Meet Matt

Matt Hartman has worked for over 10 years in the Massachusetts State Senate as Legal Counsel and Chief of Staff for two senators. Matt has written labor laws, brought local infrastructure projects like the Green Line Extension into reality, and helped bring hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean invasive species out of the Mystic River. But, it has been school funding and improvement that has often dominated much of his career in the statehouse, with work on 10 state budgets, on alternatives for school improvement programs, on working with cities and towns to advocate for school building funds, and work on the Student Opportunity Act in 2019.

Matt got involved in the Melrose schools before his children even started to attend, when he began going to meetings of parents worried about where the school budget was headed in the early spring of 2018. Quickly, Matt recognized the deep fiscal needs of the public schools and knew from his experience working on state school funding at the statehouse that Melrose had very few options to provide additional investments. As a founding member of the OneMelrose campaign, he offered his experience in campaign organization and expertise in school and municipal finance to grapple with many aspects of the 2019 override, committing a year of work to the campaign. 

He is prepared even beyond his work experience, serving since 2016 on the Board for the Community Action Agency of Somerville (CAAS), currently as the Vice-President. The agency provides high-quality pre-k education to families in classrooms across Somerville and Cambridge through the Head Start program, as well as housing assistance, tax preparation, and community organizing. It manages more than $5M in federal grants, and the agency has more than doubled its scale in the past 5 years, from a $5M budget to more than $11M. 

Matt’s range of experience and community involvement make him well prepared for the role on school committee. He most enjoys talking with people about the issues we grapple with and work to resolve and looks forward to meeting many Melrosians along the campaign trail and as a member of the committee.