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Alexandra G. Bowers, a current Cambridge school council member and former Cambridge Day journalist, is campaigning to increase the power of families in the district’s decision-making in her inaugural run for School Committee.

Bowers said that she is running for the School Committee to strengthen the influence of school councils. Every school in the district has a school council, which is tasked with advising its principal, delivering an annual “school improvement plan” to the School Committee to be approved by the superintendent, and reviewing the school’s budget.

School councils are composed of parents, teachers, and students, but Bowers believes those voices are not currently being heard effectively.

“You still have school councils that have varying levels of effectiveness, and they really should be used as a means to get the concerns of families fed up through the School Committee, because that’s what its role is,” Bowers said.

“In theory, grassroots information should flow upwards, and that isn’t happening,” she added.

Bowers served on the school councils for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School, Community Charter School of Cambridge, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where her two twin daughters are currently sophomores.

She also helped revise a policy document to standardize the authority various school councils have within the district while serving on the school council handbook working group. But she thinks that as the district edited it, they diminished the power of the school councils.

“It was a really solid document that we produced,” she said. “It’s been progressively watered down. In addition, it has not been effectively implemented across the district.”

Specifically, Bowers said that the district moved the authority to approve SIPs from the School Committee to the superintendent and changed the role of school councils to assisting the principal in creating SIPs, rather than advising the principal.

“They took out a lot of the language that gave councils some authority to determine how the school council made decisions,” Bowers said. “It took some authority away from the caregivers in the community and gave the power back to the administration.”

The district did not respond to a request for comment on the edits.

Bowers said the recent superintendent search also shaped her decision to run for School Committee, which she said had “a lack of emphasis on family and community involvement.” The superintendent search lasted for over one year, before the School Committee ultimately landed on then-interim superintendent David G. Murphy for the job.

Throughout the process, the Committee received waves of backlash from parents and teachers who felt their voices had been cast aside, and several groups, including the union representing CPS faculty and staff, called for the district to restart the search.

“All that drama drew energy and time away from the Committee and the community,” Bowers said. “It was just very demoralizing to watch.”

“The School Committee really has to rebuild trust, and I think that superintendent Murphy is in a good place to help reestablish that,” she added. “If I were elected, I don’t think I’d have any issues working with Mr. Murphy.”

Bowers said that as a parent in the district, she found it difficult to navigate resources for her children. She found course selection at CRLS “very confusing” and said that information on the school’s website was often out of date with current offerings at the school. Bowers said she authored the CRLS Family Guidebook — a resource for families explaining how to navigate CRLS’s opportunities — to help address the issue.

“When my kids were about to enter ninth grade, because I had one child coming from in the district and one coming from a charter, I was getting information at different times from different people in different ways, and it was just too much information,” Bowers said. “The written policy on the website did not match what actually happened with kids.”

She also closely followed the district’s issues while reporting on education with the Cambridge Day for five years. She hopes to leverage her experiences in journalism to bring a critical eye to the School Committee.

“I think that I can bring something to the Committee that includes the reporter’s skills of asking why, being curious, maybe being a little bit skeptical, and also digging for the reasons why decisions are made,” Bowers said.

Correction: October 30, 2025

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Alexandra G. Bowers said that the district published a handbook she worked on without School Committee approval. In fact, though a draft version of the handbook was publicly released earlier, the final version of the handbook was adopted by the School Committee, according to Bowers.

—Staff writer Ann E. Gombiner can be reached at annie.gombiner@thecrimson.com.