Still, Fantini says he understands why parents feel deceived by the school committee.

"We gave the perception we were going to provide a new school," he says. "It's hard to overcome no matter what the good intentions were."

D'Alessandro, however, maintains she has always focused on the merged school's academic program and never promised a new facility--a point even many parents concede.

Merging for Money

Fundamentally, the merger is about empty seats and empty coffers.

"I understand their passions, but we've got 1,000 empty seats," D'Alessandro says of parents upset by the Fletcher-Maynard merger.

Underenrolled schools waste money and, at a time when many districts have rising enrollment, make it harder for Cambridge to get state funding to build and renovate schools.

According to district predictions, the merged school will save the district more than $2 million over the next three years.

Early in her tenure, D'Alessandro developed a policy that schools with fewer than 300 students would have to merge or close.

Fletcher and Maynard each have fewer than 300 students; their combined enrollment next year is expected to total just 350. Four other elementary schools also fall short of the mark.

But at the committee's request, D'Alessandro is currently reconsidering the policy that forced the Fletcher-Maynard merger.

Committee members say changes are simply a matter of fairness: the present policy is unfair to schools like the Haggarty, which was built to hold fewer than 300 students at its capacity.

But many Fletcher-Maynard parents are angry.

Cheryl Kennedy, a Fletcher parent, says she finds it "thoroughly confusing...how city policy-makers can engage us in a very uprooting and disruptive process and then halfway through appear to change the rules."

It's a Goal

Though restructuring within the district has attracted much of teh school committee's attention, the district has still begun to push ahead with some of its more ambitious goals.

Soon after the committee presented its 11 objectives, D'Alessandro picked literacy as her first priority--hoping to get all students to read at their own grade level from third grade on.