Thomas says her school presents an easy target for closing because of its predominantly low-income and Portuguese student population.
“Why should anyone stick up for them?” she says. The school committee “is not getting the votes from them. To me it’s all political and all money.”
The Fitz and the Harrington are known as “neighborhood schools,” and parents say they enjoy walking their children to school and passing by the building every day on their way to work.
Teachers and parents who graduated from both schools have testified to their successes at school committee hearings and have said they feel betrayed by a plan that would close the schools.
“This is not the Cambridge that I’ve grown to love and care about,” Harrington teacher and graduate Sonya De Rosa said at a hearing on the plan last week.
“We turned out all right. Our children will too,” said Fitzgerald parent Leslie Williams Dunn.
Though the stakes are highest for the Fitzgerald and Harrington, other schools must brace for the implications if the plan passes tonight. The Graham and Parks School would move into the Fitzgerald building, and its facility would turn into district offices. The King Open, which shares a building with the King School near Peabody Terrace, would relocate into the Harrington’s location and incorporate some of its students.
Olá, a Portuguese bilingual program that is currently a part of the Harrington’s educational offerings, would remain in the building and become part of the King Open. Initially the plan had called for Olá to move into the King Open’s old space, but D’Alessandro revised that part of the plan after sustained protest.
Even though their schools would stay intact, some parents have continued to protest a process that they say has not allowed enough time to find an optimal solution to the intricate problem of rearranging elementary schools.
“My feeling about the plan is that it’s not possible for any of the schools involved to take the plan on its merits, whatever they may be, because the process through which the plan has come forward is so disrespectful of school cultures,” says Graham and Parks parent Owen Andrews. “We’re caught in a time frame that doesn’t allow for any of the decent consultation and buy-in that would make the school communities feel better or worse about it.”
Andrews says he favors spending the spring to find a new plan and delaying the implementation to 2004. He says the committee should wait until D’Alessandro’s term expires in order to begin afresh with a new leader.
“She’s now a lame duck and nobody trusts her,” he says. “Anything that she’s involved in is going to be problematic.”
But opinion among King Open parents remains divided, with some parents at that school seeing benefits to the plan—which would give their school its own building.
“We are pleased to see that this plan responds to our concerns,” King Open parent Debbie Klein said at last week’s hearing. “We would appreciate the chance to grow and diversify both racially and socio-economically.”
Although students from the Harrington and Fitzgerald Schools will receive what D’Alessandro calls “priority transfer rights” to move to any school within the district—which operates under a choice system for elementary school placement that balances for race and socioeconomic status—parents worry that the student bodies would be broken up.
For example, though the King Open will absorb many of the Harrington students, school leaders have made clear they will not take the entire population, in order to preserve the small feel of their school.
Wherever they’re told to go, according to Fitzgerald Assistant Principal Schmitt, members of the Fitz will not go without protest.
He says “conversations” have already taken place at their school regarding a plan of action if the Fitzgerald is slated to close next year.
“I don’t believe that it would be a quiet demise,” he says.
—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.