When School Committee member Rachel Weinstein announced in May she wouldn’t run for reelection, saying it was time for “new leaders to take the baton” in Cambridge, Eugenia Schraa Huh was inspired anew to run.
“She’s been a really great member. She works really hard, and she’s very focused on the issues that I think really matter that not everybody keeps top of mind,” said Schraa Huh of Weinstein. “Those values that Rachel espouses really matter to me.”
Schraa Huh sought office for the first in 2023 and made it to the seventh of nine rounds of counts determining the final six committee members.
Working since in constituent services for the mayor, Schraa Huh served a wide variety of people, many “struggling” under the current education system. (She has since left the Mayor’s Office to avoid a conflict of interest while running for an elected seat.)
“I like following up, reading every report, not being scared by data … and keeping on issues. I think that’s something that’s really important,” Schraa Huh said. “At this point, the problems that we have can’t be solved by money. They need to be solved with attention and persistence.”
That’s what she feels Weinstein represented – and what the committee “needs more of.”
“Public school is about leveling the playground,” Schraa Huh said, “and breaking the chains of the cycle of poverty.”
It’s an issue Schraa Huh has experience with. Before working in Cambridge, she worked as a public school teacher in the Bronx in New York. “I will never forget the look on my students when they told me we thought we would get such a better education, Miss Schraa, and they were so upset,” she said. “They are not as well served as they really deserve to be.”
The inequity is seen in “disparate outcomes for Black and Hispanic versus white and Asian kids” that persist in Cambridge despite the city spending more per student than most other schools in Massachusetts at $36,356 per pupil. (Salaries and benefits make up 84 percent of the current $291 million city education budget, representing the expense of living in Eastern Massachusetts.)
“I’m not saying I have any of the easy solutions, because there just aren’t any easy solutions,” she said. “But I think in 2025, this should be something that we’re taking really seriously and worried about.”
Another equity issue requiring more attention is illustrated by the closing of the Kennedy-Longfellow elementary school after years of drawing a disproportionate number of high-needs students, “rightly” causing a lot of anger at the upheaval, Schraa Huh said. “Nobody I know of is disputing that it was the right turn to close the school … but the critique I hear the most often is that [K-Lo] was allowed to languish for so long.”
A top priority for her, should she be elected, is working proactively to “prevent the next K-Lo now.” For her, this means giving attention and care to the Fletcher Maynard Academy. When she moved to Cambridge with her family, she was going to choose it for her kids, now 6 and 8, but decided against it after learning about problems with a “highly problematic” principal hiring – seemingly leading to what is now low teacher satisfaction.
“I want to hear about people talking about keeping Fletcher Maynard,” she said. “I think that Fletcher Maynard is a real jewel of our system [but] there could be another K-Lo, and I want to avoid that. FMA represents a lot.”
Schraa Huh is determined to “ask hard questions” to ensure equitable education for all students across the district. Part of that is communication through district newsletters – a great avenue for feedback from community members that School Committee members could be privy to, she believes – and holding office hours.
The current system of dispensing information through email groups online skews “highly privileged” in terms of access, she said, but if reformed could be “an important way of hearing the true diversity of our voices in our parent community.”
“Many of the issues [in our school system] do not have a quick fix,” and solutions are often arduous and require “upkeep,’’ she said.
Between working intimately with the city in her work and sending her own two children through its school system, Schraa Huh sees this campaign as a natural next step to improving Cambridge.
“I love being in Cambridge, and I feel so lucky to be here,” she said.
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These comments about K-Lo seem very disrespectful. K-Lo was only failing and “languishing” if you look at test scores. K-Lo had a vibrant community of families, scholars, educators and dismantling this completely is a huge loss that I do think some folks would argue was not necessary. Clearly there are larger issues at play relating to racial inequities and the problems with the controlled choice school system. This candidate’s focus on “data” seems to entirely focus on quantitative rather than qualitative data. That only gets to a tiny fraction of what is really going on in the school system.