Student Exodus To Be Examined

Cambridge Public School Committee members questioned whether a proposed roundtable discussion on the system’s declining enrollment would detract from other pressing school issues at a meeting last night.

The motion to host the roundtable with the City Council, proposed by first-term committee members Luc Schuster and Patricia M. Nolan ’80, came in response to City Councillor Craig A. Kelley’s statment at a meeting of the city’s Finance Committee last Thursday that Cambridge could not continue to “pour money into a school system that is hemorrhaging students.”

Last week, the Finance Committee voted to put the school system’s budget before the full City Council for a vote, but only after the committee conducted a four-hour debate on the system’s inability to retain students.

Over the last two years, Cambridge schools have lost 755 students. This year, there are roughly 6,000 students enrolled in the district.

Schuster’s and Nolan’s motion ultimately passed on a 4-3 vote.

Nolan said the roundtable was necessary because the issue of declining enrollment had not been formally addressed on School Committee agendas.

“We have nibbled around the causes of this issue a lot,” she said. “We seem to have talked about it a lot but we have never come to a consensus.”

However, some committee members questioned the importance of conducting a roundtable discussion with the City Council in conjunction with a previously announced market study.

“I don’t know that some of this can’t be accomplished by the market study,” said committee member Richard Harding, who ultimately voted against the motion.

Other committee members said they were worried that continued discussions about declining enrollment could divert attention from other important issues that the committee should address.

“I think that this has the potential to derail a lot of other important things,” said committee member Nancy Walser, who also voted against the motion. She asked the committee to consider the issues of student achievement and the evaluation of the superintendent’s role in running the district. “I think we should concentrate on those issues.”

While Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 said he agreed with Walser, stating that he did not “know why who’s leaving is our biggest issue,” he also stated the importance of having an open dialogue between the City Council and the School Committee.

“There is a pent up desire [on the Council] to be a part of the solution,” he said.

The roundtable is scheduled to occur May 30.

—Staff writer Laura A. Moore can be reached at lamoore@fas.harvard.edu.