Ch70 Bills

Disclaimers first!

  • We put this info together because there's no other comparison out there currently (September 2019). None of us are legislators, lawyers, or school finance experts - if anything on here looks wrong, please let us know via Contact and we will check it out and make any corrections as soon as possible.
  • In order to make this as easy as possible to understand, we had to draw a line to direct people to the Foundation Budget or Hold Harmless info based on their districts. There is no perfect way to do this, because all the bills are different. We opted to use numbers from MassBudget's report, "Towards Equity: School Funding Reform in Massachusetts", because it forecasts out what results might look like at the end of implementation and uses a fairly middle-of-the-road set of assumptions. Some districts have higher rates of low income or English language learners or may be significantly impacted by charter school tuitions.

Directions Second!

  1. Find your district in the list below. You'll see it is either blue (foundation budget) or brown (hold harmless).

2. If you haven't watched our Chapter 70 video, please do so now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLyLTmmJHjk. Then...if your district is blue in the list above, watch this video to learn about the foundation budget and foundation aid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H55jWH1ZJLg. For districts in brown above, watch this video for information on Hold Harmless and Minimum Aid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIKdYSnjsY8.

3. Scroll down to the chart below the district list.

  • The white ones at the top are funds and studies in the bills that could apply to districts in either the blue foundation budget or brown hold harmless categories.
  • The blue elements of the chart have the bill info for the foundation budget/foundation aid. Note that you'll need to do a reality check of your district demographics to know how much each of these might help your district. If your district has low ELL and low income populations, you'll see most of your increase from lines like healthcare and special education. If you have very high low income, you'll want to consider those lines first and the others less so.
  • The brown will have the bill info for those in Hold Harmless.
  • The green apply to pretty much all the MA districts to some degree.
2019 Legislation and Budget Advocacy Comparisons 03.25.19.pdf