BOSTON- Last week, Senator Sal DiDomenico traveled back to Washington D.C. to serve as a member of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ (NCSL) Student Centered Learning Commission. The Senator was appointed to the Commission by Senate President Stan Rosenberg for his leadership on education policy and the Senate Kids First initiative, a multi-year initiative led by DiDomenico to identify and support innovative strategies for investing in Massachusetts’ children.

Senator DiDomenico was joined by a bipartisan group of state legislators from across the country to identify legislative policy options, obstacles, and recommendations to help commission members and other legislators move forward with systems that support student-centered learning opportunities.

“It was a pleasure to travel back to our nation’s capital and participate in the NCSL’s Student Centered Learning Commission,” said Senator Sal DiDomenico. “This forum provided an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas for developing schools systems with innovative and holistic approaches to educating our children, and I was proud to share the important recommendations in our Kids First blueprint with legislators from across the country. I look forward to working with my fellow commission members in the future and sharing our findings with my colleagues in the Massachusetts Legislature.” 

The National Conference of State Legislatures has been the voice of state legislatures in Washington, D.C. and has provided support to state legislatures since 1975.  The Student-Centered Learning Commission is a new working group created by the NCSL to help states integrate student-centered learning techniques into their current school systems. “Student-centered learning” refers to a variety of educational programs, learning experiences, approaches, and academic-support strategies that are intended to address the unique learning needs, interests, and/or cultural backgrounds of individual students. 

This forum in Washington D.C. was the first meeting for the commission members. DiDomenico will also participate in two upcoming webinars to discuss legislative activity in the states and address key concepts in student-centered learning. He will also participate in a Legislative Summit in Boston where commission members will reflect on their work and make recommendations for next steps.

This was the second time this year that Senator DiDomenico traveled to Washington D.C. to represent Massachusetts. In April, DiDomenico led a group of his Senate colleagues to D.C. to gather information on the future of the federal budget and to advocate against potential spending cuts that will have a negative impact on the Commonwealth. 

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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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Last week, Senator DiDomenico testified in support of his legislation, known as the SNAP Gap bill, to create a common application program for MassHealth and other public benefit programs. “When I first began working on the Senate Kids First initiative and talking to different stakeholders and advocates, I was shocked at how frequently hunger was cited as a major issue here in Massachusetts,” said DiDomenico in his testimony.

“In light of that knowledge, sponsoring the SNAP Gap bill made complete sense for me. By cutting through red tape and tapping into 100% federally-funded nutrition dollars, this legislation will help more low-income students access free school meals, increase food access for over 100,000 Massachusetts elders, and help more families meet their basic needs. The merits of this legislation are clear, and I plan to make it one of my top priorities for this legislative session.”

The bill, An Act improving public health through a common application for core food, health and safety-net programs (S.612), has over forty co-sponsors.

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