Young originally committed to presenting concrete proposals regarding the issues pervading the Cambridge middle grades by October 2009, but the recommendations were delayed multiple times and finally slated to appear this month.

“We began the year with an intent to look at restructuring possibilities for our middle grades,” Young says. “The further along we went, we found that it was a layered problem that required further study.”

Of the five options Young forwarded at the February Committee meeting, he pushed for the “hybrid” model, which involves a combination of some K-5 and K-8 schools and the establishment of a grades 6-8 middle school. Committee members expect to flesh out the model this month.

In spite of the oft-discouraging delays in implementation, Tauber assures that the Committee has been discussing “the structure for a very long time” and that “the teachers and administrators are working on it every day.”

CONTROLLING CHOICES

The proposal to create a separate Cambridge middle school has divided district leaders for decades. The current school system, which includes 11 K-8 schools, has been accused of supporting the racially and socio-economically isolating environments to which the achievement gap has been attributed.

Controlled choice was initially set in place to create a racially-balanced student population across schools. The program allows parents to submit a ranked list of preferred schools but ultimately uses an algorithm to place students according to set demographic ratios.

Several School Committee members have pointed out that controlled choice has largely failed to achieve its goal, as it eventually assigns students based on their neighborhoods of residence and thus results in racial and socio-economic imbalance.

“We have a lot of middle school grades that are not as diverse as they should be, and that should be addressed,” says Alfred B. Fantini, the longest-serving member of the Committee.

In the past year, little has changed in the controlled choice system. Parag A. Pathak ’02, an assistant economics professor at MIT, recommended a new algorithm for the student-to-school assigning process, but concrete discussion were mostly tabled.

“We’ve talked about pieces of it,” Tauber says. “It’s complicated because at the end of the day it talks about race and class.”

“I think that we really need to take a comprehensive look at it...I don’t think we’ve done that since I’ve been on the school committee,” Tauber adds.

The current schools assignment system will not see drastic changes anytime soon, Maher says: “I don’t think that you’re going to see the system thrown out. You’re going to see some fine tuning.”

GOVERNING MONEY

The Cambridge public school system faces a $3.7 million deficit going into the 2011 fiscal year, and city schools consequently suffered deep staff cuts in the central administration.