Where Have All the Students Gone?

The Cambridge School Committee turned its attention to the dramatic, unabated drop in the number of students attending the Cambridge Public Schools at a special roundtable session for committee members and school officials this past Tuesday.

The session was marked by haggling over the accuracy of numbers presented by school officials and disputes over the cause of the decline. But all present agreed that the decline in enrollment is real—not a “temporary dip” as has been asserted in the past—and that steps should be taken to reverse the trend.

According to numbers provided by the Massachusetts Department of Education, Cambridge Public School enrollment decreased from 6,927 students in 2002 to 5,746 in 2006, a four-year decline of more than 17 percent. Over the past 11 years, the district has lost over 27 percent of its students.

The hearing, which was specially called to address the declining enrollment, was held in a roundtable format, meaning that committee members could speak freely but the public could not ask questions. It was the result of a resolution sponsored at the last regular School Committee meeting by member Patricia M. Nolan ’80, a sharp critic of the school district’s leadership.

The roundtable began with a presentation by Clifford Cook, a Cambridge city planner, who showed long-term data indicating that the number of children born and living in Cambridge has declined over the past several decades. Superintendent of Schools Thomas Fowler-Finn repeatedly interrupted the presentation, drawing conclusions from each data set in an attempt to attribute the decline more to population trends than to any fault of the school system’s.

Nolan and Fowler-Finn engaged each other in debate repeatedly throughout the night, with Nolan even preparing her own data that showed enrollment over the past four years for the towns and cities in metropolitan Boston.

To refute the charge that Cambridge is losing school-age children because families are moving out to escape astronomical housing prices, Nolan grouped the cities and towns into low, medium, and high housing-priced districts. According to her data, the high-priced districts gained enrollment, the medium-priced ones broke even, and the low-priced districts lost enrollment. The data also showed that over the past three years, Cambridge has lost a greater percentage of students than any other town or city in metropolitan Boston.

When the issue turned to addressing the causes of the decline, the School Committee members diverged even more sharply.

Nolan said that she was happy that the roundtable had taken place because it was “the first time enrollment decline has ever been its own agenda item in at least five years.” Richard Harding, Jr., a second-term school committee member, disputed this, saying that all the committee members had been concerned with the issue but that they had other chief priorities in the past.

“It’s not like Patty came along and we suddenly started noticing the enrollment decline,” Harding said. “We were all aware of it, but my concern was giving the students who are in the schools the best education possible.” Nancy Walser, a committee member serving her fourth term, also repeatedly spoke of the school district’s strengths, stating that she was concerned that the committee was too focused on talking about the district’s problems.

“A lot of people are staying, so we need to know what people perceive as our strengths,” Walser said. She said that the School Committee’s marketing survey—a comprehensive survey of how Cantabrigians view the school system—needs to include questions about what people see as the system’s positive attributes. Paul Toner, the president of the Cambridge Teachers Association, added that there were “some people who would just never send their kids to the public schools.”

But Luc Schuster, the other freshman committee member and Nolan’s closest ally, pointed out that there was still “wiggle-room” for the district to increase enrollment because there were parents who would willingly send their children to the public schools but did not do so due to concerns about the schools’ under-performance.

And true to form, Nolan backed Schuster, saying that while “some people have accused me of causing the enrollment decline by talking about it, it’s essential that people feel that we know there is a problem and that we’re taking our heads out of the sand.”

She added that the marketing survey would help to pinpoint what the School Committee needed to do to draw families back into the schools.

Sybil Knight, the principal of the system’s only high school, the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, summed up the feelings of most participants toward the end, saying, “We don’t need an exact number to tell us about declining enrollment. The numbers are down and we’ve got to do something about it.

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.