Cambridge Schools Lick Wounds After a Year of Painful Decisions

Focus, direction, clarity--these qualities are what members of the Cambridge School Committee say has been missing from the school district's educational philosophy.

But this past year, the uncertainties of teacher contract negotiations and debate over the restructuring of several schools in the district have been a continuing distraction from the district's long-term goals.

More than 100 10th-graders boycotted the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests--a state-mandated exam--last month, as well as dozens of fourth- and eighth-graders.

The merger of the Fletcher and Maynard elementary schools has been contentious and the restructuring of the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS) has also been disruptive, with committee members spending much of their time shepherding these complicated projects.

Now, school committee members say they have to scale back to a few goals, two years after they drew up 11 ambitious objectives for the school system--which ranged from making sure students pass algebra in eighth grade to teaching organizational, research and study skills.

"There's probably more stress than I'd hoped--few happy moments," says committee member Alfred B. Fantini. "There hasn't been much buy-in."

Now, the committee says it will merely monitor the merger and high school reform, but leave the schools' leaders to implement the details while it tackles more far-reaching educational questions.

Restructuring

Following the committee's unanimous vote to restructure CRLS on Feb. 3, major--and contentous--change in the Cambridge school district has been underway.

Currently, CRLS has five "houses" of unequal size that use widely varying teaching styles.

Next year, the houses will be replaced by five small "schools" of equal size, which will use similar teaching styles and create more self-contained groups of students and teachers in the high school of 2,000 students.

Teachers have already been distributed among the new schools. Three-quarters will have to pack up their classrooms so the building can be rearranged into the new schools. And over the summer, teachers will attend workshops on advising and on teaching illiterate high-school students how to read.

The end result, says CRLS Principal Paula M. Evans, who formulated the reform plan, will be more intimate schools where every student is known well by at least one teacher. Parents, teachers and students widely agree that CRLS at present is a place where some students flourish, but where many students flounder because they have no connection to school officials.

Evans says she is also trying to develop ways of helping students with reading difficulties catch up, such as having elementary school principals tell CRLS administrators which students need remedial classes.

"We're trying to get very straight information about what students are coming into high school with," she says.

Whatever the merits of the end result, the process is "excruciating," says Linda S. Lipkin, an English teacher in Pilot, one of the five CRLS houses.

"The faculty is walking around like the air is poisonous," she says. "Everybody's anxieties are coming out because there's so much uncertainty."

In the house system, Lipkin says, she works with people who share her educational philosophy. The new arrangement lacks this bond among teachers, she says.

But she says change is needed and even agrees with some specific elements of Evans' reform--like the plan to organize each school around a common space where students and teachers can interact.

Merging at the Maynard

Even more controversial than CRLS has been the Fletcher-Maynard elementary school merger, which committee members approved unanimously March 21.

The merger will effectively close Fletcher and Maynard and open a new school in the existing Maynard building, with a new principal, a different curriculum and a new name, which has not yet been decided.

The merged school will use a standardized curriculum called Core Knowledge, produced by a national firm and tailored to specific MCAS standards, as well as the Literacy Collaborative and a technology initiative called NetSchools.

The school will also cap class sizes at 17 students and be exempted from the district's racial quotas.

But this special status has some community members alarmed.

School committee member E. Denise Simmons lives in Area Four, the Cambridge neighborhood with the highest proportion of black and Latino residents, and where Fletcher and Maynard are located.

She says she has "grave concerns" about the merger.

"We continue to repeat history in a particular community for a particular group of people," she says.

Simmons says schools in Area Four have long been promised more and better resources but have been given less than their fair share of school district money.

Fletcher and Maynard parents are upset that the city will not pay for a new building or extensive renovations to Maynard. Both options could cost as much as $12 million.

But after City Manager Robert W. Healy originally budgeted $276,000 for repairs, Mayor Anthony D. Galluccio and Superintendent of Schools Bobbye J. D'Allessandro successfully lobbied Healy for extra money to ready the school for its ambitious new curriculum.

D'Alessandro announced last month that the building will undergo a modest $1.1 million fix-up over the next two years, including a paint job and replacement of windows that do not open.

Still, Fantini says he understands why parents feel deceived by the school committee.

"We gave the perception we were going to provide a new school," he says. "It's hard to overcome no matter what the good intentions were."

D'Alessandro, however, maintains she has always focused on the merged school's academic program and never promised a new facility--a point even many parents concede.

Merging for Money

Fundamentally, the merger is about empty seats and empty coffers.

"I understand their passions, but we've got 1,000 empty seats," D'Alessandro says of parents upset by the Fletcher-Maynard merger.

Underenrolled schools waste money and, at a time when many districts have rising enrollment, make it harder for Cambridge to get state funding to build and renovate schools.

According to district predictions, the merged school will save the district more than $2 million over the next three years.

Early in her tenure, D'Alessandro developed a policy that schools with fewer than 300 students would have to merge or close.

Fletcher and Maynard each have fewer than 300 students; their combined enrollment next year is expected to total just 350. Four other elementary schools also fall short of the mark.

But at the committee's request, D'Alessandro is currently reconsidering the policy that forced the Fletcher-Maynard merger.

Committee members say changes are simply a matter of fairness: the present policy is unfair to schools like the Haggarty, which was built to hold fewer than 300 students at its capacity.

But many Fletcher-Maynard parents are angry.

Cheryl Kennedy, a Fletcher parent, says she finds it "thoroughly confusing...how city policy-makers can engage us in a very uprooting and disruptive process and then halfway through appear to change the rules."

It's a Goal

Though restructuring within the district has attracted much of teh school committee's attention, the district has still begun to push ahead with some of its more ambitious goals.

Soon after the committee presented its 11 objectives, D'Alessandro picked literacy as her first priority--hoping to get all students to read at their own grade level from third grade on.

And she has gotten results.

In 1997, 64 percent of third-graders tested as "proficient" or "advanced" readers on the Iowa tests, a national standardized exam. Just two years later, that number was 75 percent--and the number of students testing as "basic" or "pre-readers" has declined steadily.

The drastic improvement in reading scores has not come easily: more than three dozen separate initiatives address reading, far more programs than currently address any one of the other 10 goals.

Nor has it come cheaply. The Literacy Collaborative, a nationally-used reading curriculum is the district's major reading program, but training just one teacher to be a single elementary school's coordinator for the Literacy Collaborative costs $17,000.

And next year's budget includes nearly $150,000 to expand reading and writing programs in the elementary schools.

Technically Speaking

As committee members and district administrators focus on reading and other goals, they will also chart the now-uncertain future of vocational education in Cambridge.

Thomas Lividoti, who coordinates vocational education in the district, sits in his office in the Rindge School of Technical Arts (RSTA), one of the five "houses" that make up CRLS.

"I wish I could tell you about the future," he says.

This year is not the first time RSTA has merged: in 1977, the Rindge and Latin schools combined to make the current CRLS, joining the vocational school with the traditional, academic school.

As part of the present reform, RSTA will be disbanded and, instead of being affiliated with one house, its teachers will be spread out among the five new schools being formed as part of the restructuring.

According to Lividoti, students will still be able to take courses in the nine fields RSTA currently offers, from carpentry and computers to electrical and auto mechanics.

School committee members are rallying to RSTA's support, fearing the restructuring will harm the program before they have time to rethink and revitalize vocational education.

"I plan to be very protective of spaces that are currently in RSTA," Grassi says.

Lividoti says an essential part of the long-term plan is getting more students interested in the technical arts--and earlier. He wants to expose students to the technical arts in elementary school, just as they are exposed to music and the visual arts.

"It's a numbers game," he says. "We've got to get our numbers up."

Students need to be actively recruited in eighth grade, Lividoti says.