After Criticism, SuperintendentAbandons Plan To Create Middle Schools

In response to widespread criticism from the Cambridge School Committee, Superintendent of Schools Bobbie J. D’Alessandro abandoned her radical plan last week to create three middle schools and shuffle students across the city.

A plan to consolidate elementary schools had been widely anticipated as the school department’s response to ongoing financial troubles and a declining student population.

But D’Alessandro offered a bolder solution that would have ended the city’s long-standing devotion to a system where elementary schools teach students from kindergarten through eighth grade.

She proposed 10 elementary schools for kindergarten through fifth grade and three middle schools for grades six through eight.

At the public unveiling of the proposal last Tuesday, school committee members shot down D’Alessandro’s plan, saying they had never discussed creating middle schools.

“The school committee never asked for this document,” said Mayor Michael A. Sullivan, who chairs the committee.

“This is not the plan we asked for,” said committee member Alice L. Turkel. “I think this caught everyone off guard.”

Future hearings on the plan were cancelled and committee members requested that she draft a new merger recommendation. D’Alessandro said she might return as early as tomorrow with a new proposal.

Many parents turned out at last week’s hearing to protest the plan, which would have closed two schools outright and merged two popular bilingual programs.

The Haggerty School, one of the two that would have been closed, is currently the only elementary school in Cambridge that offers only kindergarten through fifth grade—all others teach through grade eight.

Parents and students from the Haggerty waved signs reading “Hands Off Our School” and “If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It.”

The controversy came during an ongoing effort to fill empty seats, consolidate schools and rein in the district’s budget deficit.

The first merger occurred in the fall of 2000, when the Fletcher and Maynard elementary schools became the Fletcher-Maynard Academy after a long and contentious process.

According to D’Alessandro, the set of mergers she proposed last week would have saved $2.7 million in fiscal year 2003-2004.

Sullivan said the plan seemed too “financially driven.”

“To me this is not about the financial impacts,” he said. “This has to be about the quality and equity across our entire system.”

But D’Alessandro insisted that creating middle schools would strengthen education by allowing teachers and administrators to focus on elementary school and middle school students separately. Specialists would help prepare middle school students for high school, she said.

“This was all about equity for all kids,” D’Alessandro said. “I knew it would be controversial, but it needed to come out and we needed to talk.”

When D’Alessandro agreed to go back to the drawing board, parents expressed relief.

Haggerty parent Debby K. Irving called the plan “very top down.”

“I started to not trust the whole process,” she said.

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