When Cambridge resident Kara Keating Bench decided which elementary school to send her kids to, she was originally skeptical of the Kennedy-Longfellow School’s underperformance on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams.

“I remember going to look at the data back in 2015 when we’re probably making this decision, and being like, ‘Oh, wow, it’s a really low MCAS score compared to the other schools.’”

Despite her original hesitancy, she decided to send her child to the school because of its proximity to her family home — a decision which she now looks back on fondly.

“All of the teachers we’ve had have been really wonderful and absolutely invested in the students,” she said.

In December, the Cambridge School Committee voted unanimously to close K-Lo because of its persistent under enrollment and underperformance, describing the school’s situation as “untenable.”

As CPS moves to transition students to new schools, K-Lo parents and CPS staff said that the district’s controlled choice system — which allows parents to rank preferences for their children’s school— failed K-Lo. Even as K-Lo parents reported positive experiences with teachers and staff, they said the underenrollment created a negative perception of K-Lo, causing families to not rank the school.

CPS Interim Superintendent David G. Murphy said that it is impossible to find the “determinative factor” behind K-Lo’s historical struggle. But CPS parents and staff repeatedly said the system perpetuated K-Lo’s problem with under enrollment.

“The school itself is actually a lovely little secret of a school, but it was set up to fail,” Bench said.

‘A Vicious Cycle’

CPS has used controlled choice to sort its students since the 1980s, when the Cambridge School Committee voted to move away from a previous neighborhood model to desegregate the district.

According to the CPS website, the program has since shifted to emphasize “socioeconomic integration,” using data on students’ qualification for the federal free and reduced lunch program to determine their placement, alongside parent preferences.

“School assignments first aim to match families to their choices of school; however family choice is balanced against the district’s interest in creating equitable schools,” the website reads, citing gender and enrollment size balance as other factors considered.

But Paul Reville, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said that school choice systems often result in underenrollment at schools that do not meet the “needs” of many Cambridge residents.

“Your customers are voting with their feet and are saying that there isn’t a sufficient number — there isn’t a quorum, if you will — of residents of Cambridge who find this school to meet their standard,” he added.

Despite the system’s aim to achieve diversity in schools, Dan Monahan — the president of the Cambridge Education Association who has taught at CPS since 1997 — said the control choice system was not effective for K-Lo, exacerbating the school’s issues as enrollment declined.

“The failure of the control choice system is that it was supposed to keep all the school's demographics similar, and it has not done that,” he said.

The school primarily serves students of color, as well as English language learners, low income students, and individuals with disabilities. Nearly 90 percent of students classify as “high-needs” — the highest proportion of any school in the district.

Murphy said in an interview that the controlled school choice system is just “one variable in a complicated formula,” that impacts “almost all aspects” of CPS.

Murphy emphasized that while some of K-Lo’s issues can be pointed to the controlled choice system, that very system is also part of all of the high-performing CPS schools.

“We have schools that are really, truly thriving instructional communities who serve diverse populations,” he said. “I think that’s one of the things that’s sort of been lost in the broader conversation.”

But Monahan said the system created a “vicious cycle” for K-Lo, with under enrollment and low test scores contributing to Cambridge’s negative perception of the school, discouraging families from ranking the school.

Bench, the parent of a current first grader at K-Lo, agreed. She said that K-Lo has long suffered from a “reputation problem,” that “made it so that the people who lived in the neighborhood didn’t want to choose the school.”

“That just kind of became a vortex of people avoiding the school,” Bench added.

‘Equity Versus Equality’

Even as the under enrollment trend at K-Lo perpetuated, CPS continued to invest heavily in the school.

According to enrollment data and the summarized budget for the 2025 Fiscal Year, the district spent one of the largest amounts of money per pupil, as compared to other elementary schools in the district.

Despite this, parents and staff felt the district did not provide enough support.

Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern said K-Lo’s persistent underperformance boils down to an issue of equity. He said that schools serving a high-needs population, like K-Lo, deserve increased support from the district.

“Equal is treating everybody the same way,” he said. “Equity is giving everybody what they need to be successful.”

“Some schools are going to need more support than others,” he said. “I think there was a feeling that maybe K-Lo didn’t get as much support as it warranted, given the population that it was serving.”

According to Monahan, the district failed to provide an equitable amount of support for K-Lo teachers and students.

“Their students were high-needs, and that’s just overwhelming,” he said, noting that the CEA previously filed grievances with the district to get more support. While he said the district attempted to address the grievances, “it clearly has never been adequate.”

“They deserve much more support than they have gotten over the past several years,” Monahan said.

While Murphy said he could not speak to K-Lo’s historical issues, he said the district needed to be “vigilant about finding appropriate instructional synergies within school communities” when assigning programming.

K-Lo, which has the capacity to house 700 students, only serves 215 pupils in the current school year. According to data from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary education, the school has consistently fallen under its 700-student threshold for the past 30 years.

Murphy said that as CPS transitions K-Lo students to new schools, the district aims to put “the most students possible in positions to succeed, with a particular emphasis on students who qualify as high-need.”

“We have to be more thoughtful about how and where we organize programming to support our most vulnerable and high need students,” he said.

‘A Beacon of What Education Should Be’

Even as K-Lo struggled to meet district expectations on paper, families reported overwhelmingly positive experiences at the school.

Jia-Jing Lee, the parent of a K-Lo third grader, wrote in an email that “KLo stands as a beacon of what education should be.”

“It could have achieved even more with proper resources, yet despite challenges, its educators have gone above and beyond to support every student,” she added.

McGovern also spoke very highly of the education his kids received at K-Lo, saying that they “had a very good experience there.”

“I thought they received a quality education. The teachers were very caring and supportive,” he added.

Murphy emphasized that the closure of K-Lo does not reflect an issue with the individual school, but an issue in the district, saying that “the data does not speak to the level of care, of concern, of love that certainly our educators have for students,” he said.

“But the data does speak to how the school has been performing as an institution, and that’s something that as a district, we have to hold ourselves accountable for,” he added.

—Staff writer Ayaan Ahmad can be reached at ayaan.ahmad@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @AyaanAhmad2024.

—Staff writer Claire A. Michal can be reached at claire.michal@thecrimson.com.