The tracker now covers 36 Massachusetts school districts. Eight have confirmed receipt — from a superintendent’s own reply to four public-records portal confirmations — and three early delivery failures were caught, disclosed, and re-sent within three days.
Somewhere between the fourth bounced email and the eighth formal acknowledgment, this thing stopped being a spreadsheet and started being a story: the kind you get when you take one law — G.L. c. 66, § 10, the Massachusetts Public Records Act, and its regulation 950 C.M.R. 32.00 — and apply it, clause by clause and word for word, to every school district in the Commonwealth, in public.
The demand itself is almost boring, which is what makes it dangerous. Final written agreements that resolve student-related disputes. Executed, finalized, materially amended, or extended from September 18, 2021 through the date of each district’s response. Settlement agreements and settlement-and-release agreements. Resolution agreements. MOUs and MOAs. Mediation agreements. Stipulations, consent agreements, side letters, material amendments, and — the clause lawyers hate — any other final written agreement, regardless of title. Nothing about employees. Nothing about collective bargaining or workers’ comp or the Leasing of the Gymnasium. Nothing about students, either: the request opens the door for every district to redact names, addresses, IDs, dates of birth, anything that could re-identify a child. We asked for the paper. Not the kid.
The live tracker is where the whole experiment lives — district by district, what we asked, what they said, what the records show. This is the first dispatch from inside it.
The numbers first
- 36 districts requested — the original 31, plus Andover, Greenfield, Watertown, Shrewsbury, and Amherst-Pelham, all added September 21, 2026.
- 8 acknowledgments — Braintree, Hopkinton, Berlin-Boylston, Whitman-Hanson, Springfield, Ashland, Gloucester, Cambridge.
- 0 productions posted — the records library is an empty room on purpose, not a broken one.
- Oct. 2 and Oct. 5 — the current statutory milestones. First wave responds by Oct. 2; the newest five by Oct. 5.
Zero productions is simply early days. It is day four of a request that gives each records officer ten business days to answer. The ten days are real, they are law, and they have only just started running.
Five more names on the docket
The intake works the way public participation is supposed to work: somebody sends the district name and the town — no student information, none — and the district goes on the list. Two of the five additions came in exactly that way, from readers who saw the page and wanted their towns on it. Andover and Amherst-Pelham Regional arrived as requests from strangers who cared enough to write two lines. Greenfield, Shrewsbury, and Watertown followed the same road, all five fired off on September 21.
Watertown deserves its own paragraph, because Watertown is where the honest bookkeeping starts. The first letter to the district’s school-side records contact came back from the mail system — account inactive, try again — so the request went to the Town of Watertown’s published public-records inbox, the channel the town itself advertises for this exact purpose. The tracker says so in plain words, as it does for every delivery failure.
Eight receipts, three flavors
The superintendents. Braintree came back in less than twenty-four hours, and not from a robot: Superintendent Timothy MacDonald, September 19 — “Your request has been received.” Five words, from the top of the district, with his title under his name. Hopkinton’s Evan Bishop confirmed receipt on September 20 and said the request was being forwarded to the public records officer for review and response. That is what the start of the statutory clock sounds like.
The records officers. Berlin-Boylston’s Records Access Officer wrote back that the request was received and would be reviewed within ten business days — the statutory sentence, said plainly. Whitman-Hanson sent a formal letter on September 21, on behalf of Records Access Officer George Ferro, acknowledging the request and restating our own scope back to us with the calm precision of a district that read the thing.
The portals. Four came back through official municipal systems, each stamped with a public number — the kind of receipt you frame:
- Springfield — request #26-5338, City of Springfield public records portal.
- Ashland — request #26-548, Ashland public records portal.
- Gloucester — request #26-683, Gloucester public records portal.
- Cambridge — the City of Cambridge Law Department, confirming the request was received and is being processed in accordance with Public Records Law.
Four numbers, four timestamps, four paper trails. If any of these requests ever walks up the appeal staircase, those numbers are already sitting in the record.
When mail does not land
Not everything made it. Lexington’s published records address rejected the request outright — the mail system reported the mailbox does not exist. Freetown-Lakeville’s first address was an inactive account. Watertown bounced on the school side and got re-routed, as described above. All three were re-sent on September 21 — Lexington to two district contacts, Freetown-Lakeville to two new Records Access Officer contacts — and the tracker records every hop plainly.
And then there are the auto-replies. Andover answered with an out-of-office notice (the contact resurfaces September 22). Pembroke returned the same. Fairhaven returned a warm automatic note from the Superintendent’s office that confirms receipt of a message and nothing about a records request. Amesbury‘s autoresponder announced a superintendent transition and pointed at a new name. None of these counts as an acknowledgment of the request itself, and the tracker says so — routing milestones in one column, real receipts in another, no fudging.
A bounced email is logistics, not defiance, and an auto-reply is not an answer. The tracker records both for exactly what they are.
Ten business days is not a countdown clock
Every one of these letters invokes G.L. c. 66, § 10 and 950 C.M.R. 32.00, and every one of them will produce one of several lawful answers: an acknowledgment, a fee estimate, an extension, a production schedule, or the records themselves. The expected dates on the tracker — Oct. 2 for the first wave, Oct. 5 for the newest — are milestones for tracking, not promises, and a district that answers on day eleven has not, by that fact alone, broken anything.
The same discipline runs in the other direction, and it bears writing carefully: a district that used a settlement agreement has not necessarily done anything wrong, and this project does not claim otherwise. The point of the collection is to see, statewide, what remedies actually appear, how disputes get resolved, and how districts behave when the law shows up with a return address. What we asked is documented. What each district said is documented. What the records show — that is the next chapter, and it is written by the records, not by us.
If a district answers with silence, the law has a staircase: an appeal to the Supervisor of Public Records under G.L. c. 66, § 10A, the route this project has walked before. And if a district answers with we can’t give you these at all — that is where Champa v. Weston Public Schools, 473 Mass. 86 (2015) comes off the shelf: properly redacted special-education settlement agreements are subject to disclosure, segregable non-exempt portions and all. The Supervisor of Records applied Champa in SPR17/661, Alexander v. Wellesley Public Schools (May 25, 2017), rejecting the idea that in-district agreements could be withheld whole. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has said the same thing in public: these agreements are public records once the personally identifiable information is stripped out. Redaction is not refusal.
What This Means for Parents
- The tracker is live and growing. Thirty-six districts are covered; eight have confirmed receipt; the rest are inside their statutory window. Check the tracker for the current status.
- Your district can be next. Email the district name and town — no student information is needed — and it goes on the list.
- You can file the same request yourself. The complete copy-and-paste template is on the project page, with plain instructions; several of the receipts above came through the same official channels any parent can walk into.
- “Acknowledged” is ignition, not arrival. It means the request reached someone accountable. The substantive answers — records, fees, extensions — are what the next milestone measures.
- Delivery failures get fixed and disclosed. Three requests initially bounced and were re-sent within days; the tracker records that.