The committee fired Superintendent of Schools Bobbie J. D’Alessandro in November, saying she had failed to communicate adequately with the community about the consolidation plans she proposed. The committee hired her deputy, Carolyn Turk, to serve as interim superintendent of schools while the committee searches for a permanent replacement.

“I think Bobbie had alienated people in a certain kind of way with all the surprises,” Erlien says. “I think Carolyn Turk is less the Pollyanna: ‘you’re going to love this, this is terrific,’ that Bobbie always did. She’s much more matter-of-fact and ‘here it is.’”

Others say that Turk and her administrative team have succeeded in communicating with parents where D’Alessandro failed.

“Carolyn Turk and [Cambridge Public Schools Chief Operating Officer] Jim Maloney have run a much more open process than Bobbie ever did,” Andrews says. “The plan itself tries a lot harder than a lot of the D’Alessandro plans to explain what it’s about. For some parents that does tend to calm them down a lot.”

Parents say they have also mustered their support for the plan because of the educational benefits they envision it will bring to a district in which several schools have received a “failing” grade from the Federal government.

Erlien says the plan will increase racial and socio-economic diversity in all elementary programs.

Unlike some other Boston-area school systems, Cambridge allows parents a limited-choice as to which school their children attend, and some parents say that the plan will create more room in the city’s most popular schools.

“[The plan] does create more seats in programs that people want to go to,” Andrews says. “That appears to me to be a good thing.”

But while some parents’ protests have mellowed, others have continued the fight to save their schools.

Fantini says he thinks that because the plan is expected to pass opposition has intensified from some quarters. He adds that he has been “confronted face to face” about the plan at social events.

“There’s a sense of realness about this one,” he says. “People are responding to that—people are really nervous.”

Parents and teachers at the Peabody School in particular have spoken out against the plan at committee meetings and some intend to attend today’s protest.

Peabody parents have said the move to the Fitzgerald School and the resultant absorption of its students will threaten the school’s culture.

“The Fitzgerald community feels that the Peabody School community is a good mix although the Peabody doesn’t think so,” Fantini says.

A statement Nolan read to the committee on behalf of the Peabody parents at a recent school committee stated, “We, the parents of Peabody School children, vehemently oppose plans to move the Peabody School. If the Peabody were to be moved from its current location, we will have to seriously consider withdrawing from the school. Many of us will abandon the Cambridge Public School system entirely.”