Budget Proposal Critiqued

Public discussion of the school budget proposal for next year at the Cambridge School Committee meeting last night drew a larger crowd and more comments, with residents, organization members, and a member of the city council in attendance.

Though the budget had already been introduced at a meeting last month, the revised proposal presented by Superintendent Thomas D. Fowler-Finn received criticism from more quarters.

Cambridge City Councilor Craig A. Kelley said that the budget proposal does not tell enough holistically about Cambridge public schools.

“There’s a lot of information in this budget,” Kelley said. “I can’t put any of it in context.”

He also said he was a “bit disappointed” in the lack of discussion on the implications of the district’s Parent Attitudes Study done last year. The results of the study, released in May of last year, reported that 32 percent of parents who withdrew their children from the Cambridge Public Schools system did so because of a perceived “lack of quality education/academics,” and 11 percent withdrew because of a “lack of discipline/safety concerns.”

Kelley asked that the budget “do a better job of explaining that to everyone.”

The 2008-2009 budget—to be voted up or down on April 15—represents a 2.36 percent increase over last year’s budget, with a large proportion of additional funds allocated to personnel-related costs. However, resolving the budgetary gap between the projected proposal expenditures and revenues this year is now expected to result in approximately 3.1 million dollars in spending cuts, including administrative restructuring.

“Even though we are cutting substantially over three million dollars in our budget, we are managing to do things other schools aren’t within our budget,” Fowler-Finn said.

Cambridge resident Peter Schweich criticized the superintendent for incorrectly representing the progress of Cambridge schools. He said that the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS) graduation rates, proclaimed as “among the highest in the state” on the district’s Web site, mask the fact that Cambridge is in the “42nd percentile in the listing of all public schools in the commonwealth, or 137 out of 321.” He also cited MCAS scores for 10th graders and SAT scores as areas that need improvement.

“One also loses trust quickly in a man who claims that multiple prize winners and multiple Rhodes scholars have graduated from CRLS but cannot and will not document his claim,” he said. “CRLS needs structural change and it needs it now.”

The school committee was also criticized by more than one speaker at the microphone for failing to produce the student data report for the public.

“My last appearance here, we had asked for the student data report, and as of yet we have still not received it,” said community member Lawrence J. Adkins. “You have the packet that none of us have.”

Kathy Reddick, president of the Cambridge branch of the NAACP, also stressed the need for the data report. “Without data, without knowing the real picture, we won’t know where we’re going to go,” she said.

Though recognizing a need to address the achievement gap during his presentation, Fowler-Finn lauded the graduation rate data—which shows that African-American students for the first time graduated at a higher rate than white students—as evidence of progress in this area.

Cambridge Mayor E. Denise Simmons proposed a school committee meeting on data and how to use it for April 9.

“Given that all three speakers tonight mentioned this question of data,” said committee member Patricia M. Nolan ’80, “it is pretty important that we do discuss it as an agenda item.”

—Staff writer Vidya B. Viswanathan can be reached at viswanat@fas.harvard.edu.