Changes to the Cambridge School Committee’s public meeting structure may be on the horizon after a three-hour retreat held Friday. The changes were discussed as one way to improve family engagement, which committee members defined as a key metric of success.
All committee members except Richard Harding attended the retreat, which was primarily organized by the committee’s vice-chair Caitlin Dube, and was open to the public. The agenda was structured around three priorities – educator effectiveness, family engagement and programmatic and capital planning.
When discussing how each committee member would define success at the end of the 2027 calendar year, several members detailed boosting family engagement in decision making, both by educators and school committee members. Changing how committee meetings are run was called for by Dube, who said having “more informative” committee meetings that are “constituent-driven” was an important goal for her.
Member Luisa de Paula Santos welcomed the suggestion to “rethink how meetings are structured.” She added that presentations from the district should come from “various stakeholders on issues that also reflect the public priorities.”
The committee is set to review and vote on changes to the public meeting structure at their next meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 20 at 6 p.m., according to the meeting agenda.
The motion seeks to “provide the Chair with flexibility to adjust public comment time based on the number of speakers and meeting constraints.” If passed, it would also permit public commenters to speak on items not listed on the meeting’s agenda.
Currently, Cambridge limits public commenters to register ahead of the meeting, speak only to items specifically listed on the agenda, and talk for no more than three minutes.
Anna Shin, a parent to a child at Baldwin School and one of three public attendees of Friday’s retreat, said public comment law can hinder meeting efficiency, noting that it sometimes takes longer for the committee chair to moderate a commenter than it does to allow a commenter to speak in full.
More family engagement a hope
“Traditional family engagement” should be expanded to include engagement opportunities “that are linked to learning,” said Tina Lieu, a parent to two students at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and co-founder of the CRLS Family Connection, a group designed to better include families in the school’s community, says she hopes the new committee will prioritize student and family perspectives when making decisions.
Lieu, who also co-chairs the CRLS school council, said school councils are a key part of family engagement and need to be supported by collaborative efforts by school principals.
Student-centered committee culture was another throughline of Friday’s meeting, led by member Elizabeth Hudson. Hudson, in her second term, argued that the committee will need to focus on a couple of concrete goals to realize progress in the next year.
“We need to not lose sight of the concrete things we start doing tomorrow and the next day and the next day, and what latitude and support we need to give the superintendent and his team, so we can make these things happen,” Hudson said.
The committee will narrow down its list of goals to a couple of key priorities, and establish timelines for completing them, at a second public retreat set tentatively for Feb. 6 from 8-11 a.m.
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“The agenda was structured around three priorities – educator effectiveness, family engagement and programmatic and capital planning.”
There should have been only one thing on the agenda. How do we get all of our students in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, to be able to read, write and do math at grade level.
Why is this so difficult? Everything else has to be subordinate to this. And yet, the committee and the schools don’t understand this. So…another generation of Cambridge school students will have received an inadequate education, despite the fact that the city spends more per pupil than any other district in Massachusetts.