Insights on how to spend the Cambridge Public Schools’ proposed $268 million budget for fiscal year 2025 will arrive with a first community budget meeting and roundtable. School Committee members are looking for them too.

Public meetings this week look at plans to remake Davis Square, electing a leader for a task force that sets payments for institutions such as Tufts and a students’ health survey.

Community members are criticizing the Cambridge school district’s hiring of a highly paid chief strategy officer who is 25 years old, graduated from college two years ago and has no experience in the field of education.

Public meetings this week look at school district plans and finances and a middle-income homeownership proposal by the city’s Redevelopment Authority.

A period of austerity that’s been warned about for years has arrived, and elected officials have to start setting priorities for what projects get a go-ahead for the next five to 10 years and what must be scaled back or halted.

Public meetings this week look at an inquest into a police shooting and changes in officer procedure, deciding on public investments, Cambridge Street bike lanes, the future of Jerry’s Pond, how to use municipal space in Central Square and more.

The huge project to replace and expand the Jefferson Park public housing development will be split in two, the Cambridge Housing Authority has decided.

The Winter Hill Community and Innovation School at Sycamore Street will not be reoccupied,  Somerville’s superintendent said. The district’s violence in Gaza was another major component of the recent School Committee meeting.

Inspectors were “literally hammering the walls” of Somerville’s Winter Hill Community Innovation School when they discovered asbestos in some concrete .

One of the city’s major affordable-housing developers, Homeowners Rehab Inc., has been criticized for its response to heating, elevator and other problems reported by tenants at the 116-unit Inman Square Apartments.