Wachusett Regional produced 91 pages and Dover-Sherborn 92 pages on Oct. 6, both free. Neither is published here, and it is our review that stopped them.
On October 6, 2026, two Massachusetts districts answered our student-settlement-records request the way this project hopes every district will: they searched, they redacted, they attached the records, and they asked for nothing.
No fee estimate. No petition to charge above $25 an hour. No request for more time.
Neither production is on this site.
That distinction — cooperation and publication are two different questions — is the whole subject of this article, and it is a distinction the tracker now draws on every row. A district’s file being withheld here is a statement about our review, not about the district.
Wachusett Regional School District: 91 pages, no fee, and a footer identifier on four of them
Wachusett received our request on September 21, 2026. On October 6, Records Access Officer Barry Sclar — the District’s Director of Technology and Communication — replied with a one-page letter and a single 91-page attachment, writing that the records “have been redacted to remove personally identifiable information related to students and their parents/guardians.”
Parent Data Force’s page-level review found one defect, and it is a narrow one:
- A state special-education case-file document identifier is left legible in the page footer on pages 7, 8, 9 and 10, in the same footer position on each of those pages.
That identifier is not a name. It does not read like a name. It is a unique key to one student’s state case file, and the same failure class is what took Grafton’s and Franklin’s productions offline and what took 39 already-published files down the same week — described at 39 Records We Published Were Leaking.
Nothing else about the production is criticized. Student and parent names are barred. The substantive terms of the agreements are readable, which is the point of publishing them at all.
What would fix it: one line. Barring the footer identifier on those four pages is sufficient to let the set publish. We are asking Wachusett to re-issue; we are not doing it for them, for the reason set out below.
Dover-Sherborn Regional School District: 92 pages, no fee, one case number and eight pages we could not read
Dover-Sherborn received our request on September 22, 2026. Its October 6 letter attached a 92-page response and stated, in the District’s words, that it “has always been committed to transparency in all of its activities” and endeavors to comply with requests “in conformity with the law.”
Our review found two things, and they are different in kind:
- A BSEA case number is left in the clear on page 21. This is a populated state docket number, not a footer artifact, and it identifies one student’s due-process matter.
- Eight pages — 5, 15, 49, 57, 79, 82, 88 and 90 — could not be read reliably at any resolution we tried, up to and including dedicated footer and header band crops at high dots per inch.
The first finding is a defect. The second is not a finding about the District’s redaction at all; it is a limit on what we can certify. Our rule is that a page we cannot read is unproven, never clean. Publishing a set on the strength of the pages that did read, while eight stayed illegible, would be exactly the mistake that put 39 files up and then forced them down. We will not make it twice in one week.
District staff names, titles and office contacts appear throughout the Dover-Sherborn set. Those are not student identifying information and we do not treat them as such.
Why we did not black out the footers ourselves
The fastest route to publishing both sets runs through our own software: paint over the four Wachusett footers and the case number on page 21, re-render, post it, note the edit.
We are not doing that, and the reason is not timidity. A settlement agreement’s public value is its substance — what the district agreed to fund, for how long, on what conditions, and what the family gave up. If we redact a district’s records ourselves, then the file that goes public is a document assembled by an advocate, every judgement in it is ours alone, and the public cannot check it against anything. That is a weaker thing to hand a parent than the district’s own production with the identifying marks properly removed.
It is also the specific trap this project fell into. Thirty-nine files went up labelled “PII-reviewed public copy” on the strength of a review that missed a repeating footer element. Self-redaction would have put our own handiwork in the place of the district’s obligation, under the same “reviewed” caption, with the same reader unable to tell who did what.
So the gate reports and does not redact. Grafton Public Schools and Tantasqua Regional School District were both asked to correct their own productions before this — Tantasqua on September 25, Grafton on October 6 — and Grafton’s special-education director confirmed on October 7 that she is reviewing the questions we raised. No correction request has yet gone to Wachusett or Dover-Sherborn.
Wachusett also redacted the private school names, and that claim deserves its own look
The Wachusett letter adds a second assertion, not about student names but about institutions: private school names “have been redacted as they may reveal information about students’ disabilities.”
The reasoning is not frivolous and it is worth taking seriously. In a small district, the name of the out-of-district program a student attends can be a near-unique identifier, and naming the placement can tell a reader the student receives special education. That is a real privacy interest, and Champa v. Weston Public Schools, 473 Mass. 86 (2015), exists precisely because a settlement agreement’s substance can be public while the student inside it stays private.
Taken to its conclusion, though, the claim also swallows the record. The program, the type of placement and the funding of it are the facts the public is paying for. A district that redacts the name of every school it pays, on the theory that the name implies a disability, can describe its own spending in detail and still leave a parent unable to learn what the money bought or which program was chosen. Champa holds that protected information justifies redaction and that the segregable non-exempt parts of an executed agreement must then be disclosed — it does not convert every institutional name into student information.
That is a live question about the Wachusett production, and for now we are logging it, not litigating it: the footer identifier is the reason this set is offline, and we have not raised the placement names as a withholding challenge. The tracker records both facts separately, and if the placement redactions turn out to hide the substantive terms, that becomes an appeal on its own merits.
For contrast, Andover Public Schools also barred the names of out-of-district programs in its 14-agreement production and those agreements publish normally, because the terms around the bars remained readable. See Four Districts, One Day, Four Different Answers.
What this costs, next to what these two charged
Wachusett and Dover-Sherborn asked for nothing. Around them, districts kept pricing the identical request: Dracut’s $2,950 for 45 agreements, Silver Lake’s $650 for 26 hours, and Bridgewater-Raynham’s $27,550 for 18,900 pages. The full ledger and the arithmetic behind it are at Four More Districts Priced the Same Request, and the aggregate is on the tracker.
The free productions are the strongest evidence in every fee argument in this project, including our own. Two regional districts in the same category of record, in the same week, searched, redacted and delivered over 180 pages without billing an hour.
Both districts’ status, page counts and the reason each file is withheld are recorded on the Massachusetts Student Settlement Records Project tracker, alongside the districts that charged for the same thing.
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
- Wachusett Regional School District response letter, October 6, 2026, signed Barry Sclar, Director of Technology and Communication / Records Access Officer, with 91-page attached production; request received September 21, 2026.
- Dover-Sherborn Regional School District response letter, October 6, 2026, with 92-page attached production; request received September 22, 2026.
- Parent Data Force page-level review of both productions, October 6–7, 2026, including footer and header band crops at high resolution.
- Champa v. Weston Public Schools, 473 Mass. 86 (2015).
- G.L. c. 66, § 10(b)(iv) (burden on custodian); § 10(d)(iii) (two free hours above 20,000 population); § 10A (right of appeal).
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.