Parents at Baldwin School are urging administrators to protect the school’s beloved art room, a staple of the Cambridge elementary school for 16 years. The room is perhaps the most bitter casualty of the classroom reshuffling that is slated to occur in the next school year as the district seeks to accommodate increased enrollment numbers.
Kerry O’Conner, a Baldwin parent and treasurer of the Baldwin School Council, said she is deeply concerned by the loss of the art room and is helping to organize people against the relocation. She called having a designated, sunlit space for art instruction “an integral part of early childhood brain development, of self expression, and it directly [supports] children’s mental health.”
Owen Woolcock, a parent to a Baldwin Kindergartener, told Cambridge Day in an email “it’s sad to hear common spaces and rooms designed for other purposes (art, 1:1 dedicated support) might be converted to extra classrooms.”
A flyer being distributed among Baldwin parents urges the district to protect the art room, calling the space, “daylight soaked, custom built, and intentionally laid out.” In addition, the flyer says “We are telling our students that their creative development is the first thing to go when space gets tight.” This plea is attributed to the school’s Visual Arts teacher, Lilli Martinez. Martinez declined to comment when reached by Cambridge Day.
The district is relying on classroom relocation to create space for an additional Kindergarten class and fifth-grade class in the 2026-27 school year, according to an April 28 communication from Heidi Cook, Baldwin Principal.
It is the additional fifth-grade class that will be housed in what is now the school’s third-floor art room. While some parents have proposed alternate solutions to accommodate the new fifth-grade class that would allow the art room to remain in its current space, Cook said in her email that she is prioritizing proximity between the new fifth-grade class and the third-, fourth-, and existing fifth-grade classrooms on the third floor.
Cook defended the art room relocation, stating that given the space restrictions imposed by the current location of the school’s high-need student population, whose services predominantly take place on the third floor. “There is no other proposal for a third floor 5th grade that does not displace critical service delivery spaces for students who receive Special Education or intervention services,” Cook wrote.
“I want to emphasize that no classes are being eliminated; rather, we are optimizing our facility to ensure every student has access to high quality education,” said Jaclyn Piques, the district’s director of communications, in a statement to Cambridge Day. She added that the decision was “guided by [a] commitment to providing a supportive environment that prioritizes student achievement.”
Art space
The room was originally designed to be a space for art. A 1995 booklet detailing floor plans for renovations of The Agassiz School, which was renamed the Maria L. Baldwin School in 2002, displays a third floor space designated for art instruction.
A kiln used to fire students’ ceramics projects is built into a smaller room to the side of the art room, and cannot be moved. It is unclear if the kiln will remain operational next year, although Caitlin Dube, vice chair of the Cambridge School Committee and a parent representative on Baldwin’s school council, said it likely will remain functional. Dube said the school is also exploring partnerships with external ceramic programs.
The plan now is to move the art room to a windowless room in the basement, currently home to Maria L. Baldwin Community Center, the school’s primary afterschool programming. That program will be moved to a smaller basement room it will share with the music and health classes, also being displaced by the reallocation. Baldwin Community Center representatives declined to comment.
A parent who wished to remain anonymous told Cambridge Day that “the displacement of specialist subjects” like art, gym, music, health, and the after school program getting moved to smaller spaces is concerning.
Sudden shift
The school first mentioned reallocation in an agenda for the April 16 meeting of the Baldwin School Council, released a few days before the meeting. In her April 28 email, Cook said “By adding this new Kindergarten class, we are projecting an increase in our free/reduced lunch demographic for this incoming cohort, helping to decrease disproportionality.”
Some parents told Cambridge Day they were disappointed with a lack of advanced communication from the district on the matter.
“It feels like this decision came a little suddenly and surprised teachers and staff, and is overwhelming them,” said a Baldwin School parent who asked to remain anonymous, saying they feared retaliation from the administration. This parent agreed that the changes might boost the school’s socioeconomic diversity.
Cambridge uses a controlled choice system to place students in schools throughout the district. The system takes into account socioeconomic status as well as family preference. Baldwin School is a popular choice for many families, and was the most popular choice for Kindergarteners last year.
Enrollment at the school has steadily increased in recent years, with 340 total Baldwin students in 2023, 352 students in 2024, and 385 students this year, according to data from the Department of Elementary and Middle School Education. Enrollment for the next school year will likely exceed 400 students, with the average class size at Baldwin sitting at around 19 students.
With certain schools at capacity for enrollment and others with vacancies, the school committee has indicated it may review the controlled choice system, according to discussions that took place at a school committee retreat earlier this year.
“We absolutely need to be re-examining our controlled choice policy,” Dube told Cambridge Day on Friday. “That will be part of the work we do as a committee, both in our curriculum and achievement subcommittees, in the larger committee as a whole, and with the development of the strategic plan.”
Since the April 16 school council meeting, the district has held two virtual open house sessions, one with Principal Cook and one with Superintendent Dave Murphy. The decision to reallocate classrooms is still slated to proceed, according to April 28 confirmation from Cook.
This story was updated to include a comment from the Cambridge Public Schools.
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