“To me this is not about the financial impacts,” he said. “This has to be about the quality and equity across our entire system.”
But D’Alessandro insisted that creating middle schools would strengthen education by allowing teachers and administrators to focus on elementary school and middle school students separately. Specialists would help prepare middle school students for high school, she said.
“This was all about equity for all kids,” D’Alessandro said. “I knew it would be controversial, but it needed to come out and we needed to talk.”
When D’Alessandro agreed to go back to the drawing board, parents expressed relief.
Haggerty parent Debby K. Irving called the plan “very top down.”
“I started to not trust the whole process,” she said.
—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.