Superintendent Suggests Cambridge May Close the Kennedy-Longfellow Elementary School

Cambridge Public Schools interim Superintendent David G. Murphy suggested the district may close the Kennedy-Longfellow School in East Cambridge during a School Committee meeting on Tuesday.

Rumors have swirled over the past month that the district might shutter K-Lo, a kindergarten through fifth grade school which has long suffered from low test scores and under enrollment. Murphy and other CPS officials have already held at least two meetings with teachers and parents at K-Lo to discuss concerns about the school’s performance.

At each meeting, CPS officials have faced questions from teachers and parents about whether the district is planning to shut down the school. Though Murphy has remained vague about his plans, the district has promised a “final decision” by January 2025.

“Status quo cannot continue” read one slide from a district presentation to parents on Monday, calling it “an untenable situation.”

The School Committee will have the final say over whether to close the school.

Though Murphy did not explicitly advocate for shuttering the school, some School Committee members got that impression at the meeting.

“I think what you’re ultimately recommending is that K-Lo, the Kennedy-Longfellow School, be closed,” committee member David J. Weinstein told Murphy.

In an email to K-Lo parents on Tuesday, Murphy acknowledged the ongoing discussions about the school’s future but wrote that K-Lo “will continue to operate through the course of the 2024-2025 school year.”

During Tuesday’s meeting, Murphy walked through the process of responsibly relocating students “in the event that we transition the Kennedy-Longfellow from its current structure as a K-5 school in a way that forces us to disperse students and staff to elsewhere in the district,” promising to put any displaced students into higher-achieving schools.

Committee members largely agreed with Murphy’s assessment that significant changes were necessary at K-Lo, with some members also suggesting that the district may need to close the school.

“As I just look at the general health of the school, I don’t understand how the school can survive,” school committee member Richard Harding, Jr. said.

Cambridge leaders gather for a school committee meeting Tuesday. At the meeting, school committee members wondered aloud whether the district needed to close K-Lo. By Elyse C. Goncalves

The prospect of K-Lo closing has left the school’s teachers uncertain about their future employment in Cambridge — especially as the city, which is facing financial strain, prepares for belt-tightening in fiscal year 2026. Funding for Cambridge Public Schools is the single biggest line item in the city’s budgets, at $268.25 million this year.

Cambridge Educators Association President Dan Monahan, who leads Cambridge’s union for teachers, said in an interview that teachers with “professional teacher status” — those who have taught for more than three years under their professional teachers license — will likely remain employed in the district.

However, teachers are not protected from layoffs caused by budgetary limitations, according to Monahan.

CPS spokesperson Lily Rivera wrote in an emailed statement on Wednesday that “the conversation regarding the Kennedy-Longfellow school and the systemic factors contributing to the schools performance is extensive and ongoing.”

Rivera said that the district expects to present its recommendations for K-Lo’s future at the Dec. 17 School Committee meeting.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Murphy and the committee members said K-Lo suffered from a vicious cycle of under enrollment and an over-concentration of the district’s most vulnerable and high-needs students, which contributed to the school having a negative reputation among CPS parents.

While discussing the challenges facing K-Lo, Murphy partially blamed the city’s controlled choice system, which allows parents to rank their preferred schools for Kindergarten enrollment. The school’s poor reputation has made it the least-demanded school on average among parents for the last 10 years.

K-Lo’s English Language Arts results on the 2024 Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System were the lowest in the district, with only 17 percent of students meeting or exceeding expectations.

The school was also an outlier in its student demographics, with high needs enrollment — which includes students who are low-income, English learners or former English learners, or who have disabilities — comprising 86 percent of students. One-fifth of students at the K-Lo are homeless, more than double that of any other school in the district, according to the city.

“I don’t want an over-concentration of high need programs in individual schools,” Murphy said at the meeting. “I don’t want the most vulnerable students in the district being put over and over again in the most challenging learning environments that we have.”

But parents and teachers take pride in the school’s “safe space” for the city’s particularly vulnerable students and families. Several teachers expressed concern for students who may not be prioritized if they are spread out in schools across the city.

At the School Committee meeting, Murphy said the district took responsibility for the challenges facing K-Lo.

“This is a Cambridge Public Schools crisis, not a Kennedy-Longfellow crisis,” he said. “But that requires the development of a Cambridge Public Schools solution.”

—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.