Kennedy-Longfellow parent Anne Coburn knew the school was going to close long before it did. She figured it out as the School Committee heard a buildings and grounds subcommittee report in September – two months before the closing was announced.
“I decided that, as much as humanly possible, I was going to sit in every single School Committee meeting for the rest of the year, and I did,” she said. “I wanted them to look at my face – and I realized that I could do this job.”
Coburn moved from New York City to Cambridge in 2019 with her husband and daughter, Zora, who has “severe” dyslexia. She started her daughter at K-Lo, hopeful that, with the support of Zora’s individualized education program and the right teachers, her daughter would be given the same chance to succeed as neurotypical kids. As her daughter, then 6, was about to start at K-Lo, the pandemic hit.
“Over the next few years, I noticed that Kennedy-Longfellow did not seem like it was getting the kinds of attention that the rest of the city schools did, and I was very curious. I was very confused,” she said.
Thus began her journey in activism around an equitable budget process – in which she was joined by a fellow candidate for School Committee, Jia-Jang Lee.
The first indication of an equity problem to Coburn was that the budget for K-Lo at the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year accommodated 183 students. By December of that year, there were 250.
“K-Lo was the most diverse school in the entire state,” she said. “When you have a school that is 85 percent high-needs [students], it’s worth asking what is leading to that disproportionality?”
In her opinion, the answer is neglect – an assumption “everything was fine.”
“It is not fine that one school is disproportionately wealthy and one school is disproportionately poor. That is not fine. It’s just not appropriate,” she said. “The last five years have had so much institutional problems, institutional turnover … there have been consistent fires being put out that the day-to-day business has not been appropriately managed.”
Political roots to problems
Operating top down “without even realizing it” and not asking enough questions are major symptoms of a greater problem in the current School Committee, Coburn said, and the root of the problem is not enough transplants like herself whose kids are going through the system the committee runs.
“You look at the people on the School Committee right now and the majority of them are incumbents or multiterm incumbents. They’ve lived here for decades. Their families have lived here for generations,” she said. “There is one person on the committee who I don’t think has had that experience. And it’s my belief that there should be more.”
Problems at K-Lo suggest “caregivers need a union just as much as teachers do. It showed me that, in many ways, we elect our union, and our union hadn’t been representative,” Coburn said.
Coburn is aware she does not have the same political experiencer as some opponents. Or the answers – yet. “I just don’t have answers because I’m not really in a position to get those answers, because I don’t have the power to get those answers. I have the power to create inferences and make suppositions,” Coburn said.
Asking and listening
As a career producer and documentary filmmaker, Coburn said she’s in the business of “asking questions” – a quality she thinks the committee lacks desperately.
The most important aspect of her platform, though, comes from her experience as a K-Lo parent – in her bid for committee, she seeks to “prevent another Kennedy-Longfellow.”
“Who on the School Committee will do that proactively? Who will ask uncomfortable questions?” she said. “The way that our School Committee works seems to be very much like you will talk until you will not talk and you don’t seem to hear.”
Coburn said of the incumbents, “I don’t think that they can possibly see the urgency that all of Cambridge should be grappling with.”
One solution: publishing office hours for constituents to meet with her, should she be elected, when she can actively listen.
“Kids and caregivers are intimately woven together,” she said. “I want caregivers to be part of the conversation in a real way, and I want to be able to respect professionals doing their jobs. My contention is that I don’t feel that the School Committee has actually done either the respect or enough coherent listening.”
Controlled choice and busing
Perhaps the biggest problem, in Coburn’s opinion, is the inequity created by controlled choice in school selection – a policy she said was created “with good intentions” but has failed.
“I don’t have any problem with why controlled choice was created. What I do have a problem with was why it was ignored for 10-plus years,” she said. “Unless it’s working for everybody … it’s not working for anybody.”
Infrastructure needs attention, she said. “The transportation system is the cost of controlled choice. So if you want to keep controlled choice, you have to prioritize fixing the transportation system,” Coburn said.
She suggested a survey for caregivers to give input on transportation reforms, starting with gauging data how many hours a caregiver might spend commuting.
Innovation Agenda debt
Coburn also noted the “overspending” on the Innovation Agenda, which added middle schools to the district around a dozen years ago, and how that debt has compounded.
“That debt impacts our capacity to do more things with the capital budgets, and that disproportionately affects East Cambridge,” she said.
If elected, she said she would hold the superintendent accountable by expecting a “real and achievable 10-year plan,” and a “clear programmatic vision.”
Outside of her career in documentaries, she identifies as a “neurodiverse” Ohioan from a “cross-class” family. She is a parent to two daughters and attributes much of her passion around local politics in Cambridge to being an advocate to her eldest, who just finished fifth grade at K-Lo.
“I am the luckiest person in the world because when my daughter had a problem, I knew enough to know how important it was to fix it,” she said. “ I am lucky, and I strive to deserve the luck.”
A stronger
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While we’re on the subject of K-Lo, could the school committee please just pull the trigger and announce that Amigos will be relocated there once renovations are complete?