In contrast, the aura of academia still pervades the Peabody School, located on Linnean Street on the grounds of the Radcliffe Quad.

"Previous to desegregation every school had its own personality. By virtue of its location in the middle of academia, [Peabody] was a private school within the system," says Ellen M. Varella, acting principal of the Peabody School. "Even with desegregation, it still retains that flavor or reputation," Varella says.

Peabody School, for example, has the aura of a school for the affluent academic children even now, although as fourth grader Chloe A. Kandall says. "There is a mix of all different kids."

Peabody, a popular choice, boasts a K-3 model school for reading. The mainstay of this program is the school's Literacy Center, staffed with a early childhood specialist and part-time reading assistants for all first and second graders.

Peabody hosts an English as a Second Language Center and has facilities for special needs students, as well. "I think choice has really added for every school," Varella says. "There are so many children from different backgrounds...it probably wouldn't occur in a neighborhood school."

Socioeconomic Diversity?

Most people involved in the system seem to believe that the original aim, racial desegregation, has been achieved. But while colors may be mixed, economic distinctions blur less easily.

McGrath notes that when the original planners of the controlled choice broached the idea of socioeconomic integration more than 10 years ago, they were accused of "social engineering."

"How do you have a socioeconomic integration, as well? We are looking at that again," McGrath says. This year's incoming kindergarten class received a series of questions that addressed the child's parents' level of education and whether the child had attended pre-school, among other issues. The specific use that the answers to these questions will serve has not yet been decided.

"It's a tough issue--how do you really get at it?" McGrath said. "You can't just go with free and reduced lunch [statistics]."

Varella asks, "How can you judge [socioeconomic status]? If you base it on the lunch, I would say that 30 percent of the children that go here are economically needy."

"The [Graham and Parks] school has two classes--it has a large number of middle class parents and probably 40 percent of the people are working class or poor," Hudicourt-Barnes says. "I'm not sure that we know very well how to address everyone's problems."

Bolger, also of Graham and Parks, sees class as a variance in the level of access and awareness a person has to information, not by income level. "The class issue is real inequity...and not an easily resolvable one," Bolger says.

Currently, Cambridge's schools are balanced exclusively according to race.

Those involved in the system, from parents to administrators to the Superintendent of Schools herself, agree that class is an issue that has not yet been resolved by the current system of controlled choice, and that, so far, the means of addressing this gap have not been formulated.