Superintendent Recommends Closing Long-Struggling Cambridge Elementary School

Updated December 11, 2024, at 10:24 p.m.

Cambridge Public Schools interim superintendent David G. Murphy said he will recommend closing the Kennedy-Longfellow School, a kindergarten through fifth grade school that has suffered from low test scores and under enrollment.

Murphy’s decision, which was communicated to parents in an email on Tuesday, came after weeks of rumors that the district would move to shutter the school. The decision came exactly one week after Murphy repeatedly suggested that it was necessary to close K-Lo during a School Committee meeting.

Murphy will formally present his recommendation to close K-Lo — as the school is known to parents and staff — during a Dec. 17 session of the School Committee. The recommendation will likely be approved given past acknowledgements from committee members that the situation at K-Lo was dire.

“You can have incredible assets in a school, you can have an incredible community, you can have wonderful things going on — and you could still have an untenable situation,” said School Committee member Elizabeth C.P. Hudson.

Murphy wrote on Tuesday that the decision was “necessitated by a combination of enrollment and demand patterns along with the systemic structures that have resulted in a disproportionate and inequitable allocation of students across our district.”

K-Lo’s math scores on the recent Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test were the lowest in the district, with only 29 percent of students meeting or exceeding expectations. K-Lo’s enrollment demographics also stood out from the rest of the district, with 86 percent of its students qualifying as high-needs — a product of Cambridge’s controlled choice system.

Though a CPS facilities condition assessment ranked the K-Lo as most urgently needing renovations, no repairs or projects were included in CPS’ capital improvement projects for the next three fiscal years, according to a presentation delivered at a Sept. 17 School Committee meeting.

Some parents also expressed frustration at the recommendation to reassign all K-Lo students to other schools in the district beginning with the 2025-26 school year, saying there was not enough engagement with CPS officials prior to the decision.

“It is not appropriate in the way that we have been excluded prior to Nov. 19,” said Anne M. Coburn, whose child goes to K-Lo. “Why was this set off like a bomb? Why are we having to make sense of the shrapnel?”

But district conversations about K-Lo’s performance have been going on for years, said district administrators and elected officials.

Hudson said that “these issues aren’t new issues.”

“I understand both that the decision can feel abrupt and that there would be equal and opposite frustration if no changes were made at all,” Hudson added.

Murphy did meet with both parents and staff on Tuesday, prior to his email being sent out — a promise he had made earlier, according to Dan Monahan, president of Cambridge Educators Association — the union for CPS educators.

Murphy also announced plans to smooth the transition in the email, including a Kennedy-Longfellow Transition Advisory Committee and a reassignment timeline to be shared in January. Parents, caregivers, and educators from K-Lo will be invited to serve on the committee.

“We will do whatever is necessary to assist those affected by this transition,” Murphy wrote in his email.

“In the end, I am confident we will have better positioned our students for success and our district to fulfill our mission as a public school system,” he added.

Though K-Lo’s fate as a school may now be clearer, details of the student reassignment process and teachers’ continued employment remain muddy.

At Murphy’s Tuesday meeting with teachers, questions about student needs and student redistribution were top-of-mind. But many teachers, who were rattled by the announcement, also had questions about their own reassignments.

“We are going to advocate that every educator — unless they are discharged for cause or not renewed for cause — they all should have jobs next year,” Monahan said. “If it’s not a budgetary decision, then there’s no reason for them to actually cut positions.”

Murphy said in an interview with The Crimson on Wednesday that he anticipates “the vast majority of staff” to continue working in CPS next year, but emphasized that student needs come first.

“In terms of specifically who is going where — I think we have to address the student needs first and then we can address the staff needs,” he said. “I think it’s pretty important that we do it in that order.”

Parents also asked for more specific plans from the district as they look to ensure a smooth transition.

“The more that we keep getting these vague responses to our questions, the more our trust dwindles into, ‘They don’t know what they’re doing,’” said Virginia Cuello, a K-Lo parent and co-chair of the K-Lo School Council — a parent-faculty advisory board.

As they await more logistical information, some parents have taken it upon themselves to issue advice to School Committee officials. K-Lo Caregivers Advocates sent a list of transition recommendations to members on Wednesday.

The email advocates for K-Lo parents to be able to choose what school they go to, for the Sheltered English Immersion program to stay together as a cohort, for student transition planning to be finalized by Feb. 28, 2025, and for a school at K-Lo’s current address to reopen after undergoing renovations.

Murphy said that the district hopes to work with individual families to identify their needs and ensure they have “a degree of choice with respect to where their students transition to.”

He added the district is analyzing schools’ capacities and developing new expectations in regards to space, so that students can move in cohorts. Some schools are likely to receive a higher concentration of displaced K-Lo students than others, according to Murphy.

Carrie M. Jung, a K-Lo parent and former School Council co-chair, expressed concern about how students will be integrated into their new schools.

“Being the new kid is hard,” Jung said. “It’s not easy to come into a new school.”

“A lot of us are really worried about how these kids will be embraced in their new school communities,” she said.

—Staff writer Darcy G Lin can be reached at darcy.lin@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Emily T. Schwartz can be reached at emily.schwartz@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @EmilySchwartz37.