Ruth Ryan Allen

Register Forum: What distinguishes you from the other ten School Committee candidates?

Ruth Ryan Allen: There are 2 topics that are really important to me. Number one being special education, because I’ve been on the special ed parent advisory committee for 2 years, and have been active in the special ed PAC for a while, and I’m a parent and there are only a few of us that are parents. The second part is that I’m the only one that is talking about getting career paths for the kids that don’t relate to college. We need to get multiple unions, the plumbers union, the woodworkers union, the carpentry union in to actually make a career path for everybody that doesn’t want to go to college. Those are two things that really distinguish me. 

RF: How do you think the School Committee could become more effective?

RRA: By actually listening. The forum was one of the best things that we had. Not only that, but just having the power to implement things quickly.

RF: How are you aiming to close the achievement gap?

RRA: We need to address the achievement gap at a much younger age than we are now. We need to get reading specialists in the pre-K and Kindergarten grades. Testing in pre-K and kindergarten for things like dyslexia, and actually having an action plan for those kids and those parents to educate them as to what it is and what we need to do to start them out at an even base, so that way we won’t be working with as much of an achievement gap later on. 

RF: What do you see as a strength of Cambridge Public Schools that the committee could emphasize and what do you see as a weakness in CPS that the committee could fix?

RRA: I think one of the strengths is that they have really good teachers that really want to work with the kids and have very creative ideas. One of the weaknesses is that they are stretched too thin and a lot of times the principals are the ones directing the schools, and sometimes the teachers aren’t listened to so they don’t have the support. We need actually look at the exit interviews to figure out why these really good teachers are leaving.

RF: What are your thoughts on the deleveling of classes and the whole CP, Honors, and AP system? In my experience, there’s a disparity between who gets to take honors classes and who doesn’t, and many black kids are often shut out of these classes. Do you think it needs to be improved? What do you think should be done to improve it?

RRA: I think that to start, I support what they’re doing now, where they are putting more kids into the honors classes and honors option classes, and I know that some of the kids in those classes feel that the classes are not asking them to go up to what their potential is, but I think there has been such a disparity for so long, that we need to start making that change to the gap so that anybody can take whatever class they want and have the support in those classes to match their learning style. I think we are 2 different high schools, I really do. There is some for the kids that came from, for example, Shady Hill and BB&N and they continue with the same level of classes, whereas the kids that are struggling are put into CP, and there is no middle of the road, so it is either Honors or CP. I think they’re starting to level up, which is wonderful. I think we need to do more of it but I think there needs to be more support for students. Also, these classes can not be as large as they are. In order for this to really work, we need to look at even decreasing the teacher/student ratio to give everybody the same opportunity to access curriculums. Some people learn differently, and it doesn’t mean that they are higher achievers or lower achievers. It means that they just learn differently. Our classrooms have got to start adapting to that. The one thing that I panic about is that we need to maintain the same enrichment in these classes that are being deleveled. We should have better expectations of all of our students, and I think that sometimes they don’t and that is one of the big things that we need to be working on. We should be requiring excellence of our kids. We should expect no less, and they should expect no less. 

RF: How can we deal with the issue of overcrowding in the high school?

RRA: We have to start getting more creative in Cambridge in general because we only have so much space. We really need to get more creative, whether that be staggering days, or staggering times so that it frees up classrooms. Maybe some of the studios that we have that aren’t being used all the time could be used for cross-functional things. It is not going to be overnight, but we have to start thinking outside of the box because you have so many kids and so many classrooms. You have, say, 100 classrooms and you have 2000 kids. What are you gonna do? Well, of course, those are going to be bigger classes, but if we can utilize what we have and use other spaces it would be so much better. It is not going to be overnight. But here is the reality. The reality is the School Committee is only two-year flexibility. The hard part is you start making these plans and assessments, and by the second year, you are starting to campaign for the next term. So technically, what I think we should be doing is putting in for a three-year School Committee, so that you can start the planning, implement the plans, and actually get stuff working within a year or two. But here’s the bottom line. I don’t think we have done a great job with the middle school, and I don’t think you all are as prepared going into the high school as you should be. I think that is where a lot of the achievement gap happened too. So if we don’t get stuff done in the early times, which is Pre-K to 3rd grade. Then you’re doing catch-up from 3rd grade to 5th, and if you don’t catch up within that time, middle school can be kind of difficult. The bottom line is that your School Committee, whoever it is going to be, has to work as a team to do this and they can’t be doing what they have been doing for the past couple of years. It’s a lot of in-fighting. The bottom line is that, believe it or not, the Cambridge School Committee is a paid job, so you better come and you better work on doing stuff! It’s like a 39,000 dollar job. So don’t make the excuses that “we can’t do this, we can’t do that”. You’re getting paid. That is more than I make now in a year, and I own my own business and I don’t make that money. The School Committee itself has got to work as a team with ourselves. We can’t be fighting, because it doesn’t do the team any good and it doesn’t do you guys any good. 

RF: How do you intend to balance the needs of teachers, students, administrators, and other committee members?

RRA: I think open forums are great. I don’t like all these subcommittee things where nobody gets to… I mean I think subcommittees are great to get the information, there is obviously a need for it, but we can’t just do subcommittees. We have to actually go to the schools, and we also have to do forums to open it up. I don’t want to be politically incorrect, but basically we have to have the teachers open up to us. Right now I think sometimes if a teacher does open up they are looked down upon, and that is not right either. There has to be a trust factor with the teachers, where if they tell us something and we work on it, it can be done, and I think it can be done. They need to trust us again, too. As far as our committee goes, I know that some of the new people that are going for the job. I do have to say, that for the new people coming in, we all see what’s happened and I think the reason we are running is a good reason. I mean, we are all different but we all seem to get along very well and we are appreciative of each other and that is a big thing. The teachers and the staff have to feel appreciated, too. And that is gonna float down too because if the teachers are happy, they will be able to feel the need to be more creative and the classes are going to be better.

RF: My final question is about IEPs. I just want to know what your thoughts are on them and how you will prioritize them in Cambridge. 

RRA: The IEP procedure and the legal IEP that we have to deal with now… If you’ve seen an IEP, you look at it, and it is a document, it could be 12 pages, it could be 30 pages, but it is so technical. And I know why they do it, it’s a legal form, but parents, especially parents that have kids that need a little bit more support, a lot of the parents don’t know how to read those. They sit in these meetings, and, first of all, you don’t get the IEP until the day of the meeting a majority of the time, and then you don’t even know what questions to ask. You are totally in the hands of the administrators or “the team”. So the first thing that I would do is request that the team make it easier reading for the IEP. Make it so that someone can pick it up and read it, or have a shortened form of it. Definitely have the backup that we need, the legal one, but actually do a short form. Say, this is where my child is now, these are his/her levels, this is the grade level that he/she is, this is the grade level that we want her to be in, and this is what we feel is going to get them to that level. And we are going to watch it and ask the teacher or the team what the progress is. We shouldn’t be waiting a whole year for progress. We should be waiting, maybe until a 3-month check-in. If they’re on target, great, then you go to the next 3 months. But to find out after a year that they have made 2 months of progress, that is a horrible thing for a parent. We really need to get more familiar with it, and we need to get ahead of it, and the fact that we are waiting until our children are 2 or 3 years behind before these IEPs are implemented, or before they are even tested is not working. That is what has been happening. But, right now there was a state mandate that there is a screening for dyslexia that all children need to take. We now have tests that see if kids in Pre-K to see if they are going to have a tendency to have dyslexia. We can implement teaching and curriculum to correct that. That child should be on an IEP all the way through so that we can take a look at their progress. The problem is that there is a stigma on having an IEP, and in reality, it is not anything but a support tool, and that is how it should be implemented. Culturally, we have people coming in from all over the world into Cambridge, so some people are very hesitant to say that their son or daughter has some learning issues, because in their culture it makes the child less than, and they won’t even admit it. But in reality, that IEP is just a tool for that child to be able to learn in the way that they need to be taught. So we have to take that stigma around “special-ed” or “IEPs” or “these are the kids that are on IEPs” because it just means you learn in a different way. 

I know I say a lot, but that is why I’m running, because I’m really passionate about getting a lot of things in, and actually working. In and working. Because it just needs to be done. But I am so grateful that you guys have this forum. I think this is spectacular and I think we should have more things like this because it really helps dialogue.