read it against the scope of your request — and note any over-inclusion in writing.
• The tracker is where the comparison lives. Every district on the board has received the same request; check its fee column before you request from your own, because someone may have already priced it.

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Sources

• Kim Andre, Benefits Coordinator, Tantasqua Regional School District/Union 61, email of September 25, 2026, attaching the 45-page production; published in PII-reviewed form; copy self-hosted by Parent Data Force.
• Tantasqua Regional School District acknowledgment dated September 25, 2026, logged 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 a parent-led transparency effort, and it grows by request. If your district is not on the tracker yet, write to the project and it becomes another row on the board.