Tomorrow’s vote may place the final punctuation mark on a series of merger plans, hearings and postponed decisions.

It will also cap district leaders’ efforts to come to terms with a problem they had long brushed aside—the need for drastic action on elementary schools to combat years of declining enrollment.

The committee must vote now so that, if the plan passes, there will be time to readjust enrollment across the district. Delaying even a month would mean no plan could be implemented in time for the next school year.

Even if the plan fails, according to Price, the contentious debate over mergers finally addressed an issue that had been “undiscussable” for a decade.

“For the superintendent to bring this to our attention in a way that we might solve this in a year, there’s a big shift from the past,” he says.

The first consolidation plan came last spring, when D’Alessandro presented an ambitious initiative that would have reshaped K-8 education in Cambridge by combining elementary schools and creating the district’s first middle school program. But after only a few minutes of discussion, the committee rejected the plan and sent D’Alessandro back to the drawing board.

This fall, D’Alessandro has trotted out several other plans, each one targeting a different slate of schools and drawing crowds of picketing parents. Even Price submitted a drastic plan of his own, which he withdrew after vehement criticism.

Faced with hours of protest week after week, the committee last month ordered D’Alessandro to hold a series of so-called “stakeholder” meetings with parent leaders and principals.

The district’s principals signed onto the latest plan in theory, agreeing that two elementary schools should close, though they left the choice of which schools up to D’Alessandro.

But the situation has continued to deteriorate.

Just a day after the first stakeholder meeting, the committee voted against extending D’Alessandro’s contract, citing a drawn-out and ineffective decision-making process that left parents out of the loop.

Chaos has built within the school system with some parents threatening to send their children to private school and others pledging never again to support current committee members for re-election.

The current plan affects fewer schools than its predecessors, but it imposes more drastic measures—none of the previous plans had closed schools outright. And the opposition is as fierce as ever, especially from Fitzgerald and Harrington.

Initially parents responded with outrage that their school would be shut down. But over the last week their tactics have shifted away from the closure issue. Now, they argue that the plan attacks their students, since their school building would stay open but be usurped by another school’s student body.

“If they need to close a school they should close a school, not kick a group of children out to move another group of children in,” says Harrington parent Karen M. Thomas. “That just doesn’t make sense.”