Archive for category: Action Alerts

On Monday, the Massachusetts House Committee on Ways and Means (HWM) released House Bill 4219, An Act relative to immediate COVID-19 recovery needs, a bill to allocate funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and surplus state funds from last fiscal year. Representatives had until yesterday afternoon to submit amendments to that proposal, and TOMORROW (Thursday), the full House of Representatives will be debating and voting on those amendments.

Amendments We Support:

• The amendment would provide $78 million for a Housing and Eviction Representation Program to provide housing stability and homelessness prevention to those at risk of eviction. This program would make tenants and owner occupants whose incomes are below 80% of the Area Median Income eligible for free legal representation. Read our testimony in support of Right to Counsel here.
• The Right to High-Quality Education for All Students program would allocate funds to address barriers to fair, equitable, and high-quality education for low-income students across Massachusetts. 

• Amendment #313 calls for an additional $10 million investment, for a total of $50 million, in youth and young adult employment. This investment would empower an estimated 10,000 young people with jobs and pathways to career success.
• Amendment #314 would add language into House Bill 4219 about how youth and young adults experiencing homelessness, particularly BIPOC and LGBTQ+ individuals, should be a major focus group of this funding. Click here for more information about these amendments from our advocacy partner Breaktime. 

The Massachusetts legislative session is in full swing, and we have an unprecedented opportunity to dismantle barriers to access, stability, and basic needs that have gone unaddressed for too long.

Join us and the Language Access for All Coalition TODAY for a Day of Action! Contact your legislators and tell them: immigrant and limited English proficient families must have equal access to essential services and information.

The Language Access and Inclusion Act would standardize and enforce language access policies and protocols at public-facing state agencies to ensure non-English speaking residents can access the services they need. As families continue to struggle under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we must protect and guarantee the right to language access across the state.

Because the Massachusetts Legislature passed a temporary eviction and foreclosure moratorium in late April, thousands of families economically devastated by the pandemic have been able to stay in their homes. While that law provides Governor Baker the opportunity to extend the moratorium at increments of up to 90 days until 45 days after the State of Emergency is lifted, the Governor has publicly signaled that he plans to let these protections expire on October 17th. 

It is estimated that anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 new evictions will occur when the moratorium expires! 

Massachusetts Appleseed has previously advocated for the creation of a Right to Counsel pilot program that could protect many of these renters from eviction and potentially homelessness once the moratorium ends. Initially, we asked for a pilot program that would allow nonprofit and legal aid organizations to offer representation within 5,000 eviction cases. 

But as the numbers of likely evictions continue to climb, addressing 5,000 cases is clearly not enough. The Right to Counsel Coalition has sent a letter to Governor Baker advocating for a comprehensive plan that ensures representation for tenants and landlords in 22,000 eviction cases. We need your help to make this happen before the eviction moratorium ends on October 17th!

You can send Governor Baker an email like this: 

Dear Governor Baker,

Tenants, landlords, municipal leaders, health care professionals, and advocates are worried about what will happen when the eviction moratorium ends. The CDC moratorium is not enough. We urge you to use COVID relief funding to prevent housing instability and keep Massachusetts residents safe. We need your leadership to get us through this. Thank you.

It’s our last chance to act!  

The Police Accountability Bills from the House and Senate have been sent to a six-member Conference Committee for reconciliation. We need your help to make sure the final Police Accountability Bill protects young people.  

Our School Resource Officer (SRO) Priorities:  

• Adopt Sections 50 & 51 of S.2820 which require a public vote by school committees – rather than the decision of superintendents and police chiefs – to annually assign SROs to schools. These sections also require public reporting of arrests and mental health student support spending for a district to qualify for an SRO.  
• Fix the error in Section 50 which can be read to require school committee votes, not in traditional school districts, but in charter schools, which don’t have school committees. This was a technical error from Senate Ways and Means, and we need to fix it by adding “by public vote of the relevant school committee” to the first sentence of Section 50. 
• Avoid the new model MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) process in House 66, and instead use the current Model MOU from 2018 as the baseline for all school districts, while keeping the transparency requirements from Section 66 of the House bill. 
• Ensure that whatever qualified immunity provision the bill adopts expressly applies to SROs and amend c. 71 s. 37P(f) accordingly. 

Our Juvenile Justice Privacy Priorities:  

• Adopt Section 49 of S.2820 to keep school administrators from sharing student information with federal law enforcement databases, while removing the “germane to an incident or activity” standard and removing the requirement that the aforementioned databases be “designed” to track gang affiliation.  
• Adopt Sections 59, 60, 61, & 71 of S.2820 to expand eligibility of juvenile expungement by allowing expungement of non-convictions, replacing the one-case restriction to a 3 to 7 year waiting period, and maintaining a list of ineligible offenses only to those with a felony conviction. 

The legislative session may be ending this month, which means we need your voice TODAY.