Amendment ID: S2193-12-R1

Redraft Amendment 12

Accurate Student Enrollment Count

Ms. Chang-Diaz, Messrs. McGee and DiDomenico, Ms. Jehlen and Mr. Lewis move to amend the amendment by adding the following section:-

“SECTION 23. There shall be an interagency task force to make recommendations on the commonwealth’s ability to most accurately and efficiently count low-income students in public school districts, hereinafter called the task force. The task force shall develop recommendations on topics including, but not limited to: (i) accounting for low-income students who are not present in commonwealth databases serving low-income populations, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and transitional assistance for families with dependent Children, or  TAFDC; (ii) overcoming existing obstacles and improving the ability of the commonwealth’s data systems to successfully identify matches between school enrollment rosters and enrollment in the SNAP, TAFDC, the department of children and families' foster care program and the office of Medicaid and (iii) ensuring that there is no loss of federal Title I and other funds from school districts due to undercounting of low-income students.

The task force shall include 1 designee from each of the following: the Massachusetts office of information technology; the department of elementary and secondary education; the department of transitional assistance; the office of Medicaid; the executive office of health and human services; the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents; the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute; Project Bread; Health Care for All; and the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. The designees from the department of elementary and secondary education and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents shall serve as co-chairs.

The task force shall:

(i) identify best practices in the counting of low-income student populations in other states, including an assessing whether using probabilistic matching algorithms would improve direct certification rates in the commonwealth and an assessing whether there are other changes to the matching algorithm that would improve direct certification rates in the commonwealth;

(ii) identify all relevant data fields currently collected within each of the relevant databases in the commonwealth, and determining additional data needed in each of the databases that would improve the ability of the systems to generate successful direct certification matches including, but not limited to, expanded use of the State Assigned Student Identifier and additional name fields and recommendations for implementing any necessary changes to data fields included in the databases;

(iii) determine necessary steps to allow the commonwealth to identify partial matches with the Medicaid database and to implement those changes;

(iv) recommend methods to ensure that direct certification includes all relevant commonwealth programs;

(v) recommend methods to ensure the commonwealth is able to accurately identify students eligible for free meals and students with incomes up to 185 per cent of the federal poverty level; and

(vi) analyze the format in which data are received and reviewed by schools and school districts and the procedures used by schools and school districts to review the date, in order to determine whether there are ways to simplify procedures for direct certification and the resolution of partial matches at the local level.

The task force shall file its recommendations with the clerks of the senate and house of representatives, the senate and house chairs of the joint committee on education and the house and senate committees on ways and means not later than August 31, 2016.”