A Focus on Education

A Little League coach active in city youth organizations, Galluccio says he is also concerned with the state of education in Cambridge.

Galluccio, who graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, says he empathizes with Cantabrigians and their concerns about the high school, where one in three students fail at least one course a year, according to a recent report.

He opposed the December decision of the Cambridge School Committee to make the Pill and other long-term birth control devices available at Rindge and Latin, the city's only public high school.

"There's access already for students [to] contraceptives, throughout the city," Galluccio says. "This is more of a political move than anything else."

Galluccio says Cambridge schools should focus on learning, not birth control.

"The school system has been used for social-political indoctrination," he says. "You can't start trying to force the views of a small group of political activists into the school system."

The councillor says he fears the Pill may give teenagers "a false sense of security" and even threaten the city's AIDS-prevention efforts.

He also says the seven-member school committee did not heed the viewpoints of working-class parents.

"It's once again an example of a group of political activists who are leading the charge," Galluccio says. "[For] a lot of parents in these neighborhoods, the one thing they need to keep intact is their relationship with their children, and when they feel that relationships is being superseded, it's being intrusive."

But that doesn't stop Galluccio from saying sex education programs need to become tougher.

"It's time to get down to some sort of shock therapy," Galluccio says.

Teenagers who have actually been pregnant should speak on the issue in Rindge and Latin, he says.

"When we want to teach young men to stay out of trouble so they don't go to jail, we bring students from the teen centers to the Billerica House of Corrections," Galluccio says. "Why don't we have girls that have become pregnant come into the high school and explain how it's changed their lives, how they can't come to college because they have to take care of their baby, where the man in their life is who said he'd be around?"

The councillor also says he believes in strong discipline for public school students. He suggests removing disobedient students from Rindge and Latin and possibly setting up an alternative school to address their needs.