Merged

It was called the "new school"--at least for a while.

Last spring, the Fletcher and Maynard elementary schools, both located in Cambridge's Area 4, were closed and this fall a new, merged school was opened in the Maynard building with a hand-picked staff and a revamped curriculum.

The opening of the merged school went off smoothly, but a passionate debate ignited almost immediately thereafter. The question: What would the new school's name be?

Less than three weeks into the school year, Principal Robin A. Harris has cut off what she says could have become an "ugly" process.

According to Harris, the merged school will be called the "Fletcher-Maynard Academy."

She announced the decision at a staff meeting yesterday and will discuss the name publicly at a school open house tomorrow night.

"We have to pick the battles we're going to fight," Harris says.

As the naming debate has heated up, some teachers have gone without textbooks. Furniture for the science and computer labs has not arrived. And half of the library books are still packed in boxes.

Some Fletcher teachers and parents also say they regret having had to leave their small school and join the larger Maynard.

But by and large, staff members say they have overcome these problems and are happier with the merger now than they were last spring.

What's In a Name?

The decision to put Joseph E. Maynard's name on an elementary school was made in less than a week. But the debate over changing that name has proved considerably more contentious.

Maynard was a longtime employee of the Cambridge Department of Public Works who also served 19 years on the school committee--once in the late 1950's, once in the '60s and then continuously from 1970 to 1984.

He died of a heart attack on Nov. 26, 1985, during his tenth term on the committee. Within a week, the school committee had changed the name of the Roberts School to the Maynard School.

In its resolution to change the name, the committee called Maynard "an uncompromising advocate of, in particular, the schools which served those children he loved so much."

School committee member Alfred B. Fantini, who served with Maynard during his last term, says he remembers Maynard helping poor parents to buy clothes and shoes for their children.

At a committee meeting last week, Fantini recalled Maynard confronting the president of Harvard over the lack of educational chances for poor and minority students.

"The people from my neighborhood can't afford to go to Harvard," he recalled Maynard saying.

For Fantini, the Maynard name has become inviolable.

"You can have whatever process you want," Fantini said. "I am totally opposed to it."

Two weeks ago, more than 150 residents of the Fletcher and Maynard area signed a petition to the city council and school committee asking that the Maynard name be kept.

Even the city council has been involved. Two weeks ago, the council ordered--by a close 5-4 vote--that the school department "include the name of Joseph Maynard in the selection process."

The council's move was only symbolic, since no one in the schools department has said the Maynard name should not be considered.

Committee member Alice L. Turkel says she favors relying on current school committee policies, which call for an "organized process" and say the "wishes of parents and students should be considered."

"The school should decide what it would like to be called," she says. "I trust the principal to run a process."

The Name Game

For parents, the talk of precedent and policy is irrelevant.

Early this fall, there was a suggestion box in the new school's office for students, parents and teachers to suggest names for the school.

Harris planned to convene a committee to choose a name among those suggested in the box. But she says she called off that procedure when she saw the process getting out of hand.

Parents who have followed the merger process say they are angry that controversy over the name means they will not get to choose.

"Everything is lies, lies, lies," says Bernadette Montasse, who has a fourth-grade son at the new school. "[There was] supposed to be a new school with a new name."

Harris McCarter, parent of a kindergartner, says he wants a "name that symbolizes the two schools coming together."

He says he blames "a movement within the school committee to renege on their promise."

In With the New

Harris, a former school committee member, was an assistant principal last year at Benjamin Banneker, a charter school in North Cambridge.

When she was hired this summer, Harris' first challenge was getting the building ready for nearly 300 students and more than 80 staff members.

Last spring, the school department angered many Fletcher and Maynard parents by locating the new school in the Maynard building and proposing repairs, rather than building an altogether new school.

Over the summer, the entire school was repainted in bright yellows and oranges. Windows and floors were fixed. And empty classrooms that had been used for storage were cleaned out.

"We had a lot of junk in this building," she says. "We filled up lots of dumpsters with old broken-down furniture."

She hired her own staff of teachers, many from Fletcher and Maynard, and others who came from out of the district.

When the merger was approved last spring, the new school's curriculum was overhauled.

The school will begin using Core Knowledge, a standardized curriculum produced by a national consulting firm and tailored to each specific school's needs.

At the same time, the school uses the Literacy Collaborative reading program and the Peace Games peer mediation program.

Next year the new school will begin using NetSchools, an Internet-based curriculum for learning how to use technology.

Harris is charged with making all of the initiatives work in conjunction with one another. She calls her approach to developing the new curriculum "slow" and "deliberate."

"We're not trying to do it all at once," she says.

She says the new curriculum initiatives are part of a broader change in expectations for students at the new school.

"We have put kids on notice that we're here to make them smarter," Harris says.

In the Trenches

On Monday morning before school starts, Korin Littlejohn, a fourth-grader, sits at a table in the cafeteria with her friends.

In contrast to the contentious process that merged the two schools, she says she has gotten along fine with students from Fletcher.

"Some parents didn't like the idea," she says. "They had meetings and meetings and meetings."

Some things have changed, Littlejohn says. For one, the gym is bigger--one of the improvements made over the summer. And there is a new paint job in the cafeteria.

"They used to have flowers on the wall," she says.

"The flowers were ugly," one of her friends pipes in.

A few minutes after the first bell rings to start classes at 7:55 a.m., Phyllis Newton and MaryAnn Savilonis--the new school's parent liaisons--are sitting at their desks in the Parent Room.

"Now that people are here it's fine," says Savilonis, as she punches out paper letters for the Parent Room bulletin board she is putting up.

She was the parent liaison at the Fletcher last year.

"They had heard that [Maynard] looks like a dungeon," she says of Fletcher parents. "Those were the rumors."

Newton has been a liaison for 17 years, mostly at the Maynard. She marvels at the difference in morale between last spring and this fall.

"It's like a dream," she says. "It's like you died and went to heaven."

This morning the liaisons are joined by several parents, including Grace Travaglia.

"The teachers have been really great," she says.

Travaglia says her first-grade son Ralph was nervous about coming to school that morning--until he talked with his teacher.

"He didn't want to come, but now he wants to stay," she says.

It's Only Getting Better

For Leslie Feeley-Brooks, the first class period is about "patterning."

She says she is getting her fourth-graders ready for the middle school routine, making sure they have two sharpened pencils and three books on their desks for quiet reading time in the afternoon.

It's Monday morning. And as the students work on math exercises, Feeley-Brooks checks up on the class. Jerome has a black eye he says he got from roughhousing with his cousin. George is sitting too close to Curtis and getting distracted.

Feeley-Brooks welcomes a girl who comes in a few minutes late and has her sign in.

"They sign in with how they're feeling," she explains.

She says the happy, sad and mad faces on the sign-in sheet help her to gauge which students need extra attention and encouragement.

Feeley-Brooks has been in front of classrooms for 33 years. Before the merger, she says, morale at Maynard sunk as students' performance lagged and the school was overlooked for new initiatives.

"For a long while there was a sense of despair," she says.

But the first weeks this year have been the "happiest, most uplifting" start to school in a long time, she says.

"People were making a big squawk about a new building," she says, "but what a coat of paint can do."

Feeley-Brooks says teachers are cooperating more closely now, in part because of a new teacher training program called the ATLAS Community.

"We get to pursue things that we're interested in, not the administration says, 'this is our focus,' " she says.

Rough Road Ahead

For many teachers, the start of school has not been so smooth.

Some teachers, though they say the year is off to a promising start, have been frustrated by materials that were not ready for the start of school.

Last spring, the science lab was cited as one of the major innovations planned for the new school.

But middle school science teacher Amy Walsh, who used to teach at Fletcher, says the furniture for her science lab is on backorder.

So far, an emergency shower and eyewash have been installed in the third-floor lab. There are also pipes to bring gas to the lab tables.

But the lab tables and large sinks have not arrived yet-and probably will not until the end of October.

"It's not the best situation," Walsh says. "When it's done, it'll be really nice."

In the second-floor computer lab, David Riley Jr. faces a similar dilemma.

Riley says he wants to get started on an electronic daily bulletin with birthdays and announcements that students would assemble from around the school.

"They'll do a 'roving reporter,' " he says.

Riley has the software he needs to help other teachers who bring their classes to the lab, including a language-building program called Wiggle Word.

But the new computers have not arrived yet and most of the old ones cannot run the software he wants to use. The machines were promised at the beginning of September but likely will not arrive until the end of the month.

"I've got a lot of ideas for [the lab]," he says. "I'm running right now but there's not much students can do."

Some teachers are missing something even more basic: textbooks.

Don A. Loftis teaches ancient history to sixth-graders and American history and civics to seventh- and eighth-graders.

"If I didn't know the subject so well, I'd be up a creek," Loftis says.

Loftis is one of many teachers at the new school who come from out of the Cambridge school district.

He says he is used to moving around. He has gone to school in Colorado, been an evangelist in Akron, Ohio, and--most recently--taught middle school in Sylacauga, Ala.

For his unit on economics, Loftis uses a favorite textbook he brought from Alabama. And for his other classes he has scrounged around to find materials and bought used books at stores around the city.

Now, he says, the textbook shortage is getting straightened out. He has new student textbooks and expects to get the teachers' editions and workbook supplements soon.

But he says he still has to fill in the gaps so his students' education meets state standards.

"Basically, the books don't match up too well," he says.

Settling In

In the library, it looks as if school will not be starting for another couple of months.

Library assistant Dorothy Brown is stamping new books bought for the library over the summer and putting cards inside the back cover--cards stamped with "Maynard School."

"These were already stamped," she says. "Because we don't have a new name, we're still using them."

Librarian Julia Smith says the school department allowed her $10,000 to buy the new books and paid for an architect to help her design the layout of new shelves in the library.

But the new shelves are nowhere to be seen.

Smith gets a call in mid-afternoon, telling her there might be another delay.

"I was hoping for the end of October," she says. "Now there's a good possibility the furniture wouldn't be delivered until Nov. 11."

For now, books and paper lie piled on top of cardboard boxes full of books from the Fletcher library.

Smith says she does not blame administrators for the foul-ups but believes her library could have been ready earlier with better organization.

"We could have done a lot of this ahead of time," she says. "It would have been nice to have planned at the end of June."

"It's nobody's fault," she says. "It's just the way it is."