Cambridge Lacks a Permanent Superintendent. The School Committee Is in No Rush.

The Cambridge School Committee lacks a permanent superintendent — or any plan to identify and hire one. But it’s not in any rush.

For the fourth time, the committee punted deciding a timeline for the superintendent search at a meeting last Tuesday. Explaining the delay, Mayor E. Denise Simmons pledged to discuss the search at an upcoming special meeting, which will be open to the public.

No such meeting is currently listed on the Cambridge Public School website.

Still, committee members set for a roundtable with Glenn Koocher ’71 — the executive director of Massachusetts Association of School Committees and a former Cambridge School Committee member — to discuss best practices for superintendent searches. The discussion gave a glimpse into how the closely watched search process might shape up.

Koocher urged the committee to make community engagement and input central to the search — echoing a call from many parents and advocates who are hoping for a greater voice in the process.

“When you start a search and you're looking for a candidate, you want to confer with your community and find out what the community is looking for,” Koocher said. “What are they looking for professionally? What are they looking for personally?”

He also encouraged parents and other interested residents to apply to serve on the search committee, suggesting also that the committee seek out greater community feedback by sending out online surveys to Cambridge families, in addition to holding in-person community meetings.

Following former superintendent Victoria L. Greer’s early contract termination, several parents expressed a desire for a national superintendent search.

While committee members discussed details of hypothetical out-of-state candidates visiting Cambridge, Koocher said that relocating families across state lines can be arduous — adding that for educators nationwide, the Massachusetts Department of Education doesn’t exactly have a great reputation.

Though the past three superintendents — Greer, Kenneth N. Salim, and Jeffrey M. Young — were all hired from within Massachusetts, previous superintendents have been hired from Indiana, Florida, and Rhode Island.

At the meeting, committee members did not dismiss the possibility of an “internal candidate” being promoted to superintendent — a phenomenon that regularly occurs during superintendent searches, according to Koocher.

“About a third of our districts will just make an internal promotion and move on and usually there’s no problem with the community,” Koocher said. “In about a third of our districts, the district conducts a search — a formal search — for the process and promotes someone internally.”

And in an interview with The Crimson last month, interim Superintendent David G. Murphy did not take himself out of the running.

“Whether I’m a candidate or not, I think it’s just way too soon for me to really think about that,” he said at the time.

At the roundtable, Koocher also suggested two timeline possibilities for the committee: “start pretty quickly” and begin screening candidates in January, or maintain an interim superintendent, plan throughout summer, and begin the interview process in September.

Koocher warned that under the former option, the committee runs “the risk that the best candidates will be already selected by the districts that are starting their searches.” Superintendents are generally hired in December, according to the MASC.

Committee member Rachel B. Weinstein expressed support for a December 2025 hiring decision, with community engagement in the spring and a posting in August.

“The more we talk about all the steps we want to take and how thorough we want to be, the more I think that we can’t rush this,” she said.

“You said December 2025? I’m alright with that,” said Simmons, who has previously expressed a preference for a longer search process.

“This is going to be the most important thing we do this term. Let’s give it the due service and time that it needs,” she added.

—Staff writer Darcy G Lin can be reached at darcy.lin@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Emily T. Schwartz can be reached at emily.schwartz@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @EmilySchwartz37