The achievement gap and inability of the Cambridge Public School district to provide a quality education to all students weighed heavily on the minds of School Committee candidates and the questioners in two election forums last week.

Amid community debate over the MCAS 2.0 standardized test, the School Committee and lead school department administrators seemed destined to agree to count its scores as key measures of the superintendent’s three-year blueprint for the schools.

Progress on plans for universal preschool in Cambridge is promising, but needs to go a lot faster, officials said at a roundtable on early education.

Along with looking at a school choice glitch that had frustrated parents, last week the School Committee agreed enthusiastically to adopt sister cities in Puerto Rico and help get their schools up and running after hurricane damage.

Running for reelection may or may not have anything to do with the School Committee rearranging its remaining 2017 schedule so there will not be another regular meeting for seven weeks – until Nov. 21, when the city votes.

The threat of putting the brakes on the flow of $1 million in federal grant money finally got School Committee member Patty Nolan some of the answers she’s been seeking on the logic behind how those funds are distributed in Cambridge’s public schools.

Members of the North Cambridge Family Opera appealed a seemingly mundane policy change on facility use Tuesday before the School Committee that, they said, could threaten the opera’s financial health. Officials supported the appeal unanimously.

A near-total rewrite of the school district’s “Rights and Responsibilities Handbook” and Cambridge Rindge & Latin School student handbook for 2017-18 – neither of which most students have ever seen – was urged by School Committee members Tuesday.

Indigenous People’s Day will officially replace Columbus Day on the district’s school calendar after the School Committee voted Tuesday to make the change. It follows a City Council decision in June 2016 to change the holiday held the second Monday in October.

The committee vowed to do ’anything in our power to protect the ‘Dreamers’ among us,” following a motion by Mayor E. Denise Simmons, using a nickname for the nearly 800,000 young people granted temporary legal U.S. residency via an Obama-era program.