The outgoing president of the Cambridge Educators Association has marks for the search for a permanent school district superintendent: needs improvement.
“This was very last-minute, like they haven’t really planned these things out,” said Dan Monahan, leader since 2016 of a labor group with roughly 1,500 teachers, administrators, clerks, substitutes and paraprofessionals. “There have been a lot of starts and stops and confusion on the School Committee level, and so hence with the public.”
Forums are a good start to engaging the community, but there has been a lack of clarity on search timelines and what will be done with information from forums, he said. “They don’t have a plan,” Monahan said. “And, if they do, then I don’t know what it is, and it would be helpful if they shared that more publicly.”
Monahan won’t see the search through to its end, as he retires this summer. High school history teacher Chris Montero takes over leadership at the association July 1, he said.
The district and School Committee were contacted Tuesday with a chance to respond to Monahan’s remarks, but a district spokesperson referred questions to a School Committee executive secretary, who did not respond. District Human Resources officials also did not respond.
The deadline for superintendent applications was Friday, but at a forum on June 3 district representatives said the application portal wouldn’t close then, and that a national search was ongoing as well.
Monahan on June 3 noted that the timing of the district’s forums was less than ideal, specifically for educators such as himself; while he has encouraged members of the CEA to attend, he hasn’t been able to make a meeting himself because this is a busy time for teachers. On Friday, after Monahan spoke, the district added a Thursday staff forum to be held online.
Forums were first announced May 27 by the district: Four for dates between May 29 and Wednesday, all in-person only. Last week, it was announced that the final forum would have an online option – but later it seemed that referred not to Wednesday’s forum but to another down the road that had yet to be revealed: In addition to the staff forum, the district on Friday said there were would be a Wednesday student forum and an online forum June 16 for the community.
The schedule is now:
- Wednesday at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, 459 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge, time not announced, for students
- Wednesday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the cafeteria at the Vassal Lane Upper School, 158 Spring St., East Cambridge (Food and child care provided)
- Thursday from 6:30 to 8 p.m. held online for district staff
- June 16 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. held online for the community. (Join at bit.ly/SupSearchForum with the meeting ID 988 1649 7858 and passcode 778250 if asked.) Registration is here but not required.
Updates are on a superintendent search webpage, and a superintendent search survey is open for community members to voice their opinions through June 16.
Monahan has a better opinion of interim superintendent David Murphy. “He’s doing well. He’s inherited a very difficult situation,” Monahan said. “He did a good job at the beginning on how to best move forward given the constraints he has as interim superintendent.”
The closing of the Kennedy-Longfellow elementary school, home to a disproportionate percentage of high-need students, was suggested by Murphy as one of his first acts as interim superintendent. The last day of school is June 24. “I really respect that he made a hard decision around that,” while the problems leading to the decision have been on the committee side, Monahan said. “He’s been clear that this is the result of a systemic failure, not the result of the teachers in that building.”
Systemic problem in controlled choice
Similar problems affect the Fletcher Maynard Academy, which also sees many high-need students, including those from low-income households, whose second language is English or with learning differences, due in part to controlled choice, a student distribution method for the district dating back to 1980 to help with desegregation. (In 2001, the distribution of students was changed to deemphasize race and look at whether a child qualifies for free or reduced-cost lunch.)
“While the system was sort of initially designed to keep the [percentage] of high-need students similar across the district, it in fact actually works exactly in the opposite way,” he said. Schools with spaces available for midyear transfers – often a result of hardship claims, meaning students who tend to be higher need – are schools that already have a higher percentage of high-need students because they are chosen less during controlled choice.
Some solutions Murphy and the committee have introduced “have merit,” but a long-term fix has yet to be presented, Monahan said. First, more resources need to be allocated to Fletcher Maynard and hardship claims need to be addressed at the root, he said.
The source of the failure to make the process and thus the schools more equitable is “primarily, inattention,” he said. “And you’re restricting people’s choice, and that’s the problem.”
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