Senator DiDomenico Releases Kids First: A Vision for a Stronger Commonwealth

BOSTON- Senator Sal DiDomenico, Senate President Stan Rosenberg, and members of the Senate Kids First working group recently released Kids First: A Vision for a Stronger Commonwealth, a strategic blueprint for investing in children and their families to build pathways to successful, productive, and healthy adulthood. While this initiative is broad in scope, the focus and content of this Senate vision statement is on the critical years of birth through age 9.

“Building strong and resilient children should be our Commonwealth’s number one priority, and achieving this goal requires our dedication to this commitment at every step of a child’s educational, social, and economic upbringing,” said Senator DiDomenico, chair of the Kids First working group. “I am proud of the strategic vision and values laid out by the Senate in Kids First, and I am confident that this document will provide our Commonwealth with a critical road map of steps we must take to make serious, significant, and sustained investments in our children’s futures.” 

Senate President Rosenberg created the Kids First initiative to propose a series of recommendations that seek to build strong and resilient kids in the Commonwealth, and appointed Senator DiDomenico as chair. Together, Senate President Rosenberg and Senator DiDomenico convened a cross-jurisdictional working group of senators to look comprehensively at a wide array of policy areas that relate to supporting children.

After collecting extensive input from experts in diverse fields, a vision statement of strategic priorities was crafted to re-orient Massachusetts towards a twenty-first-century education system and to begin prioritizing long-term, smart, and strategic investments in children and their families that will provide a pathway to healthy, productive adulthood. To achieve this objective, Kids First proposes the goal of reducing by at least half the number of third-graders who are not reading proficiently by 2027.

To dramatically increase third grade reading proficiency rates and support the whole child, the Senate Kids First initiative has established four broad areas within which to focus specific strategies: Access, Quality, Readiness, and Integration.  These four pillars provide the foundation on which all policy recommendations in Kids First are centered.

At the release of Kids First, Senator DiDomenico was also joined by former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville, Middlesex Sheriff Peter Koutoujian, Senate colleagues and stakeholders from across the Commonwealth who came out in support of the Senate blueprint.

The plan laid out in Kids First is not meant as a blueprint for omnibus legislation or any piece of legislation in particular. Rather, it is offered as a statement of the Senate’s vision for children and a statement of budgetary priorities in the years to come.  The Kids First blueprint can be found online at https://malegislature.gov/cc/reports/kidsfirstblueprint.pdf.

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