The closing of the Kennedy-Longfellow elementary school and relocation of its students as of 2025-2026 school year was alluded to Monday at a meeting run by Cambridge’s interim superintendent, David Murphy.
“I do expect tonight will be the one of the most difficult of the conversations that we have had. I also consider it to be the most necessary,” Murphy said. “We are looking at a range of options. There are questions as to the viability of the school in its current structure and form.”
The school has a “disproportionate concentration” of high-need students and the lowest percent that is meeting and exceeding standards among the district’s 18 schools, Murphy said, referring to “troubling trends” from recent analysis.
An email alerting the school community to the meeting went out late Wednesday before Thanksgiving, just one week after a nearly four-hour School Committee meeting focused largely on the challenges facing the Kennedy-Longfellow School at 158 Spring St. and Fletcher-Maynard Academy at 225 Windsor St., The Port.
No date has been given for discussion of the Fletcher-Maynard Academy, where the disparity of high-need students compared with those meeting and exceeding standards was second-highest.
While the Nov. 19 meeting did not decide the future of the schools, Murphy made it clear Monday that the status quo had to change. “We have to be transparent about where we are and how we are performing and how we are serving students, and that requires – in my view and in the view of the administration – a willingness to embrace that data regardless of the direction in which that data is going,” he said. He cited the student achievement and enrollment data.
Urgency felt
The “K-Lo” school is home to roughly 220 students grades pre-K through 5. The merger of the Longfellow School, named for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the Robert F. Kennedy School dedicated June 10, 1973, it has been led by principal Christine Gerber since 2010. Its student body is 86 percent high-need, and it has the highest percentage of unhoused students at 20 percent. This year’s MCAS standardized test results show it has the lowest percentage of students meeting or exceeding expectations in English-language arts and math.
“We have allowed our system to disproportionately distribute students of high need, the most vulnerable populations in a small subset of our schools. That is a problem. It is not a problem that we have to live with,” Murphy said at the Nov. 19 committee meeting. “I don’t think I’m the first superintendent to sit in this room and insist that things are going to be different,” he said, affirming skepticism while warning against cynicism.
The naming of Murphy as interim leader in June – a promotion from chief operating officer to replace Victoria Greer after her ousting – was initially seen as being as brief as 90 days before the committee appointed someone else to guide the district during the search for a permanent superintendent. By September, though, Murphy was making big personnel changes and he was expected to stay in place during a longer superintendent search. The possible changes to two district schools suggested Monday are more indication of his confidence in the position.
“To be candid, I can’t really address why something wasn’t addressed previously” at the K-Lo, Murphy said. “I can tell you why I think our team feels an urgency to address it now … the data as it’s currently exists is not acceptable.”
Caregivers have been “begging”
At the Monday night meeting with Kennedy-Longfellow community members Murphy described the school as a “significant outlier” in the district – but this is not new information.
“There has been a group of caregivers at K-Lo who have been asking, begging really, for the district to address the controlled-choice implementation problems that were causing the enrollment issues. We have been screaming into the void about this for a long time,” said Missy Page, a former member of the school’s equity council and present member of the Friends of Kennedy-Longfellow organization.
Controlled choice is the system that places students at schools throughout Cambridge Public Schools. It was “designed to create diverse, academically rigorous schools with equal access to educational resources,” according to the CPS website. It began in 1980 in an effort to desegregate schools by moving away from a neighborhood model.
A group of advocates from the equity council and Friends of Kennedy-Longfellow compiled data suggesting that five elementary schools in Cambridge were operating outside of the parameters for Controlled Choice policy. A 2013 plan from the city says enrollment must be within 10 percentage points of the district’s low-income percentage and that the policy must be reviewed annually, which the group says it is not.
Structures and systems cited
Murphy could not answer why K-Lo has gotten to the point of such large gaps in enrollment and achievement. “It is not one person who did not do their job. I think the underlying point is that the K-Lo has not been set up to be successful based on the structures and systems that are at play,” he said. “We have to work with a sense of urgency if we’re going to correct some of these deeply seated inequities, to get to a place in which all schools are serving students at the level that we want them to.”
The district is deciding if there are “viable strategies” to improve student outcome at the school or whether the district needs to “consider transitioning the Kennedy-Longfellow away from its current school model,” necessitating the relocation of students as of the 2025 – 2026 school year, according to slides presented by Murphy on Monday.
Murphy went over data on enrollment and achievement as well as systemic factors, but a large part of the meeting was dedicated to clarifying technical details and concerns in the event of a Kennedy-Longfellow closing. This school year will proceed as normal, but the Kennedy-Longfellow may not open at the start of the 2025 school year to allow for “necessary renovations” to the HVAC system and windows as well as a reworking of enrollment. Regardless of the outcome, Murphy said the Spring street will stay within control of CPS and hopefully expand.
Skepticism for support claims
Murphy expects a final decision to be made by January with updates to follow in the coming weeks, promising “the students of the Kennedy Longfellow will be supported before, during and after, any potential transition to make sure that they are best situated for success in the remainder of their Cambridge Public Schools career and afterward.”
“Why should the community trust that? They haven’t prioritized the K-Lo students for over a decade. You’re all of a sudden going to do that? Give us a plan. Give us some specifics,” said Page in an interview after the meeting.
The district has its mind made up, she said. “They’re not coming to us as a community and offering us a full range of options. K-Lo was never given a chance,” Page said. “This has been going on for so long – it’s not like this has been a school that’s had problems and they’ve put a lot of resources in it, then it’s still failed. It’s never gotten the investment or the attention that other schools have gotten.”
The teachers at Kennedy-Longfellow had not received notice of possible changes before the Monday meeting, and the question of their future employment was not addressed.
A Kennedy-Longfellow School update is on the agenda for the committee meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday in the Dr. Henrietta S. Attles Meeting Room at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, 459 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge, and livestreamed at cpsd.us.
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From what I can glean from this article, it seems as though K-Lo has become the last-choice among CPS and a school of last resort for high needs kids. Without any further explanation, we could assume that this explains the low performance on standardized exams. Neither of these seems to support an expectation that closing the school is going to solve any problem other than just redistributing the challenging students to other schools. Can anyone help me out here?