Among other district business, better student transportation options have received a boost from the School Committee, with calls for fully subsidized MBTA passes for low-income students and changes to bus routes. 

A joint labor management group is recommending an increase in school time, starting in the fall of 2020. The details – how much, whether it’s a longer school day, a longer school year or both, and how the time will be used – won’t come until staff, families and others get input.

Reconstruction of the Tobin School/Vassal Lane Upper School is projected to total $200 million for a fall 2024 opening, although final elements won’t be complete until 2025, a meeting of the City Council and School Committee was told.

The School Committee passed a $191.1 million budget with five additions by Superintendent Kenneth Salim that addressed several, but not all, requests from parents and teachers in hearings and public comment that followed.

More than $65,000 was raised Thursday at the Friends of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School’s second Annual Bash, by turns lively and touching and called “a love fest for the high school, our many community supporters and supporters-to-be.”

Although “budget season” starts for the School Committee in January with public hearings on priorities, the real meat of its involvement is compressed into the 19 days before an April vote. And Its role has diminished from even a year ago under Superintendent Kenneth Salim.

The last chance for public comment on next year’s proposed $191.1 million school budget came just four days after the release of the draft, and the School Committee is scheduled to vote on it April 3, with only one “workshop” left before the vote.

A preliminary schools budget of $191.1 million includes a $8.1 million increase, which at 4.4 percent is slightly lower than the annual increases of the past three years.

The benching of a Cambridge Rindge and Latin School varsity hockey star on the eve of a tournament was a shock to the team, coach, student and his family, and the grading policy behind it has been called unfair and out of step with current research and legal interpretations.

In the second walkout in two weeks of Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School students rallying for gun control, a group of dedicated activists continued to press for legal and cultural change. Others watched from the windows overheard, insisting “Nothing’s going to change.”