Before she became one among the most crowded field of School Committee candidates the city has seen in decades, Alex Bowers spent five years covering Cambridge Public Schools as a journalist. Now she says she’s ready to be on the other side of the action.
Bowers wrote and edited in marketing, journalism, curriculum design and technical writing over her career – experiences that give skill in “listening and communicating,” she said.
“You just get a feel for the different ways you can communicate with different audiences,” she said.“You have to understand what the community needs to know and wants to know, and then you have to figure out how to provide it to them, not just in an easy-to-understand way, but also using today’s technology.”
Bowers wrote for Cambridge Day from 2019-2024, covering school councils, committee elections, superintendent hirings and course policy. It’s her plan to address disparities in student opportunity that pulled her from a writing career to politics.
Raising twin daughters in the district for more than a decade revealed those disparities. She got a chance to see “two parallel approaches with two different outcomes,” she said.
Her daughters, now sophomores at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, progressed differently through math courses – one at the Putnam Avenue Upper School and one at the Community Charter School of Cambridge – after placing into the same math level in sixth grade.
The daughter at PAUS participated in Bridge to Algebra, an optional after-school program that allows eighth graders to learn Algebra 1 content and place out of the course before entering high school. She passed; “a lot of her schoolmates didn’t,” Bowers said.
“If a student has the motivation to take the class and the only support that you’re giving is a couple of hours a week, and they don’t pass, I can imagine it’s just very demoralizing,” Bowers said. “The support needs to be there to ensure that every student can do the best that they can.”
Offering eighth-grade algebra has been a district goal for decades. Algebra 1 was removed from middle school curricula during the pandemic, and various motions by the committee to reinstate it have been delayed.
“This emphasis on algebra is not because algebra is the golden key to anything,” Bowers said. “It’s just something we can measure. It’s a litmus test for how the district is preparing students across the board.”
Bowers said opportunity gaps extend to parents, and it’s where her skills as a communicator come in.
“The way that parents get information depends a lot on where the kid is coming from,” Bowers observed as two schools sent home information for different daughters and she saw parents new to the district struggle with not knowing how to choose classes – and guidance about entering high school vary in usefulness depending whether the student was already part of the district.
Bowers turned her frustration into action.
“I wrote the document that became the CRLS family guidebook, which is a collection of notes that I just sent to families that I knew, because so many of my kids’ classmates had gone outside of CPS for their middle school,” she said.
Bowers is a former educator as well. She taught at a grammar school in Lahore, Pakistan, and at a high school in Changsha, Hunan Province, China, which she said imbues her campaign with a compassionate knowledge of student experiences.
“An unhappy child is an unhappy child the world over,” she said, though “I found myself tailoring what I was teaching to the interests and the collective zeitgeist of the cohort.”
There are 18 candidates running for the Cambridge School Committee’s six seats, to be decided Tuesday. With one incumbent opting not to run, one new face is guaranteed when the new committee sits in January.
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