Cambridge Schools Battle over Budget

What began as a routine Cambridge School Committee meeting last night developed into a battle over whether the district should give schools more money to spend on broadly defined improvement measures.

A motion put forward by rookie committee members Patricia M. Nolan ’80 and Luc Schuster recommended that Cambridge Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Fowler-Finn reallocate approximately $1.5 million of the district’s 2007-2008 budget to the school improvement funds of Cambridge’s 13 public schools.

“This is crazy, it’s like ‘Groundhog Day.’ Every year we go through the same thing,” said board member Nancy Walser.

The funds are managed by school principals and can be spent on unspecified measures that improve the quality of students’ education. Schuster said the additional money could be used to provide an additional staff member for each school next year.

Many committee members opposed the proposal, however, arguing that the money needed to have a specific purpose if it were to be effective.

“This is not the forum to spend money in an unwise way,” said committee member Richard Harding, Jr. “You can’t just give money and say ‘do whatever you want with it.’ If you do, the money might not be well-spent.”

Cambridge Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 agreed with Harding’s assessment.

“In education, if you don’t focus on a few things, you can get lost,” Reeves said.

Nolan retaliated with statistics from the 2005 fiscal year that compared Cambridge school expenditures with those of two other top public school districts in Massachusetts, Brookline and Somerville. According to the statistics, Cambridge schools spent far more per student on instructional materials, professional development, and administration than the other two districts, using funds Nolan believed could be better spent elsewhere.

In a burst of emotion, committee member Alfred B. Fantini said the motion would siphon money from other important areas of the budget.

“If you’re going to bring in motions, bring in the cuts directly. Bring in the names of the people you want to cut. This is too vague,” he said.

The committee is set to make a final decision on the budget in March.

Members of the committee also heard an update on kindergarten-through-eighth grade report card reforms given by Deputy Superintendent Carolyn Turk. She explained the strides that a reform committee had taken toward providing a more informative curriculum guide, which will provide parents with a more in-depth look at classroom subjects.

The current system, which employs 64 different report cards, would be thinned to simply three different report cards: one for kindergarten through second grade, one for third through fifth grade, and one for sixth through eighth grade.

The proposal, while earning the consent of some, inspired opposition from other members, who felt that the standardization compromised teachers’ abilities to more accurately depict each child’s progress and accomplishments.

“Report cards should reflect what’s going on in the classroom, not the standards,” said Walser. “We have the MCAS [Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System] to test kids on standards.”

—Staff writer William M. Goldsmith can be reached at wgoldsm@fas.harvard.edu.