Nolan Will Not Vote For Renewal of Superintendent’s Contract

A second Cambridge School Committee member has publicly stated that she will vote against renewing Superintendent of Schools Thomas Fowler-Finn’s contract this year.

Patricia M. Nolan ’80 joins Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 in opposition to Fowler-Finn’s contract renewal.

One committee member, Nancy Walser, has said she will support Fowler-Finn’s candidacy, while veteran committee members Alfred Fantini and Joseph G. Grassi have proposed a compromise one-year contract extension.

The two other committee members—Luc Schuster and Richard Harding—have yet to declare where they stand on the issue. Their votes will determine Fowler-Finn’s fate.

In a lengthy e-mail sent to The Crimson Thursday morning, Nolan wrote that the Cambridge schools superintendent “should be someone who can rally the whole community, motivate staff and get Cambridge to the top of the state.”

The reasons she gave in her e-mail dealt mostly with Fowler-Finn’s style of leadership. She wrote that he is not a collaborative leader and that the schools “need a uniter, not a divider.”

She also accused Fowler-Finn of manipulating data to fit his ends—a charge Nolan has been accused of herself by some of Fowler-Finn’s supporters, including Cambridge Civic Journal proprietor Robert Winters.

Nolan also questioned whether Cambridge can even find a new superintendent, given that four of the five candidates invited by Boston to apply for its top schools job earlier this year dropped out of the process. The Boston Public Schools will not have a chief until January 2007.

But Nolan said Cambridge should be able to lure someone to take over the “dream job” of superintendent because of the per pupil spending level of $23,000 and the $200,000 pay package.

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