From his assistant principal’s office at the Fitzgerald School, John P. Schmitt spent yesterday calling the superintendent of schools, trying to find out what will happen at tonight’s Cambridge School Committee meeting.

He wanted to know whether parents and teachers at his school will get to vouch publicly for the Fitz tonight before the committee takes its long-awaited vote on shutting the school down.

If the elementary merger plan passes tonight, it will intensify an emotionally charged battle waged by indignant parents, confused students and crying teachers. The Fitzgerald and the Harrington, another low-achieving neighborhood school, would close and their students would be scattered across the rest of the city. Two other, more successful schools would move into the vacant buildings.

Yesterday Schmitt was considering whether to try for a repeat of last week’s drama, when he hired a bus to take about 100 parents and teachers to protest before the school committee.

Ever since the plan was unveiled last week, the Fitz has been up in arms that the school district might cancel its educational program to make way for another school’s approach.

“It is just unacceptable to evict students in order to make space for other students,” Schmitt says.

Tonight’s meeting will culminate months of wrangling over how to consolidate Cambridge’s unwieldy array of 15 elementary schools, balance a $2.6 million deficit and fill hundreds of empty classroom seats. The committee has scrapped more than a half-dozen merger plans already, and district administrators proposed this one as their best offer.

The plan marks the last major restructuring effort by Superintendent of Schools Bobbie J. D’Alessandro, whose rocky tenure has already seen the contentious merger of two elementary schools and the reorganization of the city’s high school. Just a month ago, the school committee decided that it would let her contract lapse after this summer.

With the plan’s fate up in the air, committee members say they don’t even have a sense of how the vote will come out.

“A whole range of things are possible,” says committee member Alan C. Price. “From one extreme is whether or not to vote up or down the superintendent’s proposal as is, or the other extreme is a total halt or moratorium.”

The committee may also choose to put off action on its most pressing problem for a full year. The current plan would go into effect immediately next fall, but last week committee member Richard Harding Jr. proposed six more months of community discussion before any schools close or merge.

As discussions dragged on this fall, tempers have frayed on the committee. Some members have accused their colleagues of not taking the budget crunch seriously, yelling accusations at public meetings.

Despite the strained and prolonged discussion of the merger issue, Price says most Cambridge residents want more time before the committee takes action.

“The community sentiment is pretty clear,” he says.

No Quiet Demise