School Closures Reach Final Vote

From his assistant principal’s office at the Fitzgerald School, John P. Schmitt spent yesterday calling the superintendent of schools, trying to find out what will happen at tonight’s Cambridge School Committee meeting.

He wanted to know whether parents and teachers at his school will get to vouch publicly for the Fitz tonight before the committee takes its long-awaited vote on shutting the school down.

If the elementary merger plan passes tonight, it will intensify an emotionally charged battle waged by indignant parents, confused students and crying teachers. The Fitzgerald and the Harrington, another low-achieving neighborhood school, would close and their students would be scattered across the rest of the city. Two other, more successful schools would move into the vacant buildings.

Yesterday Schmitt was considering whether to try for a repeat of last week’s drama, when he hired a bus to take about 100 parents and teachers to protest before the school committee.

Ever since the plan was unveiled last week, the Fitz has been up in arms that the school district might cancel its educational program to make way for another school’s approach.

“It is just unacceptable to evict students in order to make space for other students,” Schmitt says.

Tonight’s meeting will culminate months of wrangling over how to consolidate Cambridge’s unwieldy array of 15 elementary schools, balance a $2.6 million deficit and fill hundreds of empty classroom seats. The committee has scrapped more than a half-dozen merger plans already, and district administrators proposed this one as their best offer.

The plan marks the last major restructuring effort by Superintendent of Schools Bobbie J. D’Alessandro, whose rocky tenure has already seen the contentious merger of two elementary schools and the reorganization of the city’s high school. Just a month ago, the school committee decided that it would let her contract lapse after this summer.

With the plan’s fate up in the air, committee members say they don’t even have a sense of how the vote will come out.

“A whole range of things are possible,” says committee member Alan C. Price. “From one extreme is whether or not to vote up or down the superintendent’s proposal as is, or the other extreme is a total halt or moratorium.”

The committee may also choose to put off action on its most pressing problem for a full year. The current plan would go into effect immediately next fall, but last week committee member Richard Harding Jr. proposed six more months of community discussion before any schools close or merge.

As discussions dragged on this fall, tempers have frayed on the committee. Some members have accused their colleagues of not taking the budget crunch seriously, yelling accusations at public meetings.

Despite the strained and prolonged discussion of the merger issue, Price says most Cambridge residents want more time before the committee takes action.

“The community sentiment is pretty clear,” he says.

No Quiet Demise

Tomorrow’s vote may place the final punctuation mark on a series of merger plans, hearings and postponed decisions.

It will also cap district leaders’ efforts to come to terms with a problem they had long brushed aside—the need for drastic action on elementary schools to combat years of declining enrollment.

The committee must vote now so that, if the plan passes, there will be time to readjust enrollment across the district. Delaying even a month would mean no plan could be implemented in time for the next school year.

Even if the plan fails, according to Price, the contentious debate over mergers finally addressed an issue that had been “undiscussable” for a decade.

“For the superintendent to bring this to our attention in a way that we might solve this in a year, there’s a big shift from the past,” he says.

The first consolidation plan came last spring, when D’Alessandro presented an ambitious initiative that would have reshaped K-8 education in Cambridge by combining elementary schools and creating the district’s first middle school program. But after only a few minutes of discussion, the committee rejected the plan and sent D’Alessandro back to the drawing board.

This fall, D’Alessandro has trotted out several other plans, each one targeting a different slate of schools and drawing crowds of picketing parents. Even Price submitted a drastic plan of his own, which he withdrew after vehement criticism.

Faced with hours of protest week after week, the committee last month ordered D’Alessandro to hold a series of so-called “stakeholder” meetings with parent leaders and principals.

The district’s principals signed onto the latest plan in theory, agreeing that two elementary schools should close, though they left the choice of which schools up to D’Alessandro.

But the situation has continued to deteriorate.

Just a day after the first stakeholder meeting, the committee voted against extending D’Alessandro’s contract, citing a drawn-out and ineffective decision-making process that left parents out of the loop.

Chaos has built within the school system with some parents threatening to send their children to private school and others pledging never again to support current committee members for re-election.

The current plan affects fewer schools than its predecessors, but it imposes more drastic measures—none of the previous plans had closed schools outright. And the opposition is as fierce as ever, especially from Fitzgerald and Harrington.

Initially parents responded with outrage that their school would be shut down. But over the last week their tactics have shifted away from the closure issue. Now, they argue that the plan attacks their students, since their school building would stay open but be usurped by another school’s student body.

“If they need to close a school they should close a school, not kick a group of children out to move another group of children in,” says Harrington parent Karen M. Thomas. “That just doesn’t make sense.”

Thomas says her school presents an easy target for closing because of its predominantly low-income and Portuguese student population.

“Why should anyone stick up for them?” she says. The school committee “is not getting the votes from them. To me it’s all political and all money.”

The Fitz and the Harrington are known as “neighborhood schools,” and parents say they enjoy walking their children to school and passing by the building every day on their way to work.

Teachers and parents who graduated from both schools have testified to their successes at school committee hearings and have said they feel betrayed by a plan that would close the schools.

“This is not the Cambridge that I’ve grown to love and care about,” Harrington teacher and graduate Sonya De Rosa said at a hearing on the plan last week.

“We turned out all right. Our children will too,” said Fitzgerald parent Leslie Williams Dunn.

Though the stakes are highest for the Fitzgerald and Harrington, other schools must brace for the implications if the plan passes tonight. The Graham and Parks School would move into the Fitzgerald building, and its facility would turn into district offices. The King Open, which shares a building with the King School near Peabody Terrace, would relocate into the Harrington’s location and incorporate some of its students.

Olá, a Portuguese bilingual program that is currently a part of the Harrington’s educational offerings, would remain in the building and become part of the King Open. Initially the plan had called for Olá to move into the King Open’s old space, but D’Alessandro revised that part of the plan after sustained protest.

Even though their schools would stay intact, some parents have continued to protest a process that they say has not allowed enough time to find an optimal solution to the intricate problem of rearranging elementary schools.

“My feeling about the plan is that it’s not possible for any of the schools involved to take the plan on its merits, whatever they may be, because the process through which the plan has come forward is so disrespectful of school cultures,” says Graham and Parks parent Owen Andrews. “We’re caught in a time frame that doesn’t allow for any of the decent consultation and buy-in that would make the school communities feel better or worse about it.”

Andrews says he favors spending the spring to find a new plan and delaying the implementation to 2004. He says the committee should wait until D’Alessandro’s term expires in order to begin afresh with a new leader.

“She’s now a lame duck and nobody trusts her,” he says. “Anything that she’s involved in is going to be problematic.”

But opinion among King Open parents remains divided, with some parents at that school seeing benefits to the plan—which would give their school its own building.

“We are pleased to see that this plan responds to our concerns,” King Open parent Debbie Klein said at last week’s hearing. “We would appreciate the chance to grow and diversify both racially and socio-economically.”

Although students from the Harrington and Fitzgerald Schools will receive what D’Alessandro calls “priority transfer rights” to move to any school within the district—which operates under a choice system for elementary school placement that balances for race and socioeconomic status—parents worry that the student bodies would be broken up.

For example, though the King Open will absorb many of the Harrington students, school leaders have made clear they will not take the entire population, in order to preserve the small feel of their school.

Wherever they’re told to go, according to Fitzgerald Assistant Principal Schmitt, members of the Fitz will not go without protest.

He says “conversations” have already taken place at their school regarding a plan of action if the Fitzgerald is slated to close next year.

“I don’t believe that it would be a quiet demise,” he says.

—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.