Angry Parents Fight for Schools

At 7 p.m., most of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS) was quiet as janitors washed the floors and the security guard caught up on his reading.

But in one corner of the sprawling building, a fierce battle was taking shape. Parents holding bright orange posters decried Superintendent of Schools Bobbie J. D’Alessandro as she presented her plan to close three of the city’s under-enrolled elementary schools.

They charged her with trying to destroy the traditions and cultures of Cambridge’s schools and purposely keeping parents out of the loop.

Then the debate turned personal.

On the defensive, the superintendent responded to the accusations.

“I think about it every night and I sleep very little,” she said.

A chorus of parents openly mocked her.

“Awww,” they called out in sarcastic sympathy.

Monday night’s meeting, billed as an information session for elementary school students and parents, showed where the big battle looms in local education this fall.

With enrollment in the district’s 15 elementary schools continuing its free fall, administrators say they must close three schools after this year or face financial crisis. But merger talk will pit school against school and parents against administration—making for an intense struggle in a city known for its contentious education debates.

“This is going to be one of the biggest things this district has done in the last ten years,” says school committee member Richard Harding Jr.

Divide and Merge

Within the last three years, two elementary school mergers have stirred up parental outcry but they failed to solve the district’s financial and educational problems.

Officials forecast that next year’s schools budget will run a $750,000 deficit, and they project continuing enrollment declines in the coming years.

According to D’Alessandro, closing three more schools and merging them with the rest of the system would save between $1.4 and $2 million the first year after the consolidation. Most of the savings would come from reducing staff, including 20 to 25 un-tenured teachers who would be laid off.

Enrollment in Cambridge public schools has dropped more than 10 percent over the past five years and, according to district projections, the system will lose hundreds more students over the next five years. The mergers would eliminate many of these empty seats.

Consolidation would produce 12 schools, each with between 300 and 500 students and each housed in its own building (currently, several schools share buildings).

But critics say such an aggressive plan threatens a long Cambridge tradition of elementary schools developing their own academic programs. Parents say the educational philosophies of their children’s schools have become a subject of pride and worry that moving students to other schools will be disruptive.

Parents also object to the way administrators have developed and proposed the merger plans, saying the process has been too secretive.

D’Alessandro has told parents that she is considering six options for consolidation—each involving different combinations of schools—but she has kept those plans under wraps.

Over the coming days, she will consult with school committee members, pick one of the six plans and announce it publicly. But parents say they want to see all six options and weigh in beforehand.

“On the surface it seems like it’s open, but underneath it seems really discombobulated,” says Longfellow School parent Greg A. Smutny.

In response to attacks on the process at Monday’s meeting, D’Alessandro assured parents they could offer their opinions on the plan through public hearings in October and November.

“We have to do this together,” she said. “We will be sure that when we go forward, it’s not my plan.”

Last spring, D’Alessandro proposed a consolidation plan for merging several elementary schools and creating middle schools. But she withdrew it when parents—and even committee members—protested that the plan had taken them by surprise.

Despite her reassurances this fall, school committee member Alan C. Price says he worries the process could still rile parents.

“You don’t want to divide the community through the process,” he says.

Skeptics on the school committee also worry that merging so many schools at one time would deal a lethal blow to the city’s precarious controlled choice plan, a system that lets parents choose where their children go to school so long as diversity at each school stays within a set of racial and socioeconomic quotas.

The system is already strained because schools with successful academic programs have long waiting lists, while other schools have half-empty classrooms.

D’Alessandro contends that consolidation will promote a more equitable distribution of resources among all elementary schools and attract parents to historically unpopular schools. That would relieve the pressure on the most popular schools, she says.

But educators and parents worry that consolidation will throw the system off balance because of pressures to keep students displaced by the mergers together and offer parents a choice of where to send their children.

“That could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Harding says.

Don Watson, principal of the Tobin School, says he worries that schools labeled as under-performing—which are also predominantly black and lower middle class—will be closed before they’ve had a chance to improve on their own.

“It’s about the haves and have-nots,” he says. “It’s a system mired in class.”

‘Big Bitefuls’

Even as tensions run high over school closings, other issues are edging their way onto the agenda.

“There’s a tremendous focus on these mergers and that can’t take our attention away from the schools,” says school committee member Alice L. Turkel. “It’s really important that all of this very anxiety-producing stuff doesn’t get in the way of making sure that high quality education is going on.”

While D’Alessandro’s consolidation plan will focus on elementary schools, CRLS also faces its own organizational turmoil this year. After the high school was restructured two years ago, the principal who engineered the new program quit. This summer the district named one of its own administrators, Sybil Knight, to the helm.

Restructuring did away with the five “houses” that had made up CRLS, each with its own teachers and teaching philosophy. The houses had become segregated by race, income and academic achievement—and the so-called “small schools” that replaced them two years ago were supposed to even out those discrepancies.

But some educators in the district say the new small schools are already tending toward the inequalities of the previous system and say they are not sure how to combat the problem.

“There’s already a tension,” Price says. “The tension is, do we stay the course and do what the faculty and administrators have suggested is the path to a better high school, or do we have reason to do other things that make it harder to stay the course?”

Along with the rest of the state, Cambridge education officials must also confront the imminent repercussions of Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), which will be come a high-school graduation requirement next year.

MCAS has come under fire across the state—most recently in a lawsuit filed in Springfield by six students, a suit that local school officials say they are watching closely.

“The lawsuit in Springfield lays out all the right grounds,” Price says. “I think the [Department of Education], that has been unwilling to meet with and listen to communities, is now going to have to slow down and meet its burden in a court.”

Opposition to the tests has been particularly determined in Cambridge, where one-third of high-schoolers regularly fail the exam.

Less than a year ago, the school committee voted to defy the education department and grant diplomas to students who do not pass MCAS, but D’Alessandro says she does not know how that decision will play out next year without a “viable diploma” for the students who have failed MCAS.

MCAS looms as just one of several high-stakes issues confronting the school committee this year. As the committee faces the contentious merger process and resolve continuing trouble at CRLS, committee members anticipate a school year filled with strife and contention.

“It seems like we’re back into our mode of taking big bitefuls to chew,” Turkel says. “These are tough times and we have to do these things, but it’s not the best way to build public confidence.”

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