The Massachusetts bill that was being awaited

...has now been filed: HD. 4974 was filed by Governor Baker this afternoon. On the education front, it includes measures:

Permitting Regional School Districts to suspend the statutorily-required vote on the approval of their fiscal year 2021 budget and allowing the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to certify an amount sufficient for the operation of the district, until a budget can be adopted. 

Modifying the MCAS by permitting the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education upon recommendation of the Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education to modify or waive the required competency determination for high school graduation. The Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education would also be allowed to modify or waive the MCAS testing requirement. 

Extending a Student Opportunity Act deadline by permitting the Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education to extend the April 1, 2020 deadline for each district to submit its first 3-year plan to address “persistent disparities in achievement among student subgroups.”

This is of course simply a filed bill, which will need to pass both chambers and go back to the Governor to be signed.
What's interesting is that it doesn't make the decisions, but puts the authority back at the Board and Commissioner. The competency determination is a Board authority already (did we really need that section?), but the MCAS requirement is not; grades 4, 8, and 10 are required to be tested under state law.
The Board is scheduled to meet Tuesday, March 31; should this be passed by then, naturally one wonders if something will be done at that meeting.
And of course, federal action is also necessary.

On SOA deadlines, it also doesn't establish a date, but says:

...the commissioner of elementary and secondary education may set the deadline for each school district to submit its first 3-year plan required pursuant to subsection (d) of section 1S of chapter 69 of the General Laws, as inserted by section 5 of chapter 132 of the acts of 2019, as April 1, 2020, or such later date as determined by the commissioner, in order to address disruptions caused by the outbreak of the 2019 novel Coronavirus also known as “COVID-19”..

emphasis there mine: this thus is "you could keep that deadline OR you could do something else."
The question in my mind is this: does this become even more of a pro-forma exercise now that we've essentially blown up the educational inequities of the system a hundredfold? As Chalkbeat writes today:

All in all, the weight of the research is consistent with common sense: missed school is going to mean missed learning.“The learning loss is going to be large, and almost certainly going to be worse for low-income kids,” predicted Goodman.

Plus, the state budget now is looking "grim" per today's State House News report.

Shouldn't we maybe be going back to the drawing board on this?