On the Road to Restructuring

Some parents say it's a school where one ninth-grade class regularly watches "The Simpsons" in social studies class, where students snooze during their weekly advisory period, where they sit in temporary study halls for weeks while their schedules are worked out.

But others say it's a school where administrators are overcoming a culture of mediocre expectations and are demanding higher standards from students, where teachers are collaborating and getting to know students personally.

These two opposing views of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School came head to head in a pair of special school committee meetings over the past two weeks. Last week, intensely opinionated parents polarized around what they saw as the fallout of the school's recent redesign.

Last night, CRLS administrators told committee members they have recognized obstacles in redesign and are working to improve issues like scheduling for next year.

"We know we've just begun. The road is uneven," says Principal Paula M. Evans.

Before the redesign CRLS had a system of "houses," which featured different program sizes and teaching styles. Pilot, one of the houses, was an alternative program, while Fundamental, another of the houses, used more traditional approaches to teaching. Students could choose which house they entered.

The house system started in the early '70s. But by early this decade, the system was highly unpopular, heavily criticized for creating inequities between the houses and letting more affluent and white students succeed at the expense of poorer minority students.

In a plan approved by the school committee last spring, that system was abolished. This fall, CRLS opened with five equally sized "small schools," each with a dean of curriculum and a dean of students. Students are assigned to the houses at random. Then administrators switch around students to assure racial and economic diversity.

The changes have frustrated some parents, who say they received incomplete schedules for their children and think their children's classes are not challenging enough.

"There's not much emphasis on curriculum or intellectual pursuits. It's pretty pathetic," says Margaret Hallisey, whose two ninth-grade sons are in Schools 2 and 5, respectively.

Several dozen parents repeated those themes at a hearing last Thursday night that committee members had scheduled to hear parents' concerns about the redesign.

Last night, committee members talked with Evans and the deans for two hours. Administrators acknowledged that they faced a scheduling nightmare when school opened this fall. Evans says some logistical problems have been fixed already. Scheduling has settled down, for example. And guidance counselors are getting ready to send out individual letters to parents of juniors and seniors about planning for their children's futures.

Last night, she said restructuring is a long-term process that requires the school committee's support. And, though they grilled administrators on issues of class size and academic challenge, committee members seemed willing to give Evans the support she wanted.

"We very much want you to be successful," said committee member Alfred B. Fantini. "Don't view us as adversarial in this relationship."

As problems are worked out, morale among veteran teachers has bottomed out.

Some newer teachers say they like the changes, but many long-time teachers say they feel overwhelmed by the redesign and under-appreciated by Evans.

Morale began sinking about five or six years ago when city leaders first began talk of restructuring the high school--long before Evans proposed her redesign plan.

Some of the most critical voices come from teachers nearing the ends of their careers. As many as one-third of CRLS' teachers could retire in the next several years, says Roger O'Sullivan, president of the Cambridge Teachers Association.

O'Sullivan says teachers will be retiring in large numbers throughout Cambridge, but some veteran teachers says bad feelings over redesign are pushing up their retirement plans.

'The Long Haul'

A few minutes before 8 a.m. on a windy October morning, Evans stands on the sidewalk as young men and women converge on CRLS. She greets many students by name and tells them they've got just a couple of minutes to get to homeroom on time.

Not all high school principals get to school at 7:15 a.m. and leave 10 or 11 hours later.

"Well, I do," she says briskly.

Supporters and detractors alike say Evans is tough and fair. She has brought a new seriousness to CRLS. Top on her list: cutting down on students who cut class or come late.

Yesterday, for example, each CRLS small school held a school-wide meeting. Students who came late were moved to a small cafeteria, where Evans stayed with them for the entire hour.

"I believe that every minute in this building counts, every minute for every building. I can't tolerate hanging around," she says.

Evans was hired by Cambridge Superintendent of Schools Bobbie J. D'Alessandro specifically to devise a plan for redesigning CRLS. And no one denies that she is devoted to restructuring.

Evans was not the first to talk about changing CRLS, nor was she the first to make ambitious efforts at finding a solution. But she is the first to implement a full-scale restructuring program.

Throughout the '90s, school officials have worried about the poor performance of poor and minority students. When Kenneth E. Reeves '72 was mayor, he interviewed every CRLS graduate, hoping to figure out what made the difference between students who did well and others who just got by.

For several years before Evans came, an ad hoc committee of teachers had been meeting every so often to discuss a redesign, but the process was bogged down.

Two years ago, CRLS teachers held a vote at D'Alessandro's request to decide the future of the faculty committee. Only 40 percent favored continuing with the existing process. The majority chose to hand over responsibility to the school department.

When D'Alessandro hired her, Evans had been at Brown University studying different philosophies of teaching and learning, as well as working to turn around failing high schools.

Evans says her task is similar at CRLS: to raise expectations across the board and to focus on challenging and getting to know students.

"We're about changing the culture of the school for the adults and the kids," she says. "That's the long haul. Can we stick with it and not burn out?"

"We cannot have a comprehensive high school with a huge smorgasbord of courses," she adds.

Evans says redesign comes with tradeoffs, like fewer elective classes, to ensure smaller class sizes for core subjects like English and social studies and more time for teachers to talk with each other about curriculum and students who are struggling.

A central theme of the redesign is to have each student become well-known by at least one teacher. Evans says small schools are needed in order for that to occur.

"You can't do that with 2,000 kids in the building just hanging out," she says. "You've got to break it up."

Evans listened to parents' comments last week, but she positively beamed at last night's meeting. While she says she has listened to parent criticism, Evans has tried to protect her administrators and guidance counselors.

"I've asked parents to give me evidence in writing and I'll take it on," she says. "I'm not interested in having 200 parents shrieking at me because that's not productive."

"They can't just tar the guidance department. That I'm not listening to," she adds.

The Morale Morass

In her drive to change CRLS, Evans has not gotten along well with veteran teachers. Reaction among teachers has been mixed overall and some younger teachers applaud the changes

"[Evans'] intention is to make it an equitable school and she cares," says first year special education teacher Debra Freilich. "She keeps a positive outlook all the time."

O'Sullivan says long-time teachers are more disappointed than younger teachers with what he calls the "one-size-fits-all" approach of redesign at CRLS.

"They have some basis for comparison," he says. Cambridge schools traditionally are "a mosaic of programs and they've seen this work well for kids."

"In my 30-year career, I've never seen morale at a lower level," he says. O'Sullivan taught middle school science before heading the teachers union.

He says a "style issue" separates Evans from her staff. By criticizing the previous high school so strongly, he says, Evans has in effect told long-time teachers that what they were doing before was all wrong.

"There is no morale. It's down as far as you can get. It's a general, overall malaise that comes down," says one teacher in school 2. "It's not one great big thing. It's many small things."

Larry Aaronson is not a typical teacher. He used to teach in Pilot House, an alternative program that was popular with students and parents. And he was the only teacher in Pilot who actively supported the restructuring.

He says he still supports redesign, but sees only slow progress toward the kind of cultural change that Evans envisions.

"There's a lot of demoralization. A lot of faculty are upset," he says. "People don't feel community. Where's the love?"

Reviews are not all bad, though, even from critics. For the most part teachers praise the deans who run their small schools. The deans make decisions about curriculum, as well as tending to discipline matters and filling in for sick teachers when there's no substitute teacher.

Inconsistent discipline policy is a major issue hurting morale. But that concern is not new to the redesigned CRLS and is not something redesign can fix.

"There's low morale around discipline," says Les Kimbrough, dean of students in school 4. "People don't think we're being consistent across the board. I don't think that can ever be fixed."

Kimbrough was an administrator in Leadership house last year, and he says different deans will always handle issues like discipline differently.

Evans says she knows many teachers dislike redesign.

"It's hard. That's to be expected. I would never expect people would be on the same page," she says. "If people who are focusing on their classroom...choose not to get as directly involved, that's okay."

Down to the Wire

For Kimbrough, who was an administrator in the Leadership house last year, restructuring has meant long hours and a hectic fall. Redesign has made inroads but still has a long way to go.

"I don't have any illusion of things happening quickly," he says. "We're working with people. Students and teachers don't give up the past easily."

One thing most teachers had no choice about giving up was their classrooms. Over the summer, they had to pack up all of their materials in cardboard boxes. Custodians then moved the boxes so teachers could be arranged in their small schools.

Kimbrough stayed at CRLS during the summer and watched workers frantically putting on finishing touches, right up until the day before school opened.

"It came down to the wire. The week before Labor Day, we had folks in the building doing construction," he says. "Maintenance worked around the clock. We opened intact. They really worked their butts off."

Another logistical headache was scheduling, which kept guidance counselors and administrators busy during the first weeks of school.

Students sign up for courses in the spring, then their preferences are typed into a computer system called StarBase. The computer program produces a schedule that administrators send out late in the summer.

Evans says the scheduling problems were "horrendous." Though she says restructuring may have exacerbated them, the schedules didn't go smoothly last year, either.

"We still don't know how to use the system we bought two years ago," she says. "You can't blame the computers or the software."

Debra Socia, dean of curriculum in School 2, sits on the scheduling committee. She says some scheduling problems took weeks to resolve.

Socia has just gained access to the StarBase system and is hoping to figure it out.

"I'm very good with computers. As a person who knows her way around a computer, I find this very complex," she says.

Earlier this fall, Socia wanted to make sure every student had classes scheduled each period. She tried pulling up records for every student with a missing period. But the software wasn't designed to perform a search like that, so she spent hours going through 400 student records one-by-one.

The scheduling committee is already working on ways of making next year's scheduling process smoother. Among the changes--buying an updated version of StarBase.