On November 18, 2025, CLE staff attorney Alexis Rickmers testified before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Children, Families, and Persons With Disabilities in favor of H.210. Earlier this year, CLE also submitted written testimony to the Joint Committee on Education in favor of the Senate companion bill, S.399. The bill would repeal the punitive Learnfare law, which reduces families’ Transitional Aid to Dependent Children (TAFDC) grant when a child has too many absences labelled as “unexcused.”
In her testimony, Attorney Rickmers highlighted the barriers that students with disabilities might face in attending school. She argued that reducing a family’s monetary aid “does nothing to ensure that students with disabilities receive the accommodations and devices they need to attend school and receive a free and appropriate public education.” Instead, the law ignores the unique problems facing students with disabilities and creates new problems for families, as they have to worry about their school misclassifying disability-related absences as “unexcused.”
Read CLE’s written testimony from July here and follow the bill’s progress in the House here.
