Young Expands Initiative to All Grades

Cambridge Public Schools Superintendent Jeffrey M. Young announced last night that he will expand the Middle Grades Initiative—which originally sought to restructure the city’s K-8 system to include middle schools—to address all grades, a change resulting from concerns that the initiative was too narrow to comprehensively address the achievement gaps in Cambridge schools.

The vote on restructuring the middle schools was originally scheduled to be taken on May 18, but will now be delayed.

The Initiative was developed under the assumption that middle grades were the “weak link” in the district, according to School Committee member Patricia M. Nolan ’80. However, concerns have arisen that problems in middle grades cannot be addressed without a broader investigation of issues occuring from preschool through senior year of high school, Nolan said.

She said that despite the perception that they are the weakest aspect of the school system, there has recently been some achievement in middle grades, and that the educational disparities found in middle grades also exist in Cambridge’s elementary and high schools.

The new plan will address programs such as the controlled choice plan, special education, and early childhood education, which will go well beyond the scope of the original initiative.

Nolan praised the actions of the superintendent, saying, “you can’t address middle schools without relating [them] to others.”

She said it was important that the committee plan for “a long-term budget,” that takes all grades into account.

However, both Nolan and fellow Committee member Marc C. McGovern predict that some frustration and criticism will result from the change.

“There will be some who will try to spin this in the way to say that [Young] does not have leadership,” McGovern said.

Like Nolan, he commended Young’s willingness to “change the hypothesis” about the source of educational disparities, rather than “change the facts” to fit his original assumptions.

Young said that he will both elaborate on the details of the plan and announce the new timetable during the April 6 public meeting, when the committee will vote go ahead with a scheduled vote to approve its budget for next year.

The April meeting will include votes on several proposals which could potentially be included in next year’s budget, including moving fifth through eighth grade classes for students with emotional disabilities to the Peabody School, which already includes a K-4 class for such students. However, this change would require moving the Special Start program, a preschool for children with disabilities, to another school, which may disrupt the “history and community ties” that the school has, said Nicholas Gross, a parent and school council member at Peabody School.

Gross said he was optimistic that the program would not be moved. “I think there is a lot of goodwill toward the Special Start program, and it looks like they will try to keep it at the Peabody School,” he said.

—Staff writer Linda Zhang can be reached at zhang53@fas.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: Mar. 24, 2010

An earlier version of the Mar. 24 news article "Young Expands Initiative to All Grades" stated that the Cambridge School Committee is considering converting the the Peabody School from K-4 to K-8. In fact, the Peabody School is already a K-8. The proposal discussed would in fact move fifth through eighth grade classes for students with emotional disabilities from two other schools to the Peabody School.