A new four-year plan for the Cambridge school district started to come into focus at a Friday retreat of the school committee. Budget allocation, transportation operations, and the vacancy at 158 Spring Street were issues at the forefront of the committee’s planning.
The committee vowed to narrow down a list of priorities for its term at its first retreat mid-January. The strategic plan will reflect those priorities as well as long-term district goals.
The Cambridge school system typically renews its district plan – “a strategic roadmap that sets a clear and shared vision” for student outcomes – every few years, according to the Cambridge Public Schools website. The district’s current plan was devised under former Superintendent Victoria Greer’s administration, and was set to lapse in 2025. The district extended the plan until 2026 to accommodate the superintendent transition period.
The current plan is centered around four key initiatives – instructional support for all students, accessible college and career pathways, staff learning support, and a welcoming district culture. Progress indicators include increases in literacy, attendance rates, advanced coursework participation and graduation rates.
The current district plan fostered “greater alignment” within the district, Superintendent Dave Murphy said at Friday’s meeting, but “there’s still a lot of work to do” regarding how to accelerate the district’s progress towards its goals.
Although no official vote was cast, the committee reached a consensus that the strategic plan that will be put in place this year will be re-evaluated after a four-year period. Members discussed June or September as deadlines for the plan’s completion. David Weinstein, the committee’s chair, recommended June to give the committee the full 2026-27 school year to work on implementation. It remains unclear if a specific timeline for the plan’s completion is set.
The plan’s completion will require foresight to ensure the city and school committee budget have wiggle room for the committee’s goals, said Ivy Washington, chief financial officer for the school district. The committee is set to vote on final budget decisions in April, but its strategic plan will likely not be finalized until the beginning of the summer at the earliest, according to the school committee budget.
“You’re talking about working really hard to get this done by June, but the budget has to be done by April,” Washington said, adding that the administration needed “flexibility in the budget so that we can carry out things that you decide by June.”
A school district’s strategic plan does not govern the specifics of budget allocation, but the two go hand-in-hand. Vice-chair Caitlin Dube and Washington discussed personnel shifts that may be in the district’s new strategic plan, such as changes to the student/paraprofessional/teacher ratio in classrooms. Some members called for more comprehensive organizational charts to visualize how many personnel are in positions throughout the district.
Murphy pointed to educator effectiveness and family engagement as core strategies for the district’s new plan, and listed AI policy, school choice review, behavioral and therapeutic systems, a decision for the 158 Spring Street building, and boosting early childhood education as initiatives. The committee is set to review these initiatives more directly at future meetings.
Repurposing 158 Spring Street, formerly the Kennedy Longfellow School, received unanimous support from the committee. The school was shut down last summer and has been vacant since.
The fate of 158 Spring Street was part of a larger discussion centered on necessary building modifications throughout the district. Member Luisa de Paula Santos also pointed to renovations needed at Fletcher Maynard Academy.
Transportation also arose as a key operational initiative that will become a part of the district’s new strategic plan.
While the district made strides to improve its GPS management systems during the last school year, there remains room for improvement at designing bus routes that work quicker Damon Smith, interim chief operations officer, said at the meeting. The committee had conversations about bus efficiency at the beginning of this school year when certain bus routes were facing delays. While most buses were running on time, 30 percent of schools with later start times were facing significant delays, Murphy said at a December 2 school committee meeting.
Changes to bus efficiency may come with changes to the controlled choice system, Cambridge’s system of placing students into schools based on family preference and socioeconomic status, Member Santos said.
No official changes to the district’s strategic plan were made at Friday’s retreat, and no official votes were cast.
A challenging start
Disagreement arose at the beginning of the meeting when Member Elizabeth Hudson questioned the efficacy of meetings that are centered around vague initiatives.
“Any time spent talking about a motto is an absolute waste of time,” Hudson said in reference to the committee’s initial conversation about what mission statement to attach to the strategic plan.
Hudson asked Weinstein for information about the district’s current strategic plan, which sparked a conversation about meeting accessibility.
“We’ve got 2,000 people who have, in addition to their core responsibilities of educating students every day, 100 other things going on,” Hudson said when details about the current plan were not fleshed out. “If the chair of the School Committee can’t remember what’s in the strategic plan, then we can’t expect any of our staff, our employees, our parents, who have 100 other things going on, to.”
Hudson reiterated calls for more meeting accessibility. About 20 minutes into the meeting, she asked Weinstein to provide the public with the Zoom link to Friday’s retreat. Although retreats are public meetings, the discussions tend to be informal and are not televised.
Weinstein responded that it was too late to amend the meeting’s format.
This piece was updated to clarify that the budget needs to be drafted by April.
A stronger
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I really, really wish Cambridge made the top vote-getter the Chair. [same for Council/Mayor, frankly]
Hudson’s priorities have the backing of the majority of the city and instead we have the guy who barely made the committee maintaining status quo and limiting accessibility.
Here’s hoping by ‘AI policy’ they mean ‘go slow on introducing students to AI so they don’t rot their brains and focus on learning how to think before outsourcing that to AI.’