This year’s Cambridge School Committee election is the most crowded the city has seen in two decades: 18 candidates vying for six spots, with only one sitting member having chosen not to run for reelection – Rachel Weinstein, stepping down after serving two terms.
Hear two-minute talks from the 14 School Committee candidates who came to Cambridge Day’s meet-the-candidates event.
Driving the historic number of candidates — there were 11 candidates in 2023 and nine in 2021, according to city records — is a desire for increased transparency between the committee and community, catalyzed especially by the closure of the Kennedy-Longfellow school at 158 Spring St. and a controversial superintendent search process.
During the campaign, several other issues have drawn candidate focus: the closing of East Cambridge’s Kennedy-Longfellow School in June after 51 years, implementation of advanced learning instruction, policies around artificial intelligence, methods to increase communication with caregivers and solutions for persistent achievement gaps along lines of race and class. Differentiated instruction – how teachers instruct to various learning levels in the same classroom – has also been a hot topic in this year’s race. Candidates diverge on specifics of middle school algebra offerings, which have long been an indicator of academic achievement in the district.
Several citizens groups have endorsed candidates, as has the Cambridge Education Association, the labor union that says it represents around 1,500 employees of the Cambridge Public Schools district, which endorsed no incumbent members of the School Committee. The endorsements are listed below.
Cambridge Citizens Coalition: Richard Harding, Jane Hirschi, Elizabeth Hudson, Jia-Jiang Lee
Our Revolution Cambridge: Luisa de Paula Santos, Caitlin Dube, Jessica Goetz, Lilly Havstad, Arjun Jaikumar, José Luis Rojas Villarreal, David Weinstein
Cambridge Residents Alliance: Luisa de Paula Santos, Caitlin Dube, Jessica Goetz, Lilly Havstad, Arjun Jaikumar, Jia-Jiang Lee
Cambridge Education Association: Caitlin Dube, Jessica Goetz, Lilly Havstad, Jane Hirschi, Arjun Jaikumar, Luisa De Paula Santos.
Cambridge’s local elections follow the ranked-choice form of voting (see our explainer). The new committee will begin its term in January alongside interim superintendent David Murphy, whose permanent contract also begins at the start of the year.
Candidates for Cambridge School Committee
LaQueen Battle
First-time challenger
Battle, also a challenger for City Council, does not have a published campaign platform, nor has she responded to interview requests. She is a home health aide and contract worker for Instawork, a company that provides short-term “gig” economy work, and runs the nonprofit Battle First Aid Responder Services. She has a bachelor’s degree in Spanish language and literature from Purdue University and takes classes through Harvard Medical School’s online education program. She lived in South Chicago for 10 years before moving to Massachusetts.
Alborz Bejnood
Challenger (first ran in 2023)
Bejnood is a biotechnology researcher and the son of community college professors. He has worked as an administrator for science competitions and developed and taught computer science, biology and physics.
Community engagement: “Connecting people to schools is an opaque process … We have some amazing resources, such as Find It Cambridge and Cambridge School Volunteers. Let’s build on these together and tap into the greater community’s vast talent.”
Differentiated instruction: “With the recent rise in AI, there are tools that are quite good and effective for doing … differentiated learning. Using this as an aid and a plus one to teachers is a win-win.”
Special issue: Alborz believes artificial intelligence can be harnessed to meet the needs of people by more quickly pinpointing a student’s learning challenges.
Alex Bowers
First-time challenger
Bowers is a writer and editor who has worked in marketing, journalism, curriculum design and technical writing. She spent five years reporting on Cambridge Public Schools for Cambridge Day. She has experience teaching in Lahore, Pakistan, and Changsha, China.
Community engagement: “The way that parents get information depends a lot on where the kid is coming from. There’s a lot of information that you get just from being in the room.”
Differentiated instruction: “This emphasis on algebra is not because algebra is the golden key to anything. It’s just something we can measure. It’s a litmus test for how the district is preparing students across the board.”
Special issue: Bowers wrote the document that became a Cambridge Rindge and Latin School family guidebook – which began as a collection of notes that she sent to caregivers who felt out of the loop on school happenings.
Anne Coburn
First-time challenger
Coburn moved to Cambridge in 2019 after realizing that the New York City public schools curriculum was stifling her dyslexic daughter’s ability to learn to read. She is a film and media maker who works as chief operating officer for a medical research device company.
Community engagement: To improve School Committee communication and community engagement, Coburn proposes nonvoting seats for the Cambridge Education Association and Special Education Parent Advisory Council, “and people making public comment should not be held to the published agenda.”
Differentiated instruction: “ I support consistent, districtwide work curriculum, early and accurate identification of learning disorders and reading problems, swift action” on special-needs individualized education programs “and protected time in the day for acceleration and assistance.”
Special issue: Coburn calls for meeting recordings to be published as time-stamped podcasts.
Caitlin Dube
First-time challenger
Dube, who heads her own educational consulting company, has more than a decade of teaching experience. After graduating from Harvard, she taught English, math and science at an ultraorthodox all-girls school and English and history at a developmental school for grades pre-K through 12.
Community engagement: Community school models are cited as a way the district can partner with the city on wraparound services such as mental health and after-school services, “all the things that we would ideally like to see in a functioning community.”
Differentiated instruction: “Project-based learning is an evidence-based way for teachers to differentiate while also teaching the deeper learning competencies like critical thinking. The second way is by thinking about flexible daytime schedules. When we build time into the day for students to be met at the level where they are, we’re actually creating opportunities for all kids.”
Special issue: Dube wants to boost community engagement by better involving families and caregivers in student learning. She is inspired by Karen Mapp’s “dual capacity framework,” which aims to foster connections between educators and caregivers.
Melanie Gause
No website; did not respond to interview requests.
Jess Goetz
First-time challenger
Goetz has lived in Cambridge since 2011 and is the mother of two upper-school students in Cambridge Public Schools. She has an undergraduate degree in applied psychology from New York University and a master’s in public health from the University of Michigan.
Community engagement: “Create a schedule for updates at School Committee meetings, hear from teachers, coaches, caregivers and principals about how things are going qualitatively and then examine quantitative data.”
Differentiated instruction: “Consider all the ways in which needs may not be met. If we consider all the types of need deficits in one larger policy, then we can centralize the administration of additional resources” – that way, classroom teachers don’t have to learn multiple systems.
Special issue: Goetz wants to make School Committee meetings more accessible by changing their date and location, and making real-time translation services available.
Richard Harding
Incumbent (served eight previous terms)
Harding is a lifelong Cantabrigian and the founder of Port Action Group, a neighborhood organization dedicated to violence prevention that connects formerly incarcerated people with resources.
Community engagement: “We must take meetings out to the community and do a better job at communicating information from the school system to the home.”
Differentiated instruction: “I sponsored motions way back” on Algebra and “don’t know how we stopped offering Algebra to every kid. We learned to understand that if the district wasn’t going to do it itself, we had to force them through policy,” he said of the School Committee.
Special issue: Harding supports more professional development and teacher evaluations to ensure educators are held accountable in their efforts to address the achievement gap.
Lilly Havstad
First-time challenger
Havstad describes herself as a “teacher-scholar” because of her work in the classroom and her scholarly pursuits. She worked as a substitute teacher in California public schools before realizing her passion for African history. She is a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Center for African Studies.
Community engagement: There are “major decisions made without explanation. It was a matter of one or two current committee members going rogue” to explain why the committee ended Victoria Greer’s time as superintendent in May 2024. “That has created some serious trust problems in our district that we need to address.”
Differentiated instruction: “Research shows that we are seriously underinvesting in the Tier 2- and Tier 3-level instruction that some of our kids, as advanced learners, are needing access to.”
Special issue: Havstad says African history needs to be taught more holistically and accurately to help students understand growing global inequalities.
Jane Hirschi
First-time challenger
Hirschi founded CitySprouts, an urban environmentalism education nonprofit, in 2001, and is its executive director. She has lived in Cambridge for more than 30 years. Both her daughters attended Cambridge Public Schools.
Community engagement: “A school district’s relationship to its students’ families is fundamental to a young person’s success in school. As a School Committee member, I commit to building a better partnership between the district and the school councils.”
Differentiated instruction: “A good teacher is already doing [differentiated instruction]. But an intentionally differentiated instruction is designed to help a teacher meet a range of needs. Advanced learners in historically marginalized groups” need to be prioritized.
Side issue: Hirschi supports a robust science curriculum for students in early grades. She believes science education is crucial to the development of a student’s critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Elizabeth Hudson
Incumbent (seeking second term)
Hudson specialized in neuroscience before becoming a member of the committee. She received her undergraduate degree from Yale and continued her education in neuroscience at schools such as the University of Chicago and Yale Law School. Hudson has three sons and a fourth child on the way.
Community engagement: “The committee’s actions and intents and goals are by no means self-explanatory. We don’t talk in plain English. We’ve got a lot of information, and frankly, very little understanding.”
Differentiated instruction: “We need to stop promoting kids who aren’t ready. If you have a kid who’s five to seven grade levels behind, that’s not uncommon. We have middle school classrooms right now where there’s a span of seven grade levels of ability. We need to allow students to enroll in the classes that match their abilities.”
Side issue: Hudson, part of the committee that reopened the Tobin Montessori school, says the next committee should expand the Montessori program.
Eugenia Schraa Huh
Challenger (first ran in 2023)
Schraa Huh was previously a public high school teacher in the Bronx in New York, where she taught history and English as a Second Language. She most recently worked as the director of constituent services for mayor E. Denise Simmons – leader of the committee – a position from which she is on leave while campaigning.
Community engagement: Information that is only circulated through parents’ email groups is “highly privileged,” but can be reformed to become “an important way of hearing the true diversity of our voices in our parent community.”
Differentiated instruction: “Our middle school problems boil down to a lack of accountability around student learning. At the Cambridge Street Upper School, only 5 percent of black students meet or exceed great expectations in math. These examples show that the School Committee isn’t holding its administrators and teachers accountable for student learning academically.”
Side issue: Schraa Huh wants to give specific attention and care to the Fletcher Maynard Academy to ensure it does not follow the path of Kennedy-Longfellow.
Caroline Hunter
Incumbent vice-chair (seeking third term)
Hunter, on the committee since 2022, is completing a term as the vice chair. She taught in Cambridge Public Schools for 34 years. In 1970, she co-founded the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement to end Polaroid’s support for South African apartheid.
Community engagement: “Committee members should be encouraged to visit schools in a nonsupervisory capacity so that they could get the viewpoints not only of students, but of all the staff, the custodians, the cafeteria workers, the structural aides.”
Differentiated instruction: “As a classroom teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, I dealt with this issue. I was responsible for developing the curriculum, for adjusting lessons and for differentiating instruction within the classroom.”
Side issue: Improving third-grade reading levels.
Arjun Jaikumar
First-time challenger
Jaikumar is an attorney and a public servant working for the state in Boston. Previously, he worked in a private practice and served as a law clerk. He has litigated against the Trump administration on immigration, voting rights and attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.
Community engagement: “The Open Meeting Law is designed to facilitate transparency, not limit transparency. So if that is a functional effect, we can find ways to work around it.”
Differentiated instruction: “I would ensure there are multiple educators” in pre-K through second grade classrooms to get students “the coaching and interventions they need to get them caught up by third or fourth grade. The multiple educator is not something that only affects kids who are struggling; it is also something that helps kids who are advanced learners.”
Side issue: Jaikumar wants schools to work with the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment to implement regular assessments of students that are more culturally responsive.
Jia-Jing Lee
First-time challenger
Lee, originally from Malaysia, is a medical scientist who conducted research in Australia and Singapore before moving to Cambridge in 2009. As the parent of a child who attended Kennedy-Longfellow, she says a lack of transparency around the school’s closing motivated her to run for office.
Community engagement: “We were part of the Kennedy-Longfellow community, and that community [is] still underserved. Throughout that process, I was actively advocating for the families, mostly the nonnative speakers and those who have no leisure or knowledge in advocating for their own child.”
Differentiated instruction: “I propose empowering teachers, providing resources … flexibility, autonomy, time, so teachers can truly reach every student.”
Side issue: Lee wants to bring her global perspective, from exposure to various types of educational systems, to Cambridge Public Schools.
Luisa de Paula Santos
First-time challenger
Santos is a paraprofessional in the Adapt, Include, Motivate program in Somerville Public Schools, where she works with students on the autism spectrum. She is an immigrant from Brazil who has lived in Massachusetts for more than a decade.
Community engagement: “There needs to be more engagement of communities that don’t have the capacity or the access to be able to do so. Navigating individualized education programs and navigating the school choice system is very complicated, and I feel that going to communities to get that input is critical.”
Differentiated instruction: “When we talk about identifying advanced learners, we must use methods that find the students whose gifts aren’t obvious on a test. Many of my former students with IEPs were among the most creative and profound thinkers in the school, but they would never be identified by a traditional screening.”
Side issue: Santos wants to implement more restorative justice frameworks into Cambridge Public Schools to address inequities in student discipline across lines of race and wealth. “Tying administrator evaluations to equity goals will be key.”
José Luis Rojas Villarreal
Incumbent (seeking fourth term)
Rojas, originally from Mexico, has lived in the Cambridge area for 25 years. He works for Leaf, a community development finance institution.
Community engagement: “School committees are there to listen and take input, and there are mechanisms for that … you can invite people from the public to come and talk to the committee and provide information. But when you actually make decisions, the School Committee has meetings to just make decisions.”
Differentiated instruction: “We need to strengthen the academic core, especially in literacy and math, while also expanding opportunities that make learning joyful and relevant, like experiential learning, bilingual programs and harnessing AI.”
Side issue: Rojas has a focus on recent construction projects in Cambridge, such as harnessing the newly vacant Kennedy-Longfellow building.
David Weinstein
Incumbent (served three previous terms)
Weinstein taught English and K-12 art and is a parent to a recent CRLS graduate and to an eighth grader at the Darby Vassall Upper School.
Community engagement: His inaugural term started during Covid, and “we had so much community engagement. I had an even deeper and broader understanding of what was happening in our schools, even though it was in an unprecedented situation.”
Differentiated instruction: “I co-sponsored the policy that established Algebra 1 for all Cambridge students in eighth grade and provides them with additional supports as needed.”
Side issue: Weinstein advocated for a “success planning” system that provides individualized guidance, after-school and summer programs and mental health services.
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