Chalkbeat

Thousands of Philadelphia students are owed special education services from the pandemic

2024-03-07T23:26:49+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

The Philadelphia school district has fallen way behind schedule in providing thousands of students in special education with extra services they did not receive during the pandemic, according to state officials.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education first directed the district to provide compensatory services to students in June after receiving a complaint from the Education Law Center on behalf of families.

According to the complaint, some parents and guardians were still unaware their children were entitled to extra help more than a year after students returned to in-person instruction. Families and advocates fear that many of these students may have suffered lasting damage.

“These are students who were most harmed by 15 to 18 months out of school,” said Margie Wakelin, senior attorney at the law center.

Wakelin said students didn’t receive the math tutoring, speech therapy, intensive phonics instruction, emotional support services, or other interventions that their education plans require.

In a review dated February 23 responding to the complaint, state officials found that the district has for the most part identified the students who need to be evaluated for compensatory services, but likely made decisions about what they were entitled to without properly consulting parents as required.

After analyzing 50 randomly chosen cases from four elementary schools in one of the district’s 16 learning networks, the state found only four in which the required meetings with families had occurred – yet the district made eligibility determinations in 44 of the cases.

“Not everybody is necessarily eligible, but meetings are supposed to happen to determine whether they are entitled to services,” Wakelin said.

The state ordered the district to submit evidence by April 5 that they have followed all the requirements for determining need and are providing appropriate services.

District says they face shortage of special education teachers

The closure of in-person school between March 2020 and September 2021 most severely affected students with disabilities who have either individualized education plans or 504 plans, according to the law center’s complaint. Individualized education plans, which are created by a team of school officials and parents, spell out services to which students are entitled, while 504 plans guarantee accommodations for students with conditions that could interfere with their learning.

The complaint relied on guidance from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights on what districts must do to ensure that all children, regardless of disability, receive a “free and appropriate public education.”

The district received about $528 million in federal COVID relief funding, which was meant to help address learning loss, but budget materials for this fiscal year don’t mention compensatory services as a priority. District officials did estimate in one undated request for proposal that they would need to provide services to as many as 40% of the roughly 22,000 students with disabilities who were eligible. They expected to provide the services between January 2022 and June 2024.

In a statement issued Wednesday, district officials said that they are “working to remediate educational learning loss” from the pandemic, despite a “national shortage of qualified special education teachers and related service providers.” The district opened the school year with 200 teacher vacancies.

The statement also noted that Nathalie Nérée, who has experience in several other large districts including Chicago and Broward County, Florida, became chief of special education and diverse learners at the beginning of this school year.

Under her leadership, the district “is looking forward to building transparent, collaborative and positive relationships with our families, community partners and advocacy groups as we reimagine special education for students in Philadelphia.”

Families have found it difficult to get services

Many families in the school district have found the process to get compensatory services frustrating and have sought help from the Education Law Center.

Yolanda Workman said she and her daughter met with school officials in January on Zoom to discuss services for her grandson, a fifth grader at Emlen Elementary School in Mount Airy who has been diagnosed with a learning disability. The school’s special education liaison didn’t give them much of a chance to speak, she said, and then told them that the child was not entitled to extra services. The liaison also urged them to sign a legal document confirming that.

Workman said they refused to sign and told the liaison they planned to contact an attorney. A few weeks later, they received notice that her grandson was entitled to 75 hours of compensatory services.

But neither Workman nor her daughter could say whether he was receiving the services, or what form they were taking.

Colleen Gibbons-Brown, a special education teacher for ninth and 10th graders at Strawberry Mansion High School, said that she has not seen much evidence that students are getting extra services, or that parents and caregivers have been consulted about what students need and how best to provide it.

“From what I have seen, decisions are not made as a team, but by network case managers and some administrators,” she said. “They are making a call, then informing the parents, [thus] removing parents, teachers and even students from that decision.”

At her school, she said the process for deciding whether a student qualified for extra services was hasty and flawed. For instance, invitation letters for parents to meetings about their child were generated the same day that some of the meetings were scheduled. “I’m listed as being part of the team, and I know I wasn’t attending the meetings,” she said.

One of Gibbons-Brown’s colleagues, who is also the mother of a student with disabilities, said she had no idea that compensatory services were available, even though she works in the district. The child, now 10, had not learned to read and exhibited serious behavioral issues that were exacerbated during the pandemic.

“I never heard about compensatory services,” said the teacher, who asked not to be identified to protect her child’s privacy.

She contacted a lawyer, who helped her enroll her child in an approved private school, a common alternative for students whose education plans cannot be fulfilled within the district.

Wakelin said that the law center’s goal is to compel district officials to focus on alternatives to private services, which are expensive and tend to favor parents who are savvy in navigating the system.

Meeting this mandate also falls disproportionately on some public schools. For instance, at Strawberry Mansion, a neighborhood school in impoverished North Philadelphia, 43% of its 250 students are classified as needing special education. The citywide figure is 19%.

Determining services for students is complex

Calculating what is owed to each student and then providing services is a daunting task, Gibbons-Brown said. Still, she said her school’s process didn’t consider what progress students might have made if not for the pandemic’s disruption.

If a student had not regressed beyond what they had scored pre-COVID, it was decided they didn’t need services, she said. But that doesn’t take into account any progress they should have made since.

“Analyzing the impact of COVID is more nuanced than that quick comparison,” she said. “I have students, based on one data point now and for 2019, that may look like there is no regression. Maybe not, but their progress has stalled.”

Wakelin said the process is “now in the do-over period and we’re trying to get the word out to families so they know that their children have this right.”

As complex as the task is, “it’s not like there aren’t other large urban districts that have grappled with this and come up with solutions compliant with the law,” she said.

Wakelin said the district still has not taken basic steps to reach families, saying “there’s nothing on the website, no fact sheets for parents, and minimal information provided to teachers.

“We want kids to get services, not just a ruling that this child is eligible for 50 hours they are not able to use.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia schools’ post-holiday mask mandate meets with support or shrugs

2023-01-05T16:52:18+00:00

Philadelphia public schools reopened this week with a requirement that students and staffers wear masks for two weeks to prevent the spread of COVID and other respiratory viruses.

The rule makes the district a distinct outlier: Fewer than 1% of school districts in the country now have mask mandates, according to the data-tracking firm Burbio. That’s down from more than 60% in the fall of 2021.

Unlike at the start of the year, when the masking policy sparked fierce criticism, school officials said they hadn’t heard much about it upon the return from winter break. But there were at least a few prominent signs of pushback: Officials found anti-mask messages painted outside two South Philadelphia elementary schools Wednesday morning. The district had them removed the same day, officials said, and police are reportedly investigating.

Yet even parents who disagree with the need for 10 days of masking are largely resigned to the policy, said Rahul Ganesan, whose children attend Meredith and Masterman.

“In practice, within the schools, I don’t think it’s so stringent that teachers are like, ‘Put the mask on or leave,’” said Ganesan, who questioned the policy at the start of the year.

Ganesan noted that schools made it through December with minimal disruptions without masking. Still, he added, “I think parents are apathetic at this point. It’s no big deal. It’s 10 days.”

An anti-mask message greets students near a school in Philadelphia. The city school district is an outlier for requiring students and staff to wear masks for 10 days following the holiday break.

Dr. Kendra McDow, the school district’s medical officer, said that she had not heard of issues in any schools regarding compliance with the mask mandate. Teachers returned to school Tuesday and students on Wednesday.

McDow said there were scattered reports from staff members Tuesday of positive COVID tests, but nothing that required pausing in-person learning. So far, “we haven’t seen any clusters” of cases, she said.

Robin Cooper, who heads Teamsters Local 502, Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, said she had heard nothing from principals about issues related to masking.

District spokeswoman Christina Clark noted that students at several high schools had been wearing masks even when there was no requirement. And Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan said the district’s policy “makes sense” to combat COVID as well as RSV and the flu.

“We have always fought for a multifaceted strategy to mitigation, and a two-week mask policy as a layered mitigation measure is pragmatic,” Jordan said.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

What Philadelphia parents need to know about masking and COVID testing

2022-08-25T16:38:05+00:00

Philadelphia public school students and staffers will have to mask up for the first 10 days of the school year as a “precaution” aimed at avoiding widespread COVID outbreaks, said Kendra McDow, the district’s medical officer.

In a detailed justification of the district’s mask and other virus policies, McDow said the district decided on its course of action policy because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends masking for 10 days after exposure to the virus or a positive test, she said. Masks will also be required for 10 days after extended breaks.

Officials considered testing as an alternative to masking, but decided to go with masks as an intervention that could be implemented more rapidly than complicated testing requirements, McDow told Chalkbeat.

“The focus of our district is to keep kids in school, and we want to make sure there are very limited disruptions this first month of school,” McDow said. “We know kids are coming from being out, at summer camp, with friends and family, with multigenerational family gatherings taking place. The first day of school they’ll be transitioning to being indoors, in close quarters and in tight quarters.”

Philadelphia, which shared its school masking and other COVID policies with the public earlier this month, looks increasingly like an outlier: Most school districts around the country have loosened mask requirements for the coming school year. Some have criticized the district for the mandate and have questioned the science behind it, but others believe it’s a safe and rational response to the virus.

The district is stepping up efforts to share information about its decisions and provide information to parents. In a recent webinar for parents, for example, district procurement manager Christopher Holt said the district has supplies of three-ply masks for adults and children, as well as N-95 masks, which will be required for anyone returning to school after a bout with COVID.

And Shannon Smith, director of nursing for the district, encouraged parents to consult school nurses if they have questions about masking.

Testing will be available in schools during outbreaks and for symptomatic students, and the district will provide students with test kits.

While the Centers for Disease Control puts Philadelphia at a “medium” level for COVID transmission, the level could in fact be higher, McDow said. A decrease in testing and an increased reliance on unreported, over-the-counter tests means there could be asymptomatic or mild cases or exposures that aren’t being counted, she said.

Moreover, COVID outbreaks tend to rise around holiday or vacation periods, she said.

Federally funded Head Start and preschool programs will require masks for all teachers and staff. Tracey Petty, school health services coordinator for the district’s prekindergarten programs, said that to be consistent, state-funded programs in Philadelphia schools will follow that mandate as well.

Despite the opposition from some quarters, McDow said research has shown that masks work, and that the chances of transmission are higher around holiday periods.

She pointed to a 2022 study that found school districts with universal mask policies had lower levels of transmission than those in which masks were optional. And data from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia PolicyLab found increased COVID positivity rates around the 2021 holidays, she said.

Philadelphia is a diverse district in a large urban center, and “we really need to take into account the varying health conditions and needs of our students and staff,” McDow said. A high percentage of students in the district are obese or have other medical conditions that could put them at increased risk for severe complications from COVID, she said.

The policies and the mindset behind them are oriented around a major goal, McDow said: “We really are focused on keeping children in school so they can get in-person learning.”

‘Holding their feet to the fire’ on COVID rules

There are disparate views in the district about the wisdom of the new policies, particularly when it comes to masks, and how long they’ll last.

“We’re about to put 30-plus kids in a classroom and they haven’t been around each other,” said Trina Dean, an executive board member of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and academic coach in the district. “I think masking for the first 10 days is just safer.”

In a statement, PFT President Jerry Jordan said the 10-day mandate was a “very brief period of masking” that would have a positive long-term impact. He said he was “cautiously optimistic” that following the first 10 days of school, further mandates won’t be necessary.

But Rahul Ganesan, who has a child entering kindergarten at the William M. Meredith K-8 school and another starting fifth grade at the Julia Reynolds Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School, said he’s concerned that the mask requirement will pop up again during the year, and that the district won’t rely on sound metrics for determining infection levels.

Ganesan said he’s “hopeful” the district will listen to parents and take changing conditions into account as the school year progresses.

“People have to keep questioning and holding their feet to the fire a little bit,” said Ganesan, who framed the policy as an “equity issue” holding Philadelphia students to a separate standard from their peers in other districts.

Not all parents oppose the masking plan.

“COVID is still a threat, and I’d rather err on the side of caution,” said Catherine Collins, the parent of a Masterman senior.

“I think the lack of adequate ventilation and the poor condition of Philly’s public schools is a much bigger health threat,” Collins also said. “Our government’s COVID response has brought to light what many public school parents and staff have suspected for a long time: These buildings are unsafe for our children and for anyone required to work in them.”

Philadelphia makes student masking mandatory for first 10 days of school

2022-08-12T20:40:16+00:00

Masking will be mandatory for Philadelphia students for the first 10 days of the upcoming school year that starts on Aug. 29, after which it will be “optional but strongly encouraged” for much of the rest of the school year, district officials announced Friday.

However, masking will also be mandatory for 10 days after extended breaks during the school year.

As part of its COVID protocols for the 2022-23 school year, the district is also requiring all new teachers to be vaccinated as a condition of employment, but is not extending the mask mandate to teachers currently employed.

The district’s chief medical officer, Dr. Kendra McDowell, said the protocols follow the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meaning the rules could change based on the levels of community transmission.

Right now, that level in Philadelphia is “medium,” she said. If it changes to “high,” masking will be mandatory for students and staff.

Masking will be required for the first 10 days of the school year, from Aug. 29 through Sept. 9, because students are just coming off summer vacation.

“This is an extra precaution for everyone’s health and well being since increased end-of-summer social gatherings may heighten the risk of exposure to Covid-19,” said McDowell, who is a pediatrician and an epidemiologist.

The masking protocols also apply to school buses.

If there are local outbreaks in a school or classroom, universal masking may be imposed, McDowell said. And regardless of the overall transmission level, pre-kindergarten and Head Start students and staff will be required to mask at all times.

Both she and Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr. said at a press conference the district is “determined to keep students in school for in person learning” after significant disruptions for the past three school years.

The district is reducing its quarantine requirement for students and staff who test positive for coronavirus from 10 days to five days, following new guidelines from Philadelphia Department of Public Health and the CDC. Students who have been exposed to COVID but are asymptomatic will not have to quarantine, but rather can “mask to stay” for 10 days.

While vaccination for students and staff is optional but strongly recommended, new teachers are being required to be vaccinated against the coronavirus as a condition of employment under a Board of Education resolution passed last October.

Staff are required to report their vaccination status. If vaccinated employees need to quarantine due to exposure to COVID, they can use paid quarantine leave instead of sick days. Those who are unvaccinated, however, must dip into their sick days.

McDowell said 89% of staff members are vaccinated, but that percentage will increase as new staff come aboard. It is holding a series of vaccine events for students and staff.

“We are working with the (Philadelphia health department) and its immunization program to get that information on how many are fully vaccinated and will have that information shortly,” McDowell said.

Last year, the district required student athletes and those in performing arts activities to be vaccinated, but this year it is dropping that requirement, McDowell said, based on guidance from the city health department.

”Moving in that direction overall comes from our local health authorities and the city as well, and we wanted to make sure we are equitably applying the vaccine mandate across the board,” she said.

“Test to play” in sports and the arts will no longer be required of unvaccinated students. But they will be required to wear their masks during games and performances, according to the district’s guidelines.

In preparation for the opening of school, buildings are being thoroughly cleaned, with no-touch hydration and sanitation stations, as was the case last year. All classrooms will have air purifiers to enhance ventilation, Watlington said, as was the case last year.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, issued a statement generally supporting the district’s guidelines. He emphasized the district’s recognition that “masking requirements need to remain fluid” and its focus on monitoring and improving ventilation.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Advocacy group: Philly children need new wave of resources to overcome COVID

2022-08-08T23:23:34+00:00

Philadelphia’s children need a stronger public health care system, more robust government benefits, and more funding for school staff to counteract the long-term impacts of the pandemic, an advocacy group declared Monday in a new report.

Children First’s “COVID’s Impact on Philadelphia Children: The Case for an Ambitious Rebound,” reveals the setbacks Philadelphia students endured since schools were forced to shut down in-person classes in 2020, and recommended steps to remedy the damage that fell mostly on Black and Latino students.

The group, formerly known as Public Citizens for Children and Youth, also mentioned in its presentation that the pandemic’s negative effects have ranged from an increase in youth seeking suicide prevention to a spike in gun violence, which remains the number one cause of death for children over 15 in the city.

Federal policy did help lift over 16,000 children out of poverty in the city in the first year of the shutdown of in-person learning, the group noted. And Philadelphia families are vaccinating their children at a faster rate than other parents across the state.

But to counteract COVID’s effects and shield children from the next public health crisis, officials must improve the quality and accessibility of things like behavioral health services and child care, Children First said.

“COVID was a calamity and affected every one of our lives,” said Donna Cooper, the group’s executive director. “But our children continue to face persistent structural challenges to their safety, their physical well being and their mental health and well being.”

Child care, behavioral health are key

The Children First report highlighted several issues that caused acute problems for the city’s children, as well as recommendations to ameliorate the problems in light of COVID. In several instances, the group’s proposals call for government officials to prioritize children when deciding where to spend public money.

For example, as of September 2021, there were approximately 1,500 fewer child care workers in Philadelphia than before the pandemic; nearly a year ago, child care staff were earning 19% less than employees at big box retail stores or fast food franchises, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That wage gap and other factors, including the prohibitive cost for many families, led many child care centers to shut their doors.

Children First said that in response, federal and state lawmakers should provide the funding and resources necessary to make child care and pre-kindergarten affordable and accessible to more families, and to ensure families aren’t shut out of those services by inflation.

The group also wants people to pressure the federal government to reenact the expanded Child Care Tax Credit.

Children First also pointed to two K-12 issues, the teaching workforce and internet access, where more can and must be done.

The district stopped in-person classes in 2020 between March and June, and virtual learning remained in place for much of the 2020-21 school year. But district schools had neither the inventory of computers nor the technological capacity to quickly make the shift to virtual learning.

And according to a Pew Research study, about one in three students in the district — where 74% of students are from low-income households and 86% are students of color — did not have high-speed internet access, a key factor for the viability of virtual learning.

Philadelphia made some strides in providing more students with internet access during the pandemic, such as through the PHLConnectED program. But interruptions in learning driven by internet-related problems contributed to children’s academic struggles.

Children First wants state lawmakers to provide sufficient funds so that every school in the city can provide every student with a computer and, where necessary, free or affordable internet access.

But despite these efforts, the interruption of learning exacerbated the educational gaps across school districts in the state, hitting Philadelphia hard.

Once federal COVID relief funding for schools is used up in the next several years, the group said Philadelphia will likely have to boost class sizes because the district won’t have sufficient funds to hire new teachers, given the shortage.

To help undo COVID’s impact on the teaching profession, state lawmakers should provide enough funding so that each school can afford to hire an ample number of teachers, the report said.

Children First also offered proposals related to children’s mental well-being, as well as the city’s overall approach to public health issues.

For example, the city must work to close racial and economic gaps in behavioral health services

In addition, Children First said those officials should find ways to offer preventative mental health resources, mental health first aid, and therapeutic support for children in their communities.

The group said the city should craft a strategy to make sure children are better protected the next time a health emergency like the pandemic strikes. And Children First said the city must track COVID’s continuing impact on children and work to ensure they are vaccinated against COVID and other diseases.

As part of Monday’s presentation of its report, Children First invited a panel of leaders and students, including Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington and Dr. Ala Stanford, founder of the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, to discuss what to do next.

“The biggest lesson for the children, I’ll say, is to come through on the other side [of the pandemic], as a senior as a junior, you acquired skills that you didn’t even know you had that are going to propel you stronger and further than many,” Stanford said.

Watlington said he thinks technology could be a key factor in any turnaround for students. “It’s important for us to realize that we have this once in a lifetime opportunity to totally transform how we use technology as a learning tool,” he said.

Bureau Chief Johann Calhoun covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. He oversees Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s education coverage. Contact Johann at jcalhoun@chalkbeat.org.

Mrs. Dee opened a Philly child care center mid-pandemic. It’s been hard.

2022-07-15T16:06:47+00:00

Last August, Adeola Ileyemi opened a child care center in a former barber shop building she found advertised on Craigslist.

Today, DeeGrace Child Care Center in North Philadelphia enrolls 29 young children and has a staff of seven. In one sense, it’s a success story: a fledgling small business forging ahead at a time when many child care providers have called it quits.

But it hasn’t been easy. Ileyemi, who the children call Mrs. Dee, has lost 10 employees in her first 10 months, and so far hasn’t paid herself a salary. Her husband’s marriage counseling work barely pays the family’s bills.

A month after Ileyemi started her center, Monique Jones closed the original location of her own child care business — Lovie Lee’s Stars of Tomorrow, a longstanding and highly rated child care program about a mile away from DeeGrace.

Jones didn’t exit the sector entirely. Her other child care center four blocks away remains open, and she holds out hope that one day she may reopen the shuttered site.

Ileyemi and Jones provide a snapshot of the child care sector’s difficult comeback after more than two years of COVID safety rules, staff shortages, and financial strain. Ileyemi is among 141 Philadelphia child care providers who opened their doors during the second year of the pandemic — 15 more than than did so the previous year. While that small bump is a good sign, the city still saw a net loss of providers in both years because more closed than opened.

Before the pandemic, child care closures often stemmed from a provider’s changing life circumstances. Perhaps a retirement, the sale of a business, or a new career path, said Diane Getzinger, an assistant director at the Early Learning Resource Center in Philadelphia, which is part of a network of centers across Pennsylvania that helps parents find and pay for child care and helps providers improve their quality.

But in the past two years, more closures are directly related to financial hardship. They feel a lot more personal.

“Now, we’re hearing from people who are struggling to hold on,” Getzinger said.

Jones, 43, is one of them. She shuttered the original Lovie Lee’s site for financial and logistical reasons. The decision was bittersweet.

Although Jones still operates the larger center, she started her career at the original location when she was a teenager and her mother ran the business.

“That is my history. That is the foundation of Lovie Lee,” she said. “That was like closing a chapter in my life.”

Dissatisfaction seeded a dream

Ileyemi, 39, is an upbeat mother of four originally from Nigeria. She immigrated to the United States when she was 26 and earned a culinary arts degree in Ohio. Until last August, she made good money working at a nursing home and delivering groceries through Instacart.

She decided to open DeeGrace because she was dissatisfied with the experience her daughter, now 6, and her son, now 5, had in child care and preschool. She also has 3-year-old twins.

It seemed to her that a lot of programs simply handed out coloring sheets and did little to engage children in early literacy and math activities. She wanted her center to be different.

“It’s all about learning and learning and learning.“ she said. “‘There’s so many ways you can do math with the kids, with toys, simple, simple things.”

After scouring online real estate ads, she found a space she liked on West Nedro Avenue, next to a stone church and across from an apartment complex. An unexpected $50,000 windfall from Ileyemi’s late father’s estate provided the funds she needed to cover start-up costs, including finishing the building’s basement so it could be used for a preschool classroom.

“I was so happy,” she said about receiving the money. “That’s God’s blessing.”

It took months for her to complete all the paperwork, including submitting a second application because she’d indicated incorrectly on the original one that she didn’t plan to use the building’s basement space.

On a recent Friday morning, Ileyemi accompanied a gaggle of 4-year-olds on a walk in the neighborhood. They talked about trees, plants, cars, and why so many trash cans were sitting in the street.

When the garbage truck lumbered by, the mystery was solved. A sanitation worker greeted the children, telling them, “I’m busy working now. I know you guys are working, too,” Ileyemi recalled.

Later that day, she planned to head to Walmart to stock up on supplies for the center, including tissues, paper towels, and picture frames for the 2-year-old class to paint.

“I love it,” she said. “You gotta love it to do it.”

Bouncing back and forth

When Jones closed the original location of Lovie Lee’s Stars of Tomorrow in September, it was more than shuttering a legacy. She was also closing down the kind of small, homey child care setting that appeals to many families.

“I thought it was more intimate for infants and toddlers,” she said. “It brings parents comfort when it’s a smaller program.”

But running two locations in the midst of a pandemic — and constantly covering for absent staff at each — was stressful mentally, physically, and financially, Jones said.

“Me, being one person bouncing back and forth at two locations was difficult, and that’s the moment I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said.

Getzinger, of the Early Learning Resource Center, said among child care programs that have closed recently, there’s a mix of long-established providers like Jones and some that “didn’t realize what they were getting into.”

New providers are also a mixed bag: Some are opening second and third locations, which Getzinger likes to see.

But she wonders about providers who are new to the field, especially because of what she described as lagging demand for care.

“It doesn’t feel like the population is there right now,” she said. “Parents are either making different choices or just not returning to care in the same numbers they did prior to the pandemic,” she said.

A constant headache

Like child care providers in Philadelphia and elsewhere, Ileyemi has struggled to find and keep qualified staff.

“I’ve lost good staff because they want me to pay them what I can’t pay them” she said. “You can only pay what you have.”

A child plays at DeeGrace Child Care Center.

A DeeGrace job posting on Indeed.com currently lists the pay range for a lead infant teacher as $9.21 to $15 an hour and the shift length as 12 hours. The statewide median wage for a child care worker is $10.69, according to a 2020 Stanford University report on the early childhood workforce in each state.

Both experts and providers say job-seekers in today’s labor market can make more doing unskilled labor at retail stores or fast food restaurants than working in child care.

Over the last year, some DeeGrace staff members simply stopped showing up for work. Others “call off all the time,” Ileyemi said.

Staff shortages can have troubling consequences. At least once, too few employees at DeeGrace led to a state violation because the center was out of compliance with required staff-child ratios. Such rules, which limit the number of children one staff member can oversee, are meant to keep children safe.

Ileyemi, who describes herself as someone who rarely sits down to relax, is frustrated by the constant staffing problems.

“It’s making me upset,” she said.

Still, Ileyemi hopes she can make the business work long-term: “I think things [are] going to get better.”

Today, when Jones has to cover teacher absences at Lovie Lee’s, it means she simply runs up or down a few steps, instead of across the neighborhood like she did when she ran two centers.

When she closed the original location, she absorbed the dozen children there into her larger center, converting a room used for staff meetings and training into a new classroom. Although that classroom boosted her total capacity to about 40 children, she can’t find enough staff for that number of kids. Instead, she has about 35 children during the school year and 25 during the summer.

When Jones thinks about closing the site where she got her start more than 20 years ago, she takes solace in the fact that COVID hobbled many providers.

It helps “me not feel I failed at something,” she said. “That’s just where the world is with this pandemic.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Philly schools lift quarantine mandate for people exposed to COVID

2022-05-13T22:33:47+00:00

The Philadelphia school district modified its protocols Friday for staff and students who have had “close contact” with someone known to be infected with COVID. Instead of entering a mandatory 10-day quarantine, they can go to school as long as they wear masks, the district said. But if they experience any symptoms, they must isolate and get tested before returning to school, according to the new guidance.

Under the new guidance, people who have been exposed but are asymptomatic must wear a mask in school for 10 days after their last known exposure “regardless of vaccine status.”

The so-called “mask-to-stay” option comes a little more than a month before the end of the school year and as cases in the city are on the upswing. On Monday the city reported an average of 261 new cases per day, which Philadelphia described as a “less than 50% [increase] in the previous 10 days.” There were 112 hospitalizations as of May 11, according to the city’s data.

“Requiring students who have been exposed to COVID-19 but are not exhibiting any symptoms to quarantine at home has the unintended consequence of reducing in-school learning,” Superintendent William Hite told parents and guardians in a Friday letter.

The change was made at the recommendation of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, Hite said.

In general, masking is optional in schools. The district ended its mask mandate on March 9, although it did require masks for the week after spring break last month, and masking is still required in early childhood education classrooms.

In a statement, district officials said that the “in-school alternative to quarantining” is meant to “support in-school learning and reduce the strain on classroom coverage.” The district is experiencing a shortage of substitute teachers, and this year some schools have struggled to have enough staff on hand to open safely.

Schools that are experiencing “active clusters” of cases across grades or cohorts can require mandatory masking.

At least one school, Masterman, is experiencing an active cluster and therefore is requiring masks, said Principal Jeannine Payne. She said she decided to require masks based on recommendations from the city health department and the district’s Office of Student Health Services. She said students accounted for most of the recent COVID cases.

Masks will be mandatory at Masterman, a magnet school with students in grades 5-12 from all over the city, until May 23.

Robin Cooper, president of the Commonwealth Association of School Principals, did not say she disagreed with the decision, but did criticize the district for not consulting first with its union leadership.

“There was no discussion,” she said, adding that “schools have had to shut down multiple grades, the virus is so widespread.”

Currently, there are no Philadelphia public schools closed due to COVID outbreaks.

According to the district’s statement, officials “will continue to work with [the health department] to closely monitor COVID case counts and implement any actions needed to protect the health and well-being of everyone in our schools.”

The district maintains a dashboard of COVID cases that tracks tests and positive results. It shows that nearly 15,000 of 138,000 tests administered to students and staff, or nearly 11%, have been positive throughout the school year. The dashboard also tracks the number of cases school by school.

“Everybody just wants to get to the point where we can say things are normal again,” Payne said. “Then things like this pop up. This is not normal.”

It’s official: Philadelphia schools make masks optional

2022-03-08T22:18:19+00:00

This story has been updated to include corrected vaccination data for 5 to 11 year olds released Tuesday night by the Philadelphia Department of Health.

Philadelphia schools will officially go mask-optional Wednesday, Superintendent William Hite announced Tuesday.

Calling vaccinations “the best protection against the spread of coronavirus,” Hite said that 86% of district staff are fully vaccinated, as are 75% of Philadelphians over the age of 12. He also noted that COVID case counts have been low for several weeks.

“Our number one priority remains safely keeping our students in school, full time and in person where we know they learn best and we recognize that this includes a responsibility to move our School District community closer to a sense of normalcy, as COVID-19 conditions allow,” Hite said in a letter to families explaining the move.

However, students and staff will be required to wear masks for the week after spring break, from April 18 to April 22, as an “extra precaution,” Hite said.

Due to federal regulations, students in prekindergarten and Head Start programs will still be required to wear masks.

The Philadelphia Department of Health confirmed last night that it had been overestimating the percentage of children in the city ages 5 to 11 who have been vaccinated. Officials said that 34.2% of children in that age group have received one dose, not 53.6% as previously reported by the city.

“No one is more disappointed than we are at this error, but we have corrected it and instituted new measures to ensure that any future problems are caught before they go live,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Cheryl Bettigole.

Earlier, citing the possibility of the lower rate, Jerry Jordan, the president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said that “it would be wise for the district to reevaluate entering into a mask-optional phase until such time as vaccination rates amongst our students increase.”

The city health department looks at four local metrics to determine masking requirements and other COVID policies: cases, hospitalizations, the percentage of positive tests, and the rate of increase in cases. On Monday, the department released data showing that over the last two weeks, just 1.3% of COVID lab tests have come back positive and that the city was averaging 62 new cases a day. That’s down from as many as 500 new cases a day in early February and nearly 3,000 a day in January.

Hite noted that some people will continue to wear masks even though it will no longer be mandatory.

“Please thoughtfully consider your personal situation and family circumstances, and do what is best for you or your child – and respect everyone else’s right to do the same, even if their choice differs from yours,” he said.

At the end of February, the district relaxed its COVID testing protocols for staff, ending all testing of vaccinated personnel and reducing testing for the unvaccinated from twice to once a week. It has never regularly tested students without symptoms, but will continue to test students who show symptoms in school.

Citing the sharp drop in cases, the city dropped its mask mandate for most indoor spaces earlier this month. Hite said the public health department will provide updated guidance for schools later this week.

Jordan, who supported the reduction of testing requirements for district staff, also called on the district to expand vaccination efforts, including school-based vaccine clinics. COVID vaccines are available to staff, students, and families at five high schools around the city.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in the city. She is a former president of the Education Writers Association. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

As COVID cases soar, Philly schools plan for tentative reopening after break

2021-12-23T20:16:42+00:00

Philadelphia schools plan to open in person on Jan. 4 after the winter break, although both district and city health officials caution that it is an “evolving” situation in the face of a spike in COVID cases.

“We must all be flexible and understanding that plans can change quickly,” said a letter from Dr. Cheryl Bettigole, the city’s health commissioner.

In a holiday message to staff and families, Superintendent William Hite said the plan is to open in person as scheduled, while emphasizing that if COVID-19 cases surge over the break, the district could receive new guidance from the city’s health department.

Given the increase in cases, Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said it would be “irresponsible for the district not to consider a return to virtual learning...until such time as they can effectively, and with fidelity, solidify their mitigation measures.”

He also raised questions about whether there is adequate enforcement of COVID mitigation measures in all schools. He said on Wednesday he received reports of more than 100 buildings with COVID cases “from one day.” (Emphasis is his.)

“Many buildings reported double digit cases, and dozens have closed or ‘paused,’” he said in a statement.

The health department ultimately makes the decision on whether to close schools for two weeks or to “pause” them for 48 hours while it conducts an investigation of reported COVID cases. The investigation determines whether a full 10-day quarantine is warranted based on the size of the school, the location of the cases, and other circumstances, said health department spokesperson James Garrow.

Right now, 19 district schools are under 10-day quarantine, with more than half of them put in that status since Tuesday, Garrow said.

“We are seeing an extremely rapid rise in new cases of COVID through the city,” said Garrow, which he said mirrors what is happening in other cities and is likely driven by the omicron variant.

According to the mayor’s office, as of Dec. 20, Philadelphia averaged 641 new cases per day over the prior two weeks, with a positivity rate of 7.2%. That is a jump from the week before, when the daily average was 492 new cases a day and a positivity rate of 5%.

At the same time, Garrow said, the department continues to support the continuation of in-person school for as long as possible.

“We still believe that the risk of other health and mental health consequences is so great to these children that, provided schools can do all the [mitigation] protocols we need, we believe it is still safe to go into schools,” Garrow said.

Jordan said that the union also supports the “safe” reopening of schools, but is concerned about mask-wearing, lack of accurate data, inadequate contact tracing, virus testing, and a nursing shortage. The school district’s website lists 13 nursing vacancies. He also said the district “continues to punt” on conducting widespread vaccine clinics, although it is hosting six testing sites.

“If the district cannot implement these urgently needed measures, then I do not see another option than a return to virtual learning until such time as these measures are firmly in place,”he said in a statement. “I am hearing from our members, and we are seeing first-hand, terribly inconsistent implementation of agreed upon protocols.”

Jordan said he sent a letter to Hite outlining these issues.

The district issued a response to Jordan’s statement, saying that PFT members should report to officials any “specific instance of noncompliance...so that we can immediately address the issue. To generally assert that students and staff are not adhering to the mask mandate is not useful nor does it help with us accomplishing our shared goal of keeping schools...safe.”

The statement said: “For mitigation strategies to be successful, we all must do our part to implement them with fidelity.”

Garrow said that based on the data it has, the health department believes that schools are not a major source of spread.

“In-school spread is a minority of what we’re seeing,” Garrow said. The department believes that the majority of cases among students results from their being “exposed to it at home or out in the community.”

The department can close a classroom, a grade, or a whole school. A classroom closure is triggered if there are three or more cases. If two classes in a grade are closed, or if there are six or more cases in a grade, the department quarantines the entire grade. A school is closed if at least 3% of the population has tested positive or three or more grades have been paused.

Where there are isolated cases, those identified as a close contact of someone who has tested positive can continue with in-person learning if they are vaccinated, Garrow said. Close contacts who are not fully vaccinated must stay out of the building for 10 days.

“The best way to ensure that your children can continue with in-person learning is to get them vaccinated,” he said.

The district’s statement said that, as of Dec. 18, 1.9% of 139,212 students and staff tested positive, but that covers the period since August. All staff are tested weekly if vaccinated, and twice a week if not vaccinated. District officials say 85% of staff is vaccinated.

Students are tested if they are symptomatic or if they participate in performing arts. Teachers and school staff are required to be vaccinated, unless they have a medical or religious exemption. Students are not required to be vaccinated, except for athletes.

Among students ages 5-11, who only became eligible for vaccination in November, 22.4% have received at least one vaccine dose, according to the health department. Most of the schools that have closed are elementary schools.

Among all city adults, 76.6% are fully vaccinated and 89.1% have received at least one dose. Garrow said there are no separate numbers for 12- to 18-year-olds.

As of Jan. 3, the city is requiring proof of vaccination for staff and patrons of restaurants and bars. Starting Jan. 17, a negative test will no longer be acceptable as a substitute.

Philadelphia schools that are temporarily closed due to COVID cases include: Pennypacker, John Welsh, A.S Jenks, Ethan Allen, Sullivan, Kenderton, Waring, Penn Treaty High School, Blankenburg, Carnell, Fox Chase, AB Day, McDaniel, Mifflin, McKinley, Munoz-Marin, Clemente, Richmond, U School, J.H. Brown, and Emlen.

Hite will leave superintendent post after nearly 10 years at the helm of Philadelphia schools

2021-09-28T02:30:28+00:00

Superintendent William Hite will leave the top post in Philadelphia public schools next year, choosing not to renew his contract after nearly a decade in the job, he announced late Monday.

Hite, 60, will step down in August 2022, following a challenging stretch managing education during the pandemic. In a letter to parents, Hite said he shared the news now so that there could be a “full and complete” search for the next superintendent and that he is “not going anywhere” in the meantime.

“The work we do together for your children is critical and I am fully with you and supporting your families during this year,” he wrote.

Hite, a former teacher and principal, led the district through a period of severe austerity and is credited with bringing some stability to a chronically underfunded district charged with educating mostly low-income children with significant needs.

Under his leadership, the district improved its financial condition enough to be returned to local control after nearly two decades under the state-dominated School Reform Commission. The state took the district over in 2001 citing fiscal and academic distress.

But this month, dire shortages of bus drivers, food workers, classroom aides, and other vital workers caused a chaotic situation as schools struggled to reopen for in-person learning. Hite has said he considered his ninth year leading the school district to be his most arduous. In March 2020, he was forced to shut down schools for 120,000 district students due to COVID-19.

Hite’s administration did succeed in reaching a contract agreement by the Aug. 31 deadline with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers despite the union’s continual disagreement over school conditions, the first time in 30 years that a settlement was reached before the prior contract expired.

During his time here, the city also saw charter enrollment grow to educate a third of the city’s students in public schools. In 2012 and 2013, the district closed 24 of its schools and merged or relocated five more, which had a wrenching impact on many communities and caused public outrage.

Test scores and graduation rates increased slightly during Hite’s tenure, and the district has embarked on an anti-racism initiative to combat internal inequities, including an underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students in the district’s selective schools. The Board of Education adopted a “goals and guardrails” leadership approach that sought to put the focus on academic achievement and find ways to send more resources to the neediest and lowest-achieving schools.

Hite would be the latest in a series of big-city school district leaders to resign, retire or otherwise step down in recent months, some citing fatigue as a reason for learning their posts. Chicago Schools CEO Janice Jackson left her role in May, following similar moves by the leaders in Los Angeles, New York City, and Broward County, Florida.

“This year has been difficult. It’s been difficult for everybody,” Hite said in an interview with Chalkbeat last March. “We’re navigating something we haven’t been through before.”

In the first challenge of the pandemic, the district had to pivot from teaching students in buildings to teaching them while they were at home, making sure that all its students had the hardware, the software, and the broadband access necessary for virtual learning, as well as continuing to provide meals.

An even larger hurdle was the move back from remote to in-person learning. After numerous attempts to reopen school amid the pandemic, the district opened its doors to some early learners in March. Students were brought back in phases as the district pushed to reopen school buildings last spring for a “hybrid” learning experience.

But even before the pandemic, the district was plagued with concerns about the safety of its aging buildings, especially around ventilation. And while the initial plan was to open schools last September, as most of the city’s private and parochial schools did, teachers protested in the bitter cold and threatened to strike over ventilation issues. A third-party mediator from Chicago arbitrated the dispute, and though the issue was resolved, complaints persist over building safety — not just ventilation, but loose asbestos, the presence of mold and general disrepair.

Hite became superintendent in September 2012 at a time of historic turbulence. Prior to his arrival the district was being run by a “chief recovery officer” who had plans to close 64 schools and divvy up the rest into “achievement networks” run by teams of educators or nonprofit institutions.

The district’s outlook remained bleak despite a state takeover in 2001 to address its financial and academic distress. The School Reform Commission that had replaced the local school board favored privatization and the creation of charter schools over more traditional means of education reform. And giving the district more funding wasn’t part of the reform agenda.

The situation reached a crisis shortly after Hite took the helm when Gov. Tom Corbett cut $1 billion in state aid to districts after federal stimulus money stopped.

With a quarter of that amount — $250 million — absorbed by Philadelphia, the district was forced to lay off all its counselors and nurses in an effort to make ends meet.

In the years since, the district has gotten on firmer financial footing, allowing it to make additional investments. But it never quite got to the point of eliminating its structural deficit, which means its yearly revenues never exceeded its yearly expenses. Budgets were often balanced through one-time grants from City Council rather than a recurring tax increase, and the state never significantly increased its yearly allocation to its largest district.

Philadelphia, like many other districts in Pennsylvania, is counting on a fair funding lawsuit scheduled to go to trial in November that will force the state to increase its education spending and allocate the state dollars more fairly, based on a formula that is based on enrollment and student need.

Last year, Hite’s name appeared on a short list to serve as education secretary under President Joe Biden. But for the first time, Hite received a “needs improvement” rating from the Board of Education in systems leadership and in promoting student achievement, citing the botched co-location of Science Leadership Academy and Benjamin Franklin High School and the continued closing of schools with potentially hazardous asbestos.

Before coming to Philadelphia, Hite, who was then 51, had been superintendent of Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland, another mostly poor and underfunded school district just outside of Washington, DC. There, like he would in Philadelphia, he was compelled to make tough spending choices.

He started his education career as a physical education teacher in his home state of Virginia. He became a middle school principal and spent 20 years in Henrico County, Virginia, before moving to become deputy superintendent in Cobb County, Georgia. He joined the Prince George’s district in 2006 as second-in-command and became superintendent there in 2009.

At the time, the school board president in Prince George’s said that he is “sincere about making child-driven decisions.” He described himself at the time as a “servant leader” who had ambitions to “completely revamp how schools are managed.”

At the end of this contract, Hite will have been in Philadelphia for a full 10 years, the time it takes to become vested in his pension.

Summer learning begins for thousands of Philadelphia students

2021-06-28T12:53:06+00:00

The Philadelphia school district’s summer learning program began Monday, bringing students in all grades back into school buildings for the first time since COVID-19 abruptly closed them in March 2020.

More than 15,000 students have signed up for an array of summer activities, city and district officials said at a press conference at Hunter Elementary School in East Kensington.

Those range from an extended school year program for students in special education to a “quarter 5” for 10th through 12th graders who need to make up credits lost during virtual learning. When the district reopened some schools in the spring for hybrid learning, about 25,000 students participated, though 10th through 12th graders never had the option to return.

After more than a year of disrupted learning that forced students online, this year’s summer school programming is anticipated to be among the largest in history, with the district and the city making an extra effort to help students make up for some of the lost class time.

Officials said that they did not have an estimate of the total cost of the enhanced summer programming, but said that they are using federal COVID aid to help pay for it.

“By working in partnership and coordinating resources, we’ve created thousands of opportunities for students this summer,” said Mayor Jim Kenney. “It’s a wonderful thing seeing our kids and youth back doing the things they really love and learning and catching up with what they missed all last year.”

Kenney, Superintendent William Hite, and Deputy Mayor Cynthia Figueroa were on hand to greet several hundred students at Hunter, a new school chosen as one of 26 regional sites. The school is hosting first through eighth graders in a first-ever partnership in which the district’s summer school is combined with the city’s traditional summer camp at the same site.

Cynthia Figueroa, deputy mayor of Philadelphia, greets a family outside Hunter Elementary School for the first day of summer learning on Monday.

Ali Robinson-Rogers of the district’s Office of Academic Supports said that this was the district’s “first-ever summer programming designed to support academic achievement and social growth.” Such a comprehensive program was in the works before the pandemic hit, she said.

Among the more than 15,000 students who have registered are 5,300 rising first through eighth graders and 900 students in high school enrichment classes. About 3,000 high school students registered for “quarter 5” and credit recovery, where they can catch up on missed academic work. The district had not yet responded to a request Monday to confirm that number.

Robinson-Rogers said 5,500 students in special education registered in the extended school year program for special education. And 750 incoming kindergarten students signed up for the “transition to kindergarten” program. Kindergarten is the only summer program that will be fully virtual, with young students receiving 90 minutes of online instruction twice per week.

Summer learning for first through eighth graders will be fully in person from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday. Students will receive academic instruction from 9 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. and participate in sports, arts and other extracurricular activities from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.

High school summer instruction will operate on a similar schedule, though students in grades nine through 12 can also attend the program digitally or under a hybrid model.

The city partners with providers for “out of school time” summer activities. The provider at Hunter is Norris Square Community Alliance, whose counselors lined up against the building to answer questions.

“This is a historic level of cooperation,” said Figueroa, who heads the city’s Office of Children and Families. She said there are 24 providers working with the city and district this year, many of which staffed the city’s digital access centers during the school year where students could go for internet access and supervision while they participated in classes online.

“This summer is critical...as a time to catch up,” Figueroa said. “We know it’s been a tough year academically, but also socially. We’ve been working hard for several months to make sure Philadelphia kids have fun, learn, and have a safe summer.” Altogether, there are 32,000 spaces in all city-run programs, she said, including those not being run with the school district.

“I’m really excited to see kids,” said Figueroa. “I’m so excited to see school buses passing by.”

Rising fifth graders Caleb Cross, Isaiah Haristion Cross, and Ayden Acosta lined up with their class and told Hite that they were most looking forward to sports and arts activities.

“I’m looking forward to football and video games,” said Ayden. Caleb wants to learn gymnastics.

Raelyn Guity-Scott and Esmer Scott brought their daughter Sahrasia, who is entering first grade at Willard Elementary in the fall. They got a brief scare when someone told them that she was not registered, but all was straightened out after she filled out some paperwork.

“It’s so nice for them to have something to do this summer, after COVID,” said Guity-Scott.

The summer programs will operate for five or six consecutive weeks in close to 30 schools across the city. All 120,000 district students were eligible to opt in to the program, though attendance isn’t mandatory, and registration is now closed.

All students in first through 12th grade programs will receive breakfast and lunch, and they should bring their district-issued Chromebooks to class every day.

Families can contact the district with questions about their summer learning programs here, and registration is open for other city summer programs.

A year into the pandemic, there’s good news and bad news about child care closures in Philadelphia

2021-05-18T16:17:29+00:00

Fewer Philadelphia child care providers closed permanently during the pandemic than some early childhood groups predicted last year. But when considered alongside the unusually small number of new openings, the city’s net loss in providers is much larger than in previous years.

The numbers paint a preliminary picture of what’s happened to Philadelphia’s child care ecosystem since the pandemic hit, illustrating bright spots and pain points within a fragile sector. Advocates say an influx of federal stimulus money likely staved off more catastrophic closure rates among Philadelphia child care providers, but that it will be important to track the trend long term.

In total, 183 licensed child care providers — about 11% of the city’s pre-COVID total — closed permanently between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services. There were about 200 permanent closures during the same 12-month period each of the previous two years.

But the coronavirus crisis also meant fewer new providers opened, with Philadelphia going from a net loss of 17 providers in both years prior to the pandemic to a net loss of 57 during the pandemic year. In short, that jump means dozens more defunct businesses and hundreds of lost child care slots.

Things could have been far worse.

Last summer, national early childhood groups sounded the alarm about the potential for widespread permanent child care closures all over the country as providers grappled with sudden enrollment declines and increased payroll and cleaning costs. In many states, stay-at-home orders meant child care businesses closed too, unless they were serving essential workers. But even when providers began to open back up in the summer, many families stayed away, fearful about their kids catching COVID-19 or unable to cover tuition costs because of lost jobs.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children reported that up to 40% of providers responding to the organization’s nationwide survey in June said they would close permanently without further government assistance. Child Care Aware of America pegged the number at 46%.

Closure estimates were somewhat lower in a Penn State University study released in August. It said about 4% of providers statewide would close permanently without immediate financial help, with another 14% at risk of closing.

But more government help did arrive — with the first two federal stimulus packages sending a half billion dollars to Pennsylvania’s early childhood sector. In addition, some providers received forgivable federal loans that allowed them to continue paying their staff and state officials temporarily relaxed reimbursement policies for providers participating in the child care subsidy program.

“I think this is a really good example of how government can really try to help programs during a time of great need,” said Mai Miksic, early childhood policy director for the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children and Youth.

“There were a lot of resources that were poured into the child care sector in the past year and without those resources it would have been much worse,” Miksic said. Still, she said, “I don’t want this news to undersell how difficult this past year has been on child care providers.”

The Penn State University study found that during the first few months of the pandemic, 83% of providers statewide reported losing more than a quarter of their revenue, with one-third reporting losing half. For many providers, tuition makes up much of their revenue, and when the kids don’t come, the money doesn’t either.

Around the time that study was conducted, the state began sending grants to child care providers from the first federal stimulus package, called the CARES Act.

Tyrone Scott II, director of governmental and external affairs at First Up, an early childhood advocacy group in Philadelphia, said, “There are definitely providers who are living on that CARES money and said, ‘If I didn’t get this check, I would have shut down’”

Even if Philadelphia avoided the worst-case scenario, Scott said there are still reasons for concern. Those include the loss of highly rated providers, which are hard to replace because it takes time for new providers to move up the state ratings ladder. He also worries about the loss of nearly 90 home-based providers — a group that often provides hard-to-find care for babies and toddlers, and sometimes accommodates non-traditional work hours.

Such providers “tend to be the most flexible and responsive to family needs,” he said. Plus, amid COVID, many parents likely feel safer sending their kids to a setting with only a handful of other children.

Scott said as child care slots disappear, “We’re going to see kids going into less safe environments.”

He also worries the pandemic has chased veteran early childhood teachers out of the field, exacerbating the pre-pandemic staffing crisis.

“We probably lost a good amount of experienced teachers to Costco, Walmart, and Chick-fil-A,” all of which offer similar or better pay than child care, he said.

Of course, some providers would have closed their doors in 2020 with or without the pandemic.

Cynthia MB Robinson, a highly rated home-based provider, closed permanently in March 2020 after 24 years in the business. She’d planned to retire in late summer anyway, but decided to shutter early so the six children in her care wouldn’t face the disruption of returning after a temporary pandemic closure only to leave again soon after.

Plus, she worried about how the daily comings and goings of the children would affect her husband, a cancer survivor.

“I didn’t want to put him in jeopardy,” she said.

Leslie Spina, the executive director of five Kinder Academy child care centers in Philadelphia, opened one center and closed another over the past year. Just before the pandemic hit, she signed loan paperwork for a new location on Rising Sun Road. It was February and she’d heard about the coronavirus outbreak in China but it felt like a far-away problem, not something she needed to worry about.

“Had I known, we wouldn’t have been signing on that day,” she said.

She went forward with building renovations, albeit more slowly than she’d planned, and the new center opened this March. It wasn’t her sixth center as she’d planned though. Instead, it replaced one in the Mayfair neighborhood, which closed in November because the Presbyterian church that housed it shuttered after a long financial struggle.

Spina said several factors, including having multiple sites, receiving federal stimulus money, and drawing on the organization’s rainy day fund, helped Kinder Academy survive the pandemic mostly intact.

“But we know we’re one banana peel away from bad things happening,” she said. “Life is still precarious.”

Like many providers that managed to stay afloat during the pandemic, enrollment is lower than usual at Kinder Academy’s highly rated centers. One of the five is still temporarily closed because too few families opted to come back.

“People were afraid and because they could make other arrangements, they did,” Spina said.

She expects enrollment to rebound enough at that site that she can reopen in the fall.

Advocates hope the third federal stimulus package — the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan the president signed into law in March — will help providers continue to recover and strengthen the industry as a whole.

Pennsylvania is set to get $1.2 billion for early childhood efforts — about double what it received from the first two federal stimulus packages combined. State officials are still deciding how to allocate the new funds.

“Now is a really prime time to not only account for the effects of the pandemic, but also build the sector back better,” said Miksic, of Public Citizens for Children and Youth.

Philadelphia teachers will soon have more options to get vaccinated, health commissioner says

2021-03-09T22:31:50+00:00

Teachers who can’t get vaccinated by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia will have other options available to them soon, Philadelphia Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley announced Tuesday.

Some teachers have been instructed to get their shot at the convention center, others at individual health clinics. The federal government has also announced that any pharmacy in Philadelphia with available vaccines can now vaccinate teachers.

“So you put those all together, I think there’s probably a very large percentage of teachers and childcare workers who want to be vaccinated will be vaccinated soon,” Farley said during Tuesday’s press conference.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, or CHOP, was tapped last month to coordinate the vaccinations of thousands of the city’s education workers, initially at the Roberts Center in its University City complex, and then in six other school locations around the city, including South Philadelphia High School. Now teachers will have more options available.
Mayor Jim Kenney and Farley announced three new locations for mass vaccination sites in Philadelphia. The first is Monday, March 15 at Mastery Charter’s Simon Gratz High School at 1798 W. Hunting Park Ave. Then March 17 at the Grand Yesha Ballroom at 2308 Snyder Ave. And March 19 at the Edward O’Malley Athletic Association at 144 Moore St.

Farley said he still believes Philadelphia is on track to vaccinate all teachers and school staff by April. About 35,000 educators, including those in charter and private schools, have received invitations to get vaccinated. He said appointments have been made for 19,000 educators and staff. So far, more than 9,000 teachers and school staff have been vaccinated. Getting vaccinated is optional.

Federal officials announced Monday that fully vaccinated residents can gather with other vaccinated people indoors without wearing a mask or practicing social distancing, but Farley cautioned teachers who have returned to school to continue to wear masks.

“Absolutely, teachers who are fully vaccinated should still wear their masks,” he said.

Getting vaccines for teachers and staff who work in school buildings has been one of the primary concerns of teachers expected to return to school buildings in the Philadelphia school district.

The district expected 2,650 district students to show up for class this week in its first phase of reopening. Fifty three schools opened Monday to students in prekindergarten to second grade. Some staff members, including teachers needed for those grades, returned last week.

The mayor said he was pleased with Monday’s reopening. He and Farley said no school-related cases of coronavirus were reported Monday.

“Parents were really the happiest of them all,” Kenney said. “And also the teachers. I walked down the hallway of the school and I could hear teachers talking to each other about how happy they were to see their babies back.”

Monday marked the district’s fourth attempt at reopening for some in-person instruction. But some teachers who have returned to their classrooms have complained on social media of unsanitary areas and that schools were unprepared and still unsafe for in-person learning. Kenney told Chalkbeat his office is working with the district and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers to address the concerns.

“We’re confident in the PFT because they’ve agreed to go back and are happy with the progress we’ve made,” he said. “And we’ll continue working with those organizations.”

Pennsylvania wants to allow districts to delay standardized testing until fall

2021-02-23T22:19:09+00:00

Pennsylvania Education Secretary Noe Ortega has informed the U.S. Department of Education that he wants to allow districts and charter schools to delay administering state exams until September, taking advantage of an option offered when federal officials told states on Monday that they must resume testing this year.

Acting Assistant Education Secretary Ian Rosenblum sent a letter to chief state school officers Feb. 22 telling them to administer standardized tests for 2020-21, despite the disruption caused by the pandemic and the prevalence of virtual learning. The department did not offer states the option to avoid giving tests entirely but offered flexibility, including the ability to give the tests later in the year rather than in the spring, as is customary.

“State assessments and accountability systems play an important role in advancing educational equity, by enabling states, districts and schools to use data to target resources to the students with the greatest needs,” Rosenblum’s letter said. “In addition, parents need information on how their children are doing.”

In response, Ortega on Tuesday posted on the department’s website a draft letter to Rosenblum stating that 320 of the state’s nearly 750 districts and charter schools are offering remote-only instruction due to state health guidance regarding the spread of the coronavirus in their areas. He said it would be “impossible” within the next six weeks to balance health concerns while “safeguarding … the validity of any assessment results.” The letter asks federal officials to issue one of the permitted waivers on the testing requirement.

Noting that the all-remote districts and charters enroll disproportionately high numbers of students who are economically disadvantaged, English learners, Black and Hispanic, or have special needs, Ortega said that the complex logistics of administering the tests in the spring would result in lower test participation and therefore defeat the purpose.

“The very student groups that have faced the greatest historical disadvantages will be systematically underrepresented in any near-term statewide assessment administration,” Ortega’s letter to Rosenblum said. “To be clear, Pennsylvania feels a moral imperative to assess students as one means of understanding and documenting learning loss; however, the assessment administration itself should not serve to aggravate or confound the issue.”

In Philadelphia, the district has remained entirely virtual as have most of its more than 80 charter schools, which together enroll more than 200,000 students.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced schools across Pennsylvania — and the nation — to shut down in March, a few weeks before the scheduled administration of the state standardized test, the PSSA. Since Rosenblum’s letter, several states including Michigan and Colorado took immediate steps to suspend the usual testing or substitute local assessments to fulfill the requirement.

Many civil rights groups told President Joe Biden’s administration that they opposed waiving the tests entirely, saying such assessments are necessary to expose entrenched educational inequities among different student groups and help direct resources where they are most needed.

While affirming that view, Education Voters of Pennsylvania, a leading advocacy group, issued a statement saying it agreed with Ortega’s position.

The group said the decision allows educators “to focus their time and energy for the remainder of this school year on teaching and supporting students” and on determining how to invest “one time federal funding to help mitigate the harm that Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable students have experienced” due to the pandemic.

The public is invited to weigh in on Ortega’s letter to Rosenblum by emailing RA_EDESEAWaiver@pa.gov.

Why are negotiations over reopening Philadelphia schools dragging on so long?

2021-02-21T00:35:33+00:00

Big cities across the nation, from Boston to New York to Chicago, have managed to hammer out differences between their school districts and teachers unions over the gradual reopening of schools.

In Philadelphia, not so much.

Here, school buildings have been closed for nearly a year. A mediation process between the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the district has dragged for weeks, delaying the district’s planned opening of schools for some prekindergarten through second grade students until March 1. Teachers refused to re-enter buildings on Feb. 8 to prepare, choosing to protest outside their schools instead.

On display is a long legacy of mistrust in the district’s administration, something that predates current superintendent William Hite but has intensified during his eight-year tenure. The school building stock is old and has a history of damning safety problems and deferred maintenance. Several years ago a teacher contracted mesothelioma, which is specifically related to asbestos exposure; in 2017 a first-grader got lead poisoning from eating paint chips that fell on his desk; a $40 million co-location project was so severely bungled that students from two schools had to travel elsewhere for an entire semester.

The district, operating in a state with among the nation’s biggest spending gaps between its rich and poor districts, has said it needs $4.5 billion to fully upgrade its buildings and billions more to catch up with delayed maintenance. Still, officials have long come under criticism for not being good stewards of the schools.

The union sees its moment to draw renewed attention to all the flaws, neglect, and history of mismanagement, hoping to compel the district to act more aggressively to fix buildings and perhaps shake loose additional funds to do it.

Superintendent William Hite spoke at a press conference last week.

But others worry this impasse is coming at a big cost to Philadelphia students, most Black and Hispanic from low-income families, who they believe are being harmed the longer they stay out of school.

“People are trying to address historic conditions in a crisis without regard to whether those building conditions are [bad enough] in every case for children not to go back to school,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, one of 14 child advocacy organizations that issued a statement last week calling on teachers to return to buildings. She said Mayor Jim Kenney and some council members are “trying to lower the temperature so that people can have rational conversations.”

“We get it, the district has a bad record on buildings,” she said. “But they’re holding these kids hostage. They’re trying to get it all solved with this crisis.”

Several sources told Chalkbeat that the major sticking point in the negotiations is over adequate ventilation in classrooms. Ventilation has been an issue in other districts, but nowhere has it taken on the importance that it has in Philadelphia. It is looming larger than vaccinations for teachers, which are starting Monday after pressure on the city from both the union and the district to move school staff up the priority list with other essential workers.

The focus of the uproar has been the district’s use of up to 3,000 small residential window fans to improve circulation in 32 schools where the ventilation systems are no longer operable.

In some of those schools, the ventilation systems were turned off because their components are contaminated with asbestos, a longstanding problem in city school buildings. Union officials want to know if asbestos has been removed from those systems — and say they aren’t getting answers.

“There is concern that there has been asbestos in air systems and they want to make sure those systems are remediated before being turned on,” said one person with knowledge of the mediation process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

For their part, district officials believe they have been transparent and provided mountains of information, enough to establish that the district has made buildings safe for occupancy, especially since most experts don’t regard ventilation as the primary measure for keeping schools safe. They instead cite vigilant mask wearing, social distancing, and frequent COVID testing.

According to those with knowledge of the mediation process, the district has provided the union and the mediator reams of documents about each school. But the union says that is not enough.

“The district has turned over an immense amount of data, on air handling, ventilation type, square feet, how many people it is safe to have in each classroom,” said Deputy Mayor for Labor Rich Lazer. “The union is doing due diligence in making sure the information is accurate. It’s an immense process.”

He added, “Everyone’s goal is to open up schools safely.”

Hite has said that since schools closed in March due to the pandemic, the district has invested $65 million in COVID-specific enhancements and more than $250 million in building improvements, including removal of “hundreds of thousands of feet” of asbestos. But he has not been more specific about work in individual schools.

The superintendent has also expressed frustration at the lengthy mediation process and said he thinks Philadelphia has done more than other districts regarding ventilation and the public release of information, including school-by-school air balancing reports measuring circulation in hundreds of classrooms. He has also highlighted experts who favor reopening, such as those at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and national reports showing that schools are not major vectors of virus spread.

“Our collective focus must be on finding common ground so we can safely reopen schools for the thousands of families who want and need their children to return to in-person learning,” Hite said in a statement to Chalkbeat. He was unavailable to be interviewed.

All the other cities that have come to resolution over phased-in pandemic reopenings have had contentious labor-management relations. All of them have old buildings with a variety of ventilation systems that have suffered from deferred maintenance and age.

Yet, “In every other place, we came to an agreement,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in an interview Friday. With the use of certified experts, “they’ve figured out what the proper ventilation fix would be to bring in enough fresh air, and they’ve done that work.” Chicago has made use of air purifiers, for instance, rather than “cheap” fans, she said. Some districts have used fans, but she said they were “fans appropriate for use” in school buildings.

“I do not know why Superintendent Hite is not rolling up his sleeves and trying to work with the union and parents in figuring out the ventilation issues in each school and making it work,” Weingarten said. Instead, “district lawyers are fighting tooth and nail against giving any real information to the community.”

Dripping with incredulity, she also brought up the district’s latest mishap — the revelation that some of the tape used to adhere the social distancing signs in schools contained lead and had to be removed.

In Philadelphia, she said, Hite “would rather say to the public things are safe to shield his staff’s own incompetence and at the same time be completely obstinate in the mediation ... It boggles my mind. I don’t know what’s happened to him.”

Some parent groups are siding with the union, saying they have been left out of meaningful decision-making.

“The continued standoff between the PFT and the school district is frustrating, but not because it is keeping school buildings closed. It is a striking illustration of what happens when plans are made without all stakeholders, including parents, the PFT, support staff, and students, at the table,” said Parents United for Public Education in an open letter to Hite.

The impasse was on full display at a six-hour city council hearing on Wednesday. PFT environmental scientist Jerry Roseman described in detail what the union was doing to verify the volume of information the district has provided. He and his team are conducting a meticulous, three-step analysis of 8,000 spaces in 152 schools, he said, with one step being “careful review of all relevant documents and data to ensure there were no asbestos issues or concerns associated with ventilation systems.”

And, he said, the district didn’t provide all the information requested until Feb. 14, more than a week after the mediation process began.

The union’s review, which Roseman said “is just getting underway,” has already identified “a number of serious problems” beyond the concern about asbestos. He ticked off window and exhaust fan issues, as well as a lack of basic information about the early-grade rooms, such as square footage and data about outside airflow.

He said as the review proceeds, the union is continuing to ask the district for more specific information — and is apparently not getting everything it wants.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, seen here speaking at a convention in Pittsburgh in 2018, says other districts have “figured out what the proper ventilation fix would be.”

Weingarten’s more blunt assessment, based on what she is hearing from Roseman and others, is that “the district has turned over tons of paper that says nothing.”

In his statement, Hite defended the district’s actions, saying it “has and continues to engage in the mediation process with PFT openly, honestly and with the urgency that this moment deserves. Any suggestion otherwise is just plain false. Our students, families and staff have been through so much already this past year. They deserve better than that.”

Caught in the middle of the drama is Mayor Kenney, a major ally of the PFT and also a supporter of Hite, who wants schools to open soon and is trying to ease both into some kind of agreement. Part of that effort included enlisting the sheet metal workers to install in schools “air pressurization boxes” that use ultraviolet light filters to kill pathogens. Weingarten said the district has not embraced the offer; Hite did not respond about it.

Council member Helen Gym, who co-chaired the hearing, emphasized that there could be “help on the way” in the form of both state and federal assistance to modernize school buildings. Two Philadelphia Democratic legislators announced Friday they are introducing bills to give $1 billion to school districts across Pennsylvania to fix “toxic schools,” which they note also exist in the state’s Republican-dominated aging steel towns and rural areas.

The district plans a hybrid reopening in which two cohorts of students each attend class twice a week, with Wednesday virtual for everyone as the schools are deep cleaned. This is the third try at this since September. Almost 30% of the 32,000 eligible students chose to attend in-person school.

Ventilation aside, the district has outlined a plan for keeping reopened schools safe that is more robust than some other large cities. There will be weekly testing of staff and random rapid testing of students. The city has also begun a vaccination program specifically for teachers and others who work in schools. Protocols are also in place for notifying parents immediately about positive cases, letting them know if their child was exposed, and closing the buildings if more than six cases within two weeks are identified. (This has been the protocol for more than a hundred private schools that have continued to operate in the city, and there have been just nine “outbreaks” requiring closure since September.)

At the council hearing, most teachers and parents who spoke questioned the district’s actions, repeating their conviction that they don’t think buildings are safe and displaying the deep distrust in the district’s leadership.

“What has become clear is that the school district doesn’t really care about children,” said parent Amy Henderson, whose child attends Meredith elementary, the school where the teacher was diagnosed with mesothelioma. Parents “had to fight” to get asbestos removed from the school, she said.

But she was immediately followed by parent Michael Gorman, who said that there must be movement for children to return to in-person schooling sooner rather than later.

“Virtual school is not school, it just isn’t,” said Gorman, whose daughter is a fifth grader at the Girard Academic Music Program elementary school in South Philadelphia. “Lessons don’t have the same impact. Kids, teachers and parents are burning out. The mental health challenges are staggering.”

More “privileged kids” in suburban and private schools “have been in school all year without expensive upgrades to ventilation … in Philadelphia, you can eat inside, gamble, go to the gym and go shopping, but public schools?”

“How does that reflect on our values.”

Philadelphia school reopening delayed again — this time until March 1

2021-02-17T15:44:40+00:00

The Philadelphia school district has pushed back reopening of schools for a third time, with a new target date for early grades set for March 1, Superintendent William Hite announced Wednesday.

The one-week delay for prekindergarten to second grade is the latest twist in the district’s third attempt to reopen school buildings, which have been closed since last March. Hite said he was “deeply disappointed” to make the decision, which was due to the ongoing mediation between the district and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

“I believe we all agree on reopening schools,” Hite said. “The dispute has been how can we do that safely and the district needs to address that.”

About 9,000 students were slated to return to classrooms on Feb. 22, but teachers and some parents have been questioning the safety of school buildings for months. Some 2,000 early-grade teachers were supposed to return to classes last week ahead of the reopening, but union President Jerry Jordan called on his members to stay home due to the safety concerns.

In a statement Wednesday, Jordan said the district “made the right decision to delay the reopening of school buildings.”

He said the union’s position — that “we are unable to verify the safety of buildings” — hasn’t changed. “Our goal of returning to school buildings when it is safe to do so also remains unchanged,” the statement said.

The Caucus of Working Educators on Wednesday said the district has to “drastically improve their communication and transparency” along with assessing ventilation and making vaccines available to all staff before buildings open. “We don’t have evidence that these goals can be accomplished by March 1.”

Hite said Wednesday that he believes the buildings are safe, but he said the district is waiting to hear the results of mediation. He also wants teachers to have enough time to prepare their classrooms for students and to learn how to teach in person and virtually at the same time.

Hite initially said teachers who didn’t report would be disciplined. But the district agreed to allow teachers to continue working remotely while the mediator, Dr. Peter Orris, reviewed ventilation reports and other documents tied to building safety.

The option for mediation was laid out in a memorandum of agreement secured by the union in the fall, which outlined the conditions for a safe reopening. Jordan called for mediation amid growing concerns that many buildings lacked adequate ventilation and that other longstanding issues, including asbestos, mold and lead, were still potential dangers in many buildings.

Teachers and parents have ridiculed the district’s purchase of 3,000 fans to improve air flow in classrooms in 32 schools where the aging ventilation systems had been turned off. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said during a visit to Philadelphia earlier this month that she thought the fans were a parody from Saturday Night Live. Experts, however, have said fans could be a good strategy to improve air circulation.

The mediator started working on Feb. 5, but the two sides did not come together until last Wednesday. No timetable has been set for a decision, but as mediation has dragged on, it has seemed increasingly unlikely that students could return as originally planned.

On Wednesday, Hite also outlined a plan for doing rapid COVID-19 testing of students and teachers, saying the district had “ample supplies.” All staff members will be tested weekly and students will be tested randomly, he said.

Many teachers also wanted to be higher on the priority list for vaccinations before being required to return to buildings. Some wanted to be fully vaccinated first. Hite has advocated for teachers to get priority for vaccinations, but he said Wednesday that “it’s never been a priority for vaccines to be a part of the reopening.”

The city and district announced two weeks ago that it had worked out a plan with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to begin vaccinations for school workers starting Feb. 22, both at CHOP and at six school sites around the city. Invitations should go out starting Wednesday from CHOP, including to school staff who have been working in school buildings or will be returning as part of the reopening, Hite said.

Hite estimated that 10,000 school staff would be required to reopen buildings for the early-grade students.

On Wednesday, Dr. David Rubin, the lead of PolicyLAB and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said during a City Council hearing on school reopening that he believes it is safe to reopen schools “based on the science.” He cited falling case rates, the experiences of other schools in the region, and plans to do rapid COVID-19 testing of students and teachers.

Rubin said vaccinations are important, but not a precondition to reopening. Similarly, he said that ventilation improvements were desirable, but not as crucial as primary interventions, such as wearing masks, social distancing, and keeping sick people out of the buildings. Opening as early as next week “can be done safely,” he said.

Hite, who also spoke during the council, said that all sides have the best interests of students at heart. “Let’s work together and let’s all make this happen.”

The city council hearing went on for more than five hours as parents, teachers, principals, and union leaders almost universally blasted the district leadership for its ”dime store fans” and pre-pandemic failure to adequately deal with asbestos and other school hazards. The principals pointed out that each school is in vastly different condition. “Before moving to a safe opening, we need clear, concise, transparent communication regarding each school’s status,” said Lauren Overton, principal of the Penn-Alexander Elementary School in University City.

A handful of parents, however, said that continued closure is further hurting the most vulnerable students. “Is it safe not to return?” asked parent Jen Leaman. “The educational losses over the last 11 months are monumental.”

The drama in Philadelphia comes as some school districts across the country grapple with reopening.

Philadelphia’s saga has been marked by strong distrust between the administration and the union, and the administration and the public. In a virtual rally on Monday, students, teachers and activists demanded a stronger voice in reopening plans and said they had been shut out of the process.

“We need proper ventilation, not crappy fans,” said Billy Seng, a sophomore at the Academy at Palumbo and a member of the advocacy group Viet Lead. “Our buildings have crumbling ceilings, lead and asbestos. We had that before COVID...we will continue fighting for a truly safe reopening.”

Shakeda Gaines, president of the Home and School Council, said that there has been “disrespect” coming from the district. “They’re trying to open schools even when we got together as a collective and said no,” she said. “We’re saying no to fans, no to lead paint...to asbestos, mold, lead, no to our children dying.”

Acknowledging the trust issues on Wednesday, Hite said part of the problem is when “there are sections or pockets of individuals who want to draw attention to something that is wrong and then apply that to all of the 227 buildings.”

“All we can do is to continue what we’ve done and that is to communicate,” he said.

National and local health experts have said ventilation is but one strategy among many to mitigate the spread of the virus. But the city’s activists jumped on the issue to draw more attention to the overall disrepair of many of the district’s buildings, which have an average age of 75 years.

The district’s own studies have shown that it needs $4.5 billion to fully upgrade schools.

The district has produced hundreds of “air balancing reports” in its classrooms and released other information on building conditions. But the critics were not mollified.

“We can’t verify the results,” said Art Steinberg, head of the PFT’s Health and Welfare Fund and president of the statewide federation, in an interview during an anti-reopening rally on Feb. 8. “We do not have any trust in the information. We’ve asked for data backing it up...they’ve refused to give it to us.”

Hite disputes that the union has been denied information, saying that officials have met regularly with union leaders.

From the start, Philadelphia’s health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley has said it was safe to reopen schools. More than 100 private schools have been open to varying degrees since March, with little evidence that they accelerated the spread of COVID-19 in the communities, he said.

Many parents desperately want their children back in school, but fear for their safety.

Jasmine Ellis, whose son attends Grover Washington Middle School, said their school is in a relatively new building, but has had problems with mold in its auditorium. She said the building wasn’t safe before the pandemic.

At the same time, her son, who has special needs and a heart condition, “hates every second” of remote schooling. “Learning at home is horrible for us,” she said.

A former school district employee who worked as an aide in several schools, Ellis feels that the district has long neglected building maintenance.

“They have to go in and do what really needs to be done and what they’ve been sweeping under the rug,” she said.

Tell us: As Philadelphia inches toward reopening some school buildings, what are parents and students thinking?

2021-02-11T21:04:32+00:00

Philadelphia students in prekindergarten to second grade are supposed to head back to classrooms the week of Feb. 22, two weeks after Mayor Jim Kenney unveiled a vaccination plan for teachers and school staff.

This would be the first time students and teachers have returned physically to a classroom since March — but the school district and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers are still at odds over the district’s plan to keep educators safe.

Chalkbeat Philadelphia wants to hear from families and students at this moment in time. Our short survey will be used to gain insight into what families are experiencing and what questions they may have. We plan to use the results of the survey to inform our coverage. Know that this form is confidential and if you are uncomfortable with your name being used, please let us know at the end of the survey.

If you are having trouble viewing this form on mobile, go here.

It may be weeks until Philadelphia teachers can get vaccine

2021-01-19T23:26:24+00:00

Philadelphia’s health commissioner warned Tuesday that teachers might have to wait longer than expected to get vaccinated.

City officials said last week that they anticipated teachers would get access to the vaccine beginning on Jan. 25. But Dr. Thomas Farley cautioned Tuesday that the city has a limited number of doses and a large number of people who qualify for vaccination during Phase 1B of the city’s plan.

“We are going to be gradually working down that list of frontline workers,” he said. “I know people want to know what date we are going to get to them [teachers]. I would love to give them a date, but unfortunately I can’t because we don’t know how many of the people above them are going to want to be vaccinated.”

Teachers are considered frontline workers, but will have to wait until others in the 1B group receive vaccinations. Those include first responders, employees who work in corrections, service providers working with vulnerable populations, and public transit employees. These groups will take weeks to be vaccinated, at which point, additional prioritized groups will start receiving invitations to schedule appointments.

“If everybody above them [teachers] wants to be vaccinated, it’s going to take us longer to get through them,” Farley said.

Farley recommended Philadelphia teachers who live in the surrounding suburbs try to get the vaccine in their respective area. “They should do that to help reduce the number we have to be responsible for,” Farley said.

Vaccine allocation nationwide is based on population, which means the number of doses the city gets for teachers has nothing to do with who is working in Philadelphia, said Dr. Caroline Johnson, the city’s deputy health commissioner.

“We are not in a position where we can turn away essential workforce people because they don’t live in Philadelphia,” Johnson said. “The strategy that we would like to see is people not living in Philadelphia seek the vaccine outside of the city. But in order to get our schools back up and operating, if we need to vaccinate people living outside the city we would do that.”

Johnson said the health department is unaware about the protocols for teachers in the surrounding counties.

“They have not said anything about when those teachers are going to be eligible or what procedures have been put in place to vaccinate teachers who live in other counties,” Johnson said. “What I’m saying is if they do not get vaccinated we will take responsibility for them.”

Teachers’ families don’t have the same priority for vaccinations, Johnson said. “The eligibility for the essential worker is only for the person doing that position,” she said.

The health department Tuesday announced 1,666 additional confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the city, bringing the number of confirmed cases to 101,629. There have been eight additional fatalities, bringing the number of deaths caused by the virus to 2,720.

“The numbers in the city are lowering, but they are still significant,” Farley said.

Philadelphia to offer in-person special education testing to 600 students

2021-01-15T00:22:45+00:00

The Philadelphia school district will open six high schools on Jan. 25 as regional centers for evaluating 600 high-needs special education students, Superintendent William Hite announced Thursday.

West Philadelphia High School, Edison High School, Martin Luther King High School, Strawberry Mansion High School, The Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush, and the High School for the Creative and Performing Arts will design new or updated individualized education programs. The district will help families with transportation to and from the centers, if necessary, and will offer meals at the sites.

The 600 students initially identified by the district are mostly those with complex needs and are a subset of the 21,000 district students with IEPs. They have disabilities that require some in-person therapy or interventions, said ShaVon Savage, the district’s deputy chief of specialized services.

For now, the centers will offer only special-education testing, not services. “It is our intent to open the centers for purposes of assessment first,” Savage said. “There is a strong possibility that we will be able to provide additional supports and services to special education students in these centers moving forward.”

Officials have identified students in this category who need evaluations or re-evaluations, and will begin notifying families Friday and next week starting Tuesday. (District offices will be closed Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.) Families will be able to opt out.

The long-term future of the centers depends partly on how quickly schools may open more widely for some in-person instruction. For now, Savage said, the plan is for the centers to stay open “indefinitely.”

Hite said that he would have more news within a week or two on any expansion of hybrid and in-person learning across the district.

Savage and the district’s student health medical officer, Dr. Barbara Klock, stressed that strict COVID-19 protocols will be in place at the regional centers.

“Health and safety practices are at the forefront of every decision we make,” Klock said. School staff will be tested weekly, Hite said, and students will be tested daily using a rapid test that provides results in 15 minutes.

No more than two adults will be in a room with a student, and all will be required to wear masks and observe 6-foot social distancing. In cases where that might not be possible, as in an evaluation for a student with physical disabilities, examiners will wear extra personal protective equipment, Klock said.

Savage noted that all-virtual learning has been going on in Philadelphia for much of a year, and said that this is the appropriate time to prepare for some in-person learning for students with complex needs.

“No one could have predicted that we would have stayed closed for this extended period of time,” she said. “We are now planning forward so that we can begin to really get into the depth of serving students in this new environment.”

Hite said that when more in-person learning resumes, it will start with prekindergarten through second graders. The next groups to go back would be all students with special needs from grades three through 12 and students in career and technical education fields that require certifications with equipment that’s only available in schools. “We will look at other groups after that,” he said.

Hite said that the schedule for a return to more in-person learning will not depend on the availability of COVID-19 vaccines for school workers. “Naturally we support expediting the vaccines so educators are receiving those, but the return is not conditioned on individuals receiving the vaccines.”

City health officials said earlier that vaccines might be available to school personnel as soon as later this month, but Hite and Klock said logistical details of who will be prioritized and the process of giving the vaccines were still being worked out.

Vaccines for Philadelphia teachers could be ready in two weeks

2021-01-13T15:29:55+00:00

Philadelphia teachers could begin receiving the COVID-19 vaccine the last week of January, the city’s health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley confirmed Tuesday to Chalkbeat.

The city had originally anticipated vaccinating teachers beginning the first week of February, but the process of distributing the vaccine to health care workers in Phase 1A is ahead of schedule.

“We’ve always said that we are not going to wait until Phase 1A is complete” to begin the next phase, said Farley, who noted that there are still many health care workers who have yet to receive their shots. “We are looking to start vaccinating people in Phase 1B the last week of January, perhaps Jan. 25, which is a couple of weeks away.”

Teachers aides and school food service and facilities workers will also be eligible.

Teachers are now listed in the Phase 1B group, which comprises mostly frontline workers, such as first responders, transit workers, some retail and factory workers.

Also included in the next phase are those at a high risk of morbidity or mortality — including people who live and work in nursing facilities and group homes, people over the age of 75, and those with high-risk medical conditions.

The accelerated vaccine schedule is good news for teachers. But the city has not yet made decisions about which educators will get the vaccine first, said Dr. Caroline Johnson, the city’s deputy health commissioner.

“We have had discussions that have made it clear that we need to open access, not just to classroom teachers, but we have to look at this broadly across all the individuals in the schools who are serving the children,” Johnson said. “So we’re going to be looking at everyone in the schools who interacts with the students. And we will be including them in the vaccination planning.”

Johnson confirmed the city’s student access centers won’t likely be used as vaccine distribution sites, but that staff working at these centers would receive the vaccine alongside teachers.

The city’s health department announced on Tuesday 637 additional cases of COVID-19. That brings the number of confirmed cases to 98,215. Health officials also confirmed 37 additional fatalities, bringing the number of residents who have succumbed to the virus here to 2,640.

Even though the pandemic continues to rage, Mayor Jim Kenney and Farley are hopeful that school buildings will open for some students this school year.

“Practically, it seems not as sure that it will happen in the spring,” Kenney said. “But if we can get the teachers vaccinated, give them a little comfort to get back into the classroom and get the kids out of the house, off their computers, and into the classroom, I think that’s a win-win for everybody and a win for parents and the economy.”

But that’s contingent on school workers being vaccinated and other factors, he said.

Superintendent William Hite, Board of Education President Joyce Wilkerson, and teachers’ union President Jerry Jordan have all expressed confidence that some city schools would be able to reopen this academic year. Hite said last week that he would announce a reopening plan within the next “10 days or so.”

Farley noted that some of the city’s charter and parochial schools are now open. “I’m optimistic that we can get public schools open as well,” he said.

Teachers could get coronavirus vaccine in February, Philadelphia health commissioner says

2021-01-06T02:40:55+00:00

Philadelphia teachers could get the COVID-19 vaccine as soon as February, according to the city’s health commissioner.

Dr. Thomas Farley said Tuesday that while plans have not been finalized, it’s likely that teachers will be listed in the 1B group with frontline workers. These workers are expected to get the vaccine once the city’s health care workers have received it.

“We still haven’t given definition to the category of frontline central workers,” Farley said. “I imagine [teachers] will probably be in there. That group is a large group — there are many people who fall into that category.”

Area hospitals began administering the vaccine last month. The city’s more than 100,000 health care workers, in group 1A, were the first to have access to the vaccine.

Farley said once heath care workers are inoculated, those in the 1B group may receive the vaccine at a combination of pharmacies, health clinics, and physician offices.

The city anticipates beginning to vaccinate the 1B group around February 1, according to Farley. “But it’s a very large group, so it may take months for us to get through that entire group,” he said.

Mayor Jim Kenney said he would like to see teachers get vaccinated as soon as possible. Philadelphia schools have been forced to close since March due to the coronavirus.

“I believe they are central workers, and I think they are even more essential in order for us to get kids back in school and get people back to work,” Kenney said. “That’s more an act of normalcy than we’ve been used to in the last 11 months. Once we get teachers vaccinated, they will feel comfortable going into a classroom setting and getting our kids out of the house and back into school.”

Farley said Tuesday he understands why some would be apprehensive about getting a still-new vaccine, but tried to allay fears — noting risks of contracting the virus. COVID-19 has already killed some 2,500 people in Philadelphia, “so when you balance this out, it’s a lot safer to take the vaccine than to not take the vaccine,” he said.

On Tuesday, an additional 805 people tested positive for COVID-19 in Philadelphia, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 94,127 since the beginning of the pandemic last year.

A new concern recently emerged in the form of a more contagious variant of the virus, which has been identified in 33 countries and five U.S. states. According to scientists, the new variant is 40-70% more infectious than the current virus.

Asked if he thought schools would open for in-person learning this semester, Farley pointed to some charter and parochial schools that are currently open, but did not elaborate.

“The vaccination will help, but there are other things the schools can do to protect the teachers and the children,” Farley said.

Philadelphia schools due for more than $400 million from COVID-19 relief

2020-12-23T00:08:49+00:00

The Philadelphia school district is in line to get more than $400 million from the coronavirus relief legislation passed by Congress — but that doesn’t mean the system’s fiscal woes are over, Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson said Tuesday.

The money “buys us 18 months for the local economy to recover and for things to normalize,” he said. It will also let the board of education focus on its goals for improving student achievement rather than worrying about plugging budget holes.

“It’s not a moment we suddenly sit back and say, ‘Great, now we have nothing to worry about’” regarding funding, he said. “This is one-time money, so we can’t paper over structural issues.”

The $900 billion federal relief package allocates about $57 billion to K-12 education. Most of that, $54.3 billion, is for public schools, including charters. The money is expected to be allocated based on the formula for the Title I program. Title I is the federal government’s primary program to aid low-income students and districts.

Pennsylvania would be due nearly $2 billion of the education money, and Philadelphia would receive nearly a quarter of that. In the last COVID-19 relief bill, Pennsylvania received about $473 million, of which Philadelphia’s share was more than $100 million. Monson said he doesn’t have an exact figure yet for the latest round of stimulus funding.

The legislation, which runs to more than 5,500 pages, gives districts wide latitude for spending, but homes in on addressing student learning loss, investing in improvements to school facilities to mitigate the spread of the virus, and upgrading technology.

In Philadelphia, the district faces huge challenges with ventilation in aging school buildings. Workers have been analyzing air quality in all the district’s schools, which have an average age of 70 years, and reports show many have alarmingly few classrooms that meet basic standards. This money will help accelerate ongoing improvement efforts, Monson said, while also freeing up funds to address other chronic problems, such as asbestos and lead paint. “We will be able to do more work than planned,” he said.

The school board passed a $3.5 billion budget last May, which showed a small surplus for this year and a predicted $145 million budget gap at the end of 2022. That was before the second surge of the virus and the subsequent loss of more city and state tax revenue.

The budget also didn’t figure in the costs of the new contract agreement with the teachers union and it counted on $35 million from a property tax reassessment, which the city has subsequently abandoned.

Monson told the board earlier this month that the financial picture had worsened considerably, outlining a shortfall $11 million this year and predicting a 2021-22 budget gap of $300 million, more than twice the size of what he forecast in May. In five years, the projected shortfall was over $700 million.

While the federal funds won’t totally wipe out these numbers, they will improve the fiscal picture enough to change the conversation, Monson said. Board president Joyce Wilkerson issued a statement saying that “these one-time funds will be immensely helpful in filling budget gaps for the next 18 months, while the district focuses on long-term structural deficits that challenge our ability to fully support student learning and achievement.”

At its December meeting, the board of education announced its intention to reframe its stewardship of the district around “goals and guardrails” that focus on raising student achievement and promoting equity.

Both publicly and internally, Monson said, questions have been raised how the board could do that while facing such huge gaps between available revenue and student needs. “Now the discussion is how we can reallocate certain resources, where we can put investments for the goals and guardrails,” rather than always searching for how to save money. “We’re starting these conversations already,” he said.

Because the money is not recurring, strategies like hiring more teachers to reduce class size would not be advisable, he said. Addressing learning loss would more likely have to be done through temporary programs, such as tutoring or summer school.

The federal legislation did not include additional money for local and state governments. That’s a problem for Philadelphia schools because, unlike every other district in Pennsylvania, it is entirely dependent on local and state revenue. The board has no taxing power of its own.

After the last recession, Pennsylvania used stimulus money as a replacement for state aid. When it dried up, districts faced huge shortfalls. Philadelphia alone lost more than $250 million, forcing it to lay off all of its nurses and counselors, among other austerity moves, the effects of which linger today.

But the latest bill prevents that from happening by specifying that states cannot reduce state education aid significantly without a federal waiver. Cities, however, have no such restrictions and Monson said he anticipates some pressure on the city to try to cut the funds it allocates to the schools as a way to meet its own needs.

“The city is facing its own challenges,” Monson said. “We won’t know what the city will do until we see the mayor’s budget.”

President-elect Joe Biden called this bill just a “down payment” and has said that he may push for another relief bill after he takes office.

Philadelphia superintendent confident some in-person school will resume this year

2020-12-16T19:34:35+00:00

Superintendent William Hite said Wednesday that he was confident some in-person schooling would resume in Philadelphia before the end of this academic year, but he could not say where, when, or for which students.

“I do predict schools will be in some form of in-person this school year,” Hite said at his weekly press briefing. “I can’t say with certainty what grades will be included, but I can say with a great deal of confidence that there will be some schools that will be serving children.”

Hite said his confidence is based on the district and city’s ability to test staff and students for the coronavirus. It is not contingent on teachers getting vaccinated.

While Mayor Jim Kenney and city health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said Tuesday that teachers would be in the second tier of workers in line for vaccination, they gave no timetable.

“There are so many individuals in the first tier, it is unlikely we can move educators up,” Hite said. Officials haven’t gotten to the point where they are discussing the logistics of teacher vaccinations.

Plans for testing students and staff for a return to in-person schooling are moving forward, Hite said.

Hite noted that some Catholic schools are already open, with school nurses working there who are provided by the district. The coronavirus testing will be rolled out in those places to establish the “routine.” Frequency of testing, he said, will be “based on broader data, data around cases in the communities, and if in fact we need to do more testing in communities that are seeing a spike of cases, we will have the ability to do that, both with adults and with children.”

“We will have testing in place, we will be able to quickly analyze where we have cases rising or not,” he said. “I’m also confident, in fact, that in the very early ages we’re not seeing the transmission [of the virus] like we’re seeing with many of the adults. And I’m confident in how schools have been prepared in order to provide some form of in-person instruction in a way that’s safe for both students and for faculty.”

The district has spent millions on safety measures including plexiglass barriers, social-distancing signs, ventilation testing and upgrades, and deep cleaning — although many parents and teachers continue to believe that ventilation, based on the testing, shows that the buildings are not yet safe.

Twice the district planned for a form of hybrid learning — for the beginning of the school year and then at the end of last month. Both times, plans were scuttled after public outcry and a spike in cases. Under the plans, students in pre-kindergarten through second grade would have attended in alternating groups for two days a week, learning remotely on the other three days. The district spent $11 million on cameras so teachers could simultaneously teach students in classrooms and remotely.

A lot of the work in school buildings was done with federal coronavirus relief money, but overall, between revenue declines and added expenses, the district’s budget outlook has worsened.

The likelihood with resuming in-person school, Hite said, is that “some [schools] may open, and then close, and then reopen, but we will have the ability to track that simply because of our ability to test.”

Hite also said Wednesday that he agreed with the board of education’s most recent job evaluation of him, which rated him as “needs improvement” in the areas of operations and student achievement. The board did research that showed, among other things, that student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation’s report card, put Philadelphia near the bottom compared to comparable urban districts.

“Yes, I do agree with the evaluation,” he said. “With respect to [student] performance of the district, yes we have to do better, and I’m the one who is ultimately responsible for all of that.”

No snow day for Philadelphia students, despite a storm and fond wishes

2020-12-16T00:15:44+00:00

Sledding. Throwing snowballs. Making a snowman.

With the region’s first significant snowfall since March 2019 on the way, parents and students are chattering online about how welcome it would be — after hours of Zoom classes and all the stresses of being cooped up in the pandemic — to have a good old-fashioned snow day.

Bah Humbug! Not in Philadelphia. No need to have a snow day if classes are remote, the reasoning goes.

Perfectly logical. But is it right?

Parent Jennifer Byiers, a member of the Facebook group NW PHL public schools, tweeted at Superintendent William Hite:

@SDPHite please reconsider your policy. Many other school districts are recognizing the healing powers of a snow day. pic.twitter.com/1gcZ18O7Ke
— Jenny Byiers (@JennyByiers) December 15, 2020

There are scores of comments on Byiers’ Facebook post of her tweet, many of them lighthearted. “We’re taking the ‘snow day’ if principal Mommy says so,” wrote one parent. “I need a snow day more than my wee one,” posted another.

Not everyone wants a “snow day,” however. One person pointed out that many parents are working from home and if their child is not occupied by school, it will wreak havoc on their schedule.

The district — which is not the only one taking a no snow day stance — is standing firm.

“Since all classes are being held virtually at this time, there will be no change to class schedules and all students are expected to log in to their classes at their normal times,” said district spokeswoman Monica Lewis in a statement.

“The District has made significant investments to allow for our students to engage in digital learning since school buildings were closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic last spring,” she added. “The beauty of virtual learning environments is that inclement weather doesn’t impact the ability to continue teaching and learning.

Besides having a day for a much-needed break from staring at a computer screen, parents, teachers and others cited additional issues: electricity and internet connections aren’t as reliable in storms. And the city runs more than 70 centers where some 2,000 students go during the school day for internet access and supervision. Some families use the centers because parents work, others because their homes lack broadband access. If school is in session and the centers closed, those students won’t be able to get online.

At a city briefing on storm preparations Tuesday afternoon, Deputy Mayor Cynthia Figueroa said that the access centers will be open on Wednesday until 1 p.m., but “as of right now” they will be closed all day Thursday due to travel conditions and “the recognition that folks may be home.” She said those students who use the centers due to a lack of home internet “is a small percentage of the total school district population.” And, she added, it’s only one day.

The school district is closing its district headquarters and three technology support centers around the city that service Chromebooks to minimize travel, said Chief Operating Officer Reggie McNeil at the briefing. Lewis said that the district plans to go ahead with its regular weekly distribution of “grab and go” meals at its 63 regular sites on Friday.

Lewis did give a nod to those parents and students who think snow days are an important ritual and bemoan their loss.

“We absolutely encourage students and staff to take brain breaks throughout the day and, if the weather conditions are safe, we see nothing wrong with students engaging in outdoor activities if they can do so in ways that allow for them to practice social distancing and other safety measures that will help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” she said.

Philadelphia teachers next for vaccine, after healthcare workers and nursing home residents

2020-12-15T23:43:16+00:00

Teachers will be able to get the COVID-19 vaccine after healthcare workers and nursing home residents, Mayor Jim Kenney and Dr. Thomas Farley, the city’s health commissioner, announced Tuesday.

They could not say when the vaccine would be available.

Farley identified teachers as part of the “second big group of critical infrastructure workers” to get the vaccine. Teachers are “very likely to be exposed while on the job,” Farley said during the mayor’s press briefing Tuesday.

Kenney acknowledged that teachers aren’t among the highest risk workers — as they are unlikely to pass the infection to vulnerable people — but said it would give them a “level of comfort” and help get students back in school buildings faster.

“That will help the economy move faster,” Kenney said.

Farley said the city may also consider using schools as distribution sites, as hospitals began this week taking delivery of the first COVID-19 vaccine.

“It’s unclear how many new sites we need to set up,” he said. “But if we do need to set up new sites the schools are a possibility.”

There have been 81,708 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Philadelphia, including 1,223 new cases recorded Tuesday, according to the health department. Of those, 2,141 people have died. Residents of long-term care facilities account for 958 of the deaths..

Many hospitals received their first shipment of vaccines on Monday or Tuesday, and the rest will receive it on Wednesday. The city received 13,650 doses in this first allotment. Hospitals have been advised to begin vaccinating their staff as soon as they are able, and some may have started Tuesday.

The city’s health officials said both vaccines, made by Pfizer and Moderna, are safe and effective.

“I see this as a turning point in the pandemic,” Farley said. “I am very hopeful that this and other vaccines can ultimately end this pandemic.”

‘The cutting edge of safety’: Philly area schools plan widespread coronavirus testing

2020-12-11T15:51:00+00:00

School administrators across the Philadelphia area are moving forward with plans to provide coronavirus testing to students and staff — a step seen by many as essential for in-person learning to proceed safely.

The planning comes as a surge of coronavirus cases have compelled the School District of Philadelphia to delay bringing some students back to the classroom, and forced other schools in the region to suspend in-person learning.

Mastery Charter — which runs 26 schools with more than 14,000 students in Philadelphia and Camden — announced Thursday that it would provide free weekly coronavirus tests to all students and staff who want them, whenever in-person education resumes.

“We really recognized it was the cutting edge of safety, and something that was incredibly important to ensuring the health and safety of our kids,” said Laura Clancy, a senior adviser with Mastery.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia also confirmed Thursday it was in discussions with local government and school districts in the region to pilot a program to administer COVID-19 tests in schools. A CHOP spokesperson declined to offer more detail, but Chester and Delaware counties, as well as two Montgomery County school districts, Lower Merion and North Penn, confirmed they would be participating. A spokesperson for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health said they are “having some conversations about how it could be organized in Philly,” but said nothing was formalized.

School District of Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite also said Thursday that he expects tests to be available for all students and staff that want them when classrooms re-open. The district is partnering with the city’s health department, but could not yet give specifics about what the testing program will look like and how it would be administered.

“The test will be voluntary, but will be mandatory for people with [COVID] symptoms,” Hite said. “That’s our approach right now, but we’re in the process of finalizing, we hope within the next couple of weeks, a plan for administration.”

Grappling with cost

Public health and education experts have honed in on consistent testing as the key to making in-person instruction safe during the pandemic. One recent study from Johns Hopkins and Duke University found that weekly coronavirus tests can reduce transmission within a school by 60 to 70%. Officials in New York City reopened elementary schools this week, even as the pandemic worsens, based largely on weekly testing.

Mastery’s experience administering a small number of coronavirus tests to students and staff this fall convinced the charter network that routine testing was effective, Clancy said. For one, their overall positivity rate mirrored the city’s rate at the time. Perhaps more importantly for reducing transmission, Clancy said many of those who tested positive had no symptoms.

“If really the only way to tell if someone who is asymptomatic is sick is to do a test…that’s a pretty compelling reason to do a screening program,” Clancy said.

Clancy said Mastery’s plan is only possible because the cost of coronavirus tests has fallen dramatically in the last few months. The school system will pay about $12 per test. By comparison, the average cost of a coronavirus test last summer was $127.

Still, those tests add up. Mastery plans to spend up to $2.7 million of federal coronavirus stimulus funds to pay for the endeavor through the end of the year. The charter network has been able to absorb many other pandemic-related expenses, such as laptops for all students, in part because of its strong philanthropic support.

Mastery is budgeting for a plan to test roughly 50% of all students — the amount they expect will want to return to in-person learning when it becomes available — every week from mid-January through the end of the school year.

If the School District of Philadelphia wanted to do the same testing program for the same proportion of its students, it would cost about $15 million. The district is currently facing a budget gap of nearly four times that amount.

Cost is proving to be a major obstacle for other schools, many of whom have struggled to pay for more basic necessities in the COVID era, including personal protective equipment. A spokesperson for the African American Charter School Coalition, a group of Black-led Philadelphia charter schools, said some of those schools would like to implement consistent COVID-19 testing for students and staff, but have long since run out of federal stimulus funding, and lack other philanthropic support.

“There is limited funding that these schools have,” coalition spokesperson Dawn Chavous said. “With limited funding, you are limited in terms of what you can do.”

Philadelphia to widen eligibility for free internet access for students

2020-12-10T19:41:33+00:00

City officials plan to expand eligibility for PHLConnectED, a program that provides students in Philadelphia with free internet access for remote learning.

Next week will be designated “PHLConnectED Week” with expanded outreach to families, said Otis Hackney, the city’s chief education officer. City officials will release details then about who else will be eligible for the program.

Thousands of families still are not connected to the internet, he said, though he couldn’t provide an exact figure. When the program began in August, city officials estimated that 18,000 families needed internet access. Since then, they said that they have reached about 12,000 families, including more than 7,000 who had signed up for a Comcast promotion before the official launch of PHLConnectED.

“We’re using this week to continue promotion of PHLConnectEd with new opportunities to sign up,” he said, speaking at Superintendent William Hite’s weekly availability with reporters.

Since the program began, city officials have learned more about why families continue to lack internet access. One problem is that some families start the process to receive wired access or a mobile hotspot and then don’t complete it. A large proportion of families fail to take the next step, Hackney said.

The week will include incentives, including contests and gift cards, and increased communication with those families and others, he said.

“We’ve targeted those families who started the process but not yet completed it,” he said.

Hackney said that the program is working with district and charter schools and the Catholic Independence Mission Schools to pinpoint those in need.

Initially, Hackney said, the city tried to find families who had no access at all. Now city officials are reaching out to those who have some access, but it’s sufficient to support multiple students in the same home. In that case, they may also offer mobile hotspots to the family.

Some students may have access in their homes but spend their school day with caregivers who have spotty internet connections or no access. Those students also would be candidates for mobile hotspots.

PHLConnectED, funded through a combination of public money and private contributions, including by Comcast, promises free internet access through June 2022.

During Thursday’s availability, Hite also said the district is working with Children’s Hospital and the city’s department of health on a rapid coronavirus testing plan for when school buildings might reopen. He said the district will likely contract with a third party to administer the testing, which will be mandatory for any student or staff who is symptomatic.

The district is hoping to contract with an organization with mobile sites that can prioritize areas of the city that have been hardest hit by the virus. He said a plan will be finalized in the next couple of weeks.

Philly mayor, school board objected to COVID fund distribution

2020-12-09T00:42:38+00:00

Mayor Jim Kenney and city council president Darrell Clarke sent a letter to Gov. Tom Wolf in August complaining about how the state distributed $174 million in coronavirus relief funds to school districts, saying it denied the Philadelphia school district, the state’s largest, its “fair share” of the money.

A report issued this week by two state education advocacy organizations said that districts serving low-income, mostly Black and Latino students were shortchanged by the process. The groups urged state leaders to distribute any additional federal funds by using the state’s basic education formula, which takes into account factors such as poverty and the number of English language learners.

The letter from Kenney and Clarke called the formula the state used “inequitable” and called for Wolf to use his emergency education money to fix the disparity and “ensure Philadelphia students receive their fair share of state funding.”

Republican legislative leaders devised the formula used to distribute the health and safety grants — giving each of the state’s 500 school districts a baseline of $120,000 and then allocating the rest based on total enrollment. The result: Philadelphia received less per student than any other district, according to the letter.

After the Keystone Research Center and Education Voters PA released the report, Wolf, a Democrat, said he agreed the money should have been distributed using the state’s basic education funding system, also known as the “fair funding” formula.

“The District’s share would increase from $13 million to more than $40 million if the Fair Funding Formula was used to distribute these funds,” the letter said. The district’s chief financial officer, Uri Monson, told the board last week that it may have to do layoffs or furloughs because of shrinking revenue and rising costs from the coronavirus pandemic.

The Philadelphia Board of Education first objected to the distribution method when the money was allocated last spring. Board president Joyce Wilkerson said the formula “benefited wealthy suburban schools at the expense of large, urban schools. These are the same school districts that face the biggest hurdles and expenses related to reopening.”

Philadelphia’s educators should get vaccine priority, mayor says

2020-12-08T22:38:56+00:00

Mayor Jim Kenney said Tuesday he would push to make local educators a priority in getting a vaccine against COVID-19.

“We would like to get schools open and have it done safely,” the mayor said at his regular briefing about the coronavirus pandemic. “[Teachers] are a priority for us, not the same as an ICU nurse, but they do have priority from our perspective,” Kenney said.

School superintendent William Hite also called last week for educators to be among the first workers to get vaccinated. He and other urban school leaders are pushing the issue nationally, he said.

City health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said he expects Philadelphia will get some vaccines as early as next week from Pfizer and some from Moderna the week after. But he said people should not expect widespread availability until the spring of 2021.

The first priority for the city is to vaccinate frontline medical personnel, which are those who work in hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities, Farley said. After that other “critical workers” would receive the vaccination, but that category of workers has yet to be defined. Farley said it’s “too early to say” whether teachers would fall into that category. He suggested that “critical workers” would be those who have “lots of contact with other people.”

“If we have teachers who are actively teaching, that makes sense,” he said. At the same time, Farley said, “It’s always been our [the city] position that schools can open if they follow safety precautions.”

The Philadelphia school district had planned to open schools in September using a “hybrid” model for pre-kindergarten through second graders and some students with special needs. But those plans were scuttled after public outcry that it was unsafe. Opponents cited poor ventilation in many of the district’s aging buildings, among other concerns.

The district did work on the buildings and purchased millions in personal protective equipment, or PPE, and cameras to allow teachers to teach both in person and online, with the hope of starting hybrid learning in November. It also signed a detailed agreement with the teachers union outlining mandatory safety measures. But the plans were derailed again when the virus surged in the city.

The district made that decision on its own and not because the city health authorities ordered it. Farley noted about 100 private and parochial schools in the city have been conducting some in-person classes since September.

He said the health department “was working with every school we’re aware of where cases were reported” and there was evidence that the spread occurred in the school. He said that has happened at about 16 schools, and a few had to close as a result.

Last month, as part of a tighter crackdown due to an alarming rise in city COVID-19 cases, the city ordered high schools to go all-virtual, but allowed elementary schools to continue in-person teaching.

Since September, the city has opened up 77 access centers for students in kindergarten through sixth grade who needed a place to be during the day to do their remote learning. City officials said Tuesday that since September, there have been 30 positive cases involving either staff, students or parents across the 77 centers, resulting in 27 instances of temporary closure. (Some centers closed more than once.)

Deana Gamble, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said there have “not been cases of spread at access centers.” Those that closed “have done so because someone was exposed to COVID-19 elsewhere and out of an abundance of caution, the entire cohort was placed under quarantine.” Each access center has one cohort of 25 people or two that are kept isolated from each other.

Farley said doses of the vaccine will go directly to the states, but that some cities, including Philadelphia, will get additional supplies. Between the health department and hospitals, he said, the city has ample deep-freeze storage capability required by some of the vaccines.

He blamed the latest surge in the city on Thanksgiving gatherings. There were 1,408 new cases reported on Tuesday, and the test positivity rate has increased over the past week compared to the week before.

Kenney, who announced that he is in quarantine due to exposure to someone who tested positive, said it is important to him that schools open as soon as possible. But, he added, “all decisions will be based on science and medicine.”

Brave new world: Students from immigrant families in Philadelphia give inside view on adjustment to remote learning

2020-12-04T23:07:30+00:00

This article was produced with support from Resolve Philly, the organization that leads Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on economic mobility.

In mid-March, some 200,000 Philadelphia students were sent home from their public schools due to the coronavirus, with hopes they would return two weeks later. That didn’t happen, and the buildings have been shuttered ever since.

From Northeast to Overbrook to Furness, students had to adapt to learning online, largely from their homes. For thousands of students from immigrant families in Philadelphia public schools, including 13% who are English Language Learners, the shutdown has posed unique challenges. There can be language barriers or confusion about the new technology. There is concern about juggling jobs with children’s course loads. There is fear about the virus, which disproportionately strikes communities of color.

But there are also victories, grace, even a touch of enlightenment. A pair of brothers cozily study on a pillow bed handmade by their mother from African fabric. Others enjoy sharing lunch as a family, eating recipes passed down by great grandparents. Many have grown closer in this isolation.

Here are the stories of three immigrant families who spoke to Chalkbeat Philadelphia about this singular time in their education experience.

It all happened so fast.

“I had stuff left in my locker. I had my personal books in my locker, my dance clothes for my dance team in my locker. I expected to be sitting [out] for a week or two and come back,” recalled Ramirrah Reid, a junior at George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science, of her last days attending school.

But then the principal sent out an email saying the district was shutting down. “That was my sophomore year,” Ramirrah said, “and I didn’t really get to experience it at all.”

Ramirrah Reid, left, and her younger sister Samya Demercado.

“It all happened so fast ... I expected to be sitting [out] for a week or two and come back.” -Ramirrah Reid, George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science

For 16-year-old Ramirrah, school is now a laptop that she uses in her home in Overbrook Park, where she lives with her siblings as well as her mother and grandmother, both of whom immigrated from Jamaica in the 1990s. As the eldest of three children, she has also taken on the role of tutor and teacher while her mother is at work as a nurse.

On a recent morning, Ramirrah watched an astronomy lesson on space missions while her sister, Samya Demercado, sat on a living room sofa in her pink and white pajamas and played a game on the cell phone. Samya had a half day and was done with school a little after 10 a.m.

“My mom, at first she was here with us, taking care of my grandmom but she just recently started going back to work so it’s just me with my siblings,” Ramirrah said. “It’s kind of a lot because I’m doing my work, then I got to make sure they’re doing their work.”

Ramirrah is juggling everything at home while still fulfilling the requirements of what she called “hardcore” classes — Honors Pre-Calculus, Honors Physics, AP U.S. History, and an English 101 dual enrollment course at the Community College of Philadelphia.

According to the African Cultural Alliance of North America (ACAN), an organization that assists African and Caribbean immigrants, virtual learning has brought on an extra burden for families. The organization provides tech training for business owners and says they are working on a grant to help families adjust to virtual learning.

“There have been a lot of issues with digital learning in the African and Caribbean community,” said ACANA CEO Voffee Jabateh. “We do get parents having difficulties...issues like trying to log onto Zoom and not having the proper internet. In some cases, parents do not have the proper tools. Some of them only know how to go online over the phone. The parents might not know how to follow up or check their work, they only take their [students’] word for it.

Reporter Samaria Bailey and immigrant students appear on The Source with Andrea Lawful Sanders - WURD Radio

Player not showing? Click here.

Ramirrah said before returning to work, her mother supervised her younger brother and sister. Now, although she has stepped into the role, she is just as, if not more, bothered by the fact that she can’t be near her close friends. While Ramirrah is not shy, she does sometimes keep to herself and felt like school “really brought me out of my shell.” She tries to stay positive, avoids thinking about the stress and keeps herself busy. But some days it’s not easy.

“I prefer to be in school - just the whole school experience – going to different classes, meeting new people, going places after school with my friends,” she said, crying. “I don’t think I’ve ever come straight home after school.”

“Going virtual,” she continued, “I’m missing out on most of my high school experience.”

Ramirrah’s sister, Samya, said she felt similarly, like remote learning has taken something from her. When she was a second grader last year at Overbrook Educational Center, she was in the annex building. This was supposed to be the year that she moved up to the big building, where she could see all the older students, including her brother, walk to lunch in the cafeteria.

Ramirrah Reid, left, and her younger sister Samya Demercado shown studying together at home.

“But, now I’m in my house. I’m not in the building,” she said. “I feel furious because I want to see all my friends. I can’t see any of my friends and how funny and crazy they are.”

Samya has been struck by the heavy workload she’s expected to finish every day and turns to her teacher or sister if she needs help. The computer puts a strain on her eyes, she said, so much so that sometimes she feels as though they are “burning.” Ramirrah says she also gets headaches sometimes. Their brother, on the other hand, prefers learning at home without the distraction of classmates.

But virtual learning has brought on some residuals that they enjoy. Ramirrah and Samya have come to appreciate their grandmother and mother’s food, especially recipes passed down from their great-grandmother. Before, they might have eaten the school’s breakfast and lunch or ordered takeout meals. Now, they eat more of their family’s native foods – including special Jamaican sourced frankfurters, tin mackerel with boiled dumplings, and porridge.

“Sometimes what I will do is come down and make them something to eat because I don’t want them to be sitting around the computer all day, eating chips and stuff,” said their grandmother, Marlene Johnson. “I think I feel more for the children because sometimes you can see that they are confused. [But] they do their work.”

Learning at home has been an adjustment for all of Aracely Isidoro, an immigrant from Mexico, and her four children. But the sacrifice is perhaps steepest for her oldest, Jazaret.

The 18-year-old is an advanced construction student at YouthBuild Philadelphia, an accelerated program for nontraditional students to finish high school. Learning at home means she might miss out on one of the most important pieces of her program — the hands-on training needed to eventually earn a certification in her field. Jazaret watches the local coronavirus cases rise and restrictions on in-person learning remain in place, and she feels uncertain about her future.

“It’s complicated to get your certificate without having any experience,” said Jazaret. “We are going to get our diploma [but] we might not get certified because we don’t have the required hours or the hands-on experience.”

Juntos, a community-led Latinx immigrant organization based in South Philadelphia, said such uncertainty has come to mark the experiences of countless families and called on the School District of Philadelphia to do more.

“We have seen parents weigh between taking a job or leaving their children home alone, older siblings becoming teachers for their younger siblings, all while families fight for internet access to ensure their children are able to attend classes and then resolve issues that come up with the online platforms all in a language that is not their own,” Juntos said in a statement.

Learning inside the family’s three bedroom home in South Philadelphia, Jazaret misses having a “seat partner” who she could ask questions of in class. Jazaret described her new version of class as “in my bed … just staring at the computer.”

From left, Jazaret Isidoro embraces her younger brother Francisco. Her sister Angie is to the right and her brother Alan Perez is at the rear.

“When [we] go to normal school, if you have a question, you ask your seat partner. Now, it’s really difficult because we don’t know each other because our cameras are off.” -Jazaret Isidoro, YouthBuild Philadelphia

“Now, it’s really difficult because we don’t know each other because our cameras are off. We don’t have that connection or communication,” she said, adding that she sees a change in her siblings, too. “Normally, [I’m] used to after school, after three, the kids come in, they are full of energy but now it’s quiet.”

Her brother, Alan Perez, an 8th grader at Andrew Jackson School, also attends class in his bedroom. He said he initially liked the idea of virtual learning because he didn’t always enjoy learning in a school building. “I was actually pretty happy that we weren’t going back. I didn’t really like going in person. I thought it was nice to have freedom to roam around the house on breaks,” he said.

“My feelings have changed drastically.”

Alan knows that he procrastinates without someone watching him, especially when his mother is downstairs, and not able to mind him. So he admits he sometimes doesn’t pay attention in class. “It’s like, since I’m not being watched, I drift off doing my own thing…mostly playing video games,” he said. “I do feel I am learning. I still am able to turn in my assignments correctly.”

Jazaret and Alan said they also assume tutor roles for their two younger siblings, Angie, a fifth grader, and Francisco, a third grader. Their mother, who doesn’t speak English, said through a translator that their stepping in has been a huge help, as has a nearby church that offers tutoring two days a week.

“It’s very hard for me and my kids. I also didn’t study in Mexico, so the method of learning is very different and also much more advanced,” she said, noting that Jazaret and Alan’s help with the younger kids “makes it easier [but] it’s still complicated.

“In the case of my younger son - he has a hard time focusing on the task at hand. The teacher will send a message if the younger child is missing homework but there is no additional support,” she said.

One of the silver linings to having school at home for the family is the growth of their relationships. Jazaret and Alan observed that Angie and Francisco, who’ve been mostly immersed in American customs, are now more exposed to Mexican food and language.

“My younger siblings, they are speaking more of their native language, instead of English, which is good. During lunch or breakfast, we are eating more of our native food than normal school. They are eating better now. Here, we eat what we normally eat and our own fresh food, compared to the school’s processed food,” said Jazaret. “That’s one of the great things that came out of it. You have more time to connect or talk to your family than you would normally.”

When the Mohammed brothers, Aunullah and Mohammed-Muftahu, awake in the morning, the first thing they do is pray the Fajr prayer, one of the five daily Islamic prayers. They then shower, eat breakfast, and by 8:30 a.m., they are logged into their laptops for school. This is their regular routine, and according to their mother, Halimatu Mohammed, it has been slightly modified for virtual learning – as have other parts of their lives.

Mohammed, originally from Ghana, has to balance supervising her sons’ learning with her work as a visiting scientist at Northeastern University, including writing scientific papers and editing journals.

Brothers Aunullah Mohammed and Mohammed-Muftah Mohammed attend class on their laptops at their mother’s seamstress work table.

“I have to put a lot of these things on hold. Or, the majority of my work is done when they are asleep at night,” said Mohammed, who moved to the U.S. in 2000. “Whereas, I was a little bit relaxed on the sleeping time, now I have to be a lot stricter. I realized having a calendar for each child helps out a lot.”

Kou Dolo, an ACANA social media consultant, said the pandemic is a challenge for many working parents, including African and Caribbean business owners who have had to bring their children to work. She observed one instance recently while visiting a store along a majority African business corridor.

“There was a student in the store during [business] operations and people kept coming in and out and she was basically in class online and there were a lot of distractions [and] asking the teacher, ‘Can you please repeat?’” said Dolo. “I spoke to the president of the small business owners association and he talked about how they can’t leave their kids alone, they don’t have a babysitter, they have to bring their child to work with them.”

An active parent, Mohammed serves as a parent representative board member for her sons’ school, Independence Charter School - West, and regularly contacts their teachers to ensure they are on or ahead of target. At home in their Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood, such engagement translates into what the eldest, 12-year-old Aunullah, described as a mom who is stricter than the teacher.

“I can’t get as loose as I want to because in school there’s certain things that I can do, that I can’t do in here. At school, if you want to stand up, you can stand up. Here, if you stand up, you have to sit down, and you have to pay attention in class,” he said. “Mom is stricter when it comes to school. She takes it really serious.”

Aunullah Mohammed lies down on the pillow bed handmade by his mother, while attending class on his laptop.

On a late November afternoon, while Aunullah participated in a science lesson on the four hemispheres of the Earth, a piece broke off of his headphone jack. It’s the fourth pair he’s had. Seated nearby, his 9-year-old brother, Mohammed-Muftahu, listened intently to a Spanish class while the teacher reviewed the terms for the three meals of the day.

The brothers sat at a table usually used by their mother for some of her seamstress work. Mohammed observed the boys, providing direction in her Ghanian language, Hausa, while also tending to their three-year-old sister. At one point, she urged Aunullah to put his headphones back on, to which he responded with a minor protest.

“I don’t like it,” he said. Both sons wore casual clothes, as opposed to a uniform that they would normally have worn if they were in the school building.

At other times, they attend class in their rooms, planted on a pillow bed Mohammed recently handmade using an African-printed fabric, an effort to make them feel comfortable while online.

The issues they’ve experienced are similar to those reported by other families – computer freezes, sound failures, screen fatigue, wandering minds, and some sibling discord.

“I was in the room doing my class [and] he kicked me out while I was lying down,” said Mohammed-Muftahu, pointing out one of his brother’s antics. “When I’m not looking, he will come in my class and start [throwing] his hand up. It’s annoying. Sometimes, he types all of this stuff in the chat and the teacher says stop but it’s not me.”

Aunullah admitted that he is prone to distractions and will play games while his teacher is prepping lessons or if he finishes his work early.

Ms. Mohammed said the games were initially a problem, but through a rewards system she’s created, she’s been able to rein it in. She describes the entire experience as an adjustment – from the all-day management of the kids while tending to her own business to the constant buying of headphones and having to visit the school for supplies. But on a broader plane, she describes it as a “blessing.”

Because they are home more, the children are learning more of her native language — and she’s learning different sides of their personalities.

“I deeply appreciate it now that my kids will actually…initiate the conversation in my language and now it’s like a competition for them. I really love hearing them speak it,” she said. “These times are affording that and it’s allowing me to know my children. I feel like I’m a lot closer to them.You get to learn the different personalities of the kids. So, it’s like a blessing in disguise.”

Reporting on a pandemic while living through it? Student journalists and Chalkbeat Philly weigh in.

2020-11-18T21:36:43+00:00

Ace Orion and Jordyn Williams, two high schoolers, are chronicling how fellow classmates are navigating the virtual learning world.

As student journalists, they have spent their free time in Discord chats and Zoom calls to listen and tell the stories of how students are navigating going to school with teachers and peers they have never met in person. And while it’s been a very difficult year, they want the public to know it hasn’t been all bad.

“I recently did a story about a freshman and asked her: ‘In a virtual space, how are you finding friends?’” said Williams, a senior at George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science. “She was open and honest that she is making some friends – and she is even talking to people online she normally wouldn’t think to walk up to. There is a brighter side of things.”

Orion, a sophomore at the Franklin Learning Center High School, agreed and said students are also using social media to keep each other current on assignments and to keep “morale up between everyone.”

Orion and Williams joined two veteran education journalists on Tuesday for a panel discussion hosted by Chalkbeat about reporting and learning during the coronavirus pandemic. Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s Johann Calhoun and Dale Mezzacappa also weighed in on the big questions surrounding school reopening in Philadelphia, which was recently postponed again, and talked about their big stories.

Listen here to their in-depth discussion on journalism in the time of COVID-19, what could be done to improve virtual learning, and the storylines you should be following this year.

Having trouble viewing the video on mobile? Go here.

Philadelphia again delays start of in-person learning

2020-11-10T16:18:54+00:00

The Philadelphia School District has reversed its plans to start hybrid learning for pre-kindergarten through second grade students on Nov. 30, Superintendent William Hite said Tuesday.

Hite announced the decision to remain 100% virtual at a press briefing with Mayor Jim Kenney and city health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley. He said he made the decision after consultations with city and state health officials and the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Principals were informed in an email Tuesday morning that schools would remain all virtual “until further notice.”

“Transitioning to hybrid learning and having students engage in face-to-face instruction is our goal, but our top priority is the health and well-being of our students and staff,” Hite said, adding that “as with everything we’ve done over the last eight months, we have to be flexible” in responding to conditions.

Farley said that COVID-19 case counts in the city “are hitting all-time highs,” with 879 new cases on Monday. The positivity rate was 9.3%, the highest since mid-May. Hospitalizations are also going up.

“We are entering a dangerous period,” Farley said. He said the city was considering more stringent restrictions on everyday activity as a result, but did not announce any.

As recently as five days ago, Hite said the district planned to move ahead with its plan to reopen schools for the youngest students at the end of the month. The district did move back the anticipated start date for teachers from Nov. 9 to Nov. 16.

At the time, Hite announced that just one-third of eligible families had chosen the hybrid model.

Farley said that he fully supported Hite’s decision, but did not order it. “The decision was ultimately made by the school district,” he said.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers strongly opposed reopening, saying it wasn’t safe due to rising COVID-19 cases and poor ventilation conditions in some buildings, among other concerns.

“The decision to remain fully virtual for the foreseeable future will save lives,” said union president Jerry Jordan in a statement. “The science of COVID-19, paired with the massive ventilation and other facilities issues throughout the district, makes it clear: returning to school buildings, in any capacity, is unsafe right now.”

Through last week, Hite and Farley had emphasized that in-person learning is important for the development of young children. They said there were health implications for children who were unable to go to school and interact personally with teachers, and prolonged remote learning had the most dire effects on the most at-risk children. Hite reiterated that position Tuesday.

“The most important thing that is concerning to me, we wanted to make sure that children had the appropriate conditions for learning to read, learning to do math, and unfortunately in many of our communities these conditions do not exist,” Hite said. “That’s one of the reasons we were trying to do our best to get young people back as quickly as possible.”

Many students lack reliable internet access. The city, service providers, and philanthropists set up PHLConnectED, a program to help families connect for free. Now, just under 2,000 students are enrolled at city-run centers where students can go during the school day for internet access and adult supervision. The centers have a capacity of 2,147 and the number fluctuates daily; more than 300 families are on a waiting list. Altogether, about 2,700 families have used the centers since they opened in September, officials said.

After the pre-kindergarten through second graders, the district said it would bring students with complex needs and high school freshmen back in January and those in career and technical education programs back in February. Now, that schedule is also up in the air.

“We hope to see those children return before the spring,” Hite said. “It all depends on ... if it is safe to do so.”

When Farley said last week that it was safe to reopen schools, he noted that no child in Philadelphia had died from the virus, and so far national data indicate that schools typically aren’t sources of community spread.

But on Tuesday, he acknowledged that there have been “a large number of cases, or clusters of cases,” at independent, parochial and other religious schools that have resumed some in-person learning in the city. He said, however, that contract tracing showed only three schools were at the center of the outbreak. And right now, city officials have no plans to order those schools to return to all-virtual learning.

Over the last week, the teachers union had grown increasingly vocal about concerns whether a return to in-person learning was safe.

Philadelphia’s teachers and the school district had reached a tentative contract agreement last month that included a 2% raise and what Jordan called “one of the most stringent safety plans in the nation” to regulate in-person schooling during the coronavirus pandemic.

Jordan noted, too, that the state department of education’s guidelines indicated virtual learning should be used by school districts if there’s a substantial increase in community spread. State officials recommend all-virtual learning if there are more than 100 cases per 100,000 population and a positivity rate of 10%. Philadelphia is now at 9.3%, and that is steadily rising.

“This delay is challenging for students and educators alike,” Jordan added. “Remote learning should be no one’s goal, because we know that it is far from ideal. But, it is a win for students and educators nonetheless, because no one can work and learn if they are ill, or worse, from COVID. This decision will keep our students and staff safe, and that is, and must remain, the top priority.”

Ahead of Philadelphia selective admissions deadline, group says applications are down

2020-11-06T18:24:50+00:00

Applications to the city’s special admissions high schools are down this year, according to the Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP), the organization that runs the annual high school fair.

This is the first time the group has warned so starkly about a lag in applications. Eighth graders have until 11:59 p.m. Friday to apply to selective and citywide admissions high schools for the next school year.

Superintendent William Hite said Thursday that admissions numbers won’t be available until after the deadline has passed. He stressed that since the application process is all online, it should be easy for students to complete, adding that “there is no expectation that a child needs to visit a school.”

In an email to parents, PSP said most special admissions schools are seeing “significantly lower application numbers than they have during this time in previous years.”

The group, which in addition to the fair runs the GreatPhillySchools website, suggested that this could provide an opportunity for students to be accepted even if their test scores and grades don’t meet a school’s requirements.

“Due to this, we are highly encouraging students to apply to special admissions high schools that they may have previously considered ‘reach’ schools,” the email said.

Ted Domers, principal of the George Washington Carver High School of Engineering & Science, said he could not tell if applications were running behind the pace of prior years. He said there is always a late surge. “Everyone puts in at the last minute,” he said.

Students, counselors, and parents interviewed last month said they were hampered this year because they could not visit schools and shadow students, which many said figured crucially in their decision-making process. They said virtual “open house” events could not compare.

And counselors who relied on seeing students every day to set up appointments to advise them and help them complete applications have had a harder time doing this.

The district has an array of selective admissions and citywide admissions high schools, and other special programs, including about 40 career and technical education options. Students, even those who plan to attend their neighborhood school, are encouraged to apply and rank five choices.

The pandemic has forced other changes in the process. Because the state standardized test was not administered last spring, the district said it would consider fifth and sixth grade scores instead of seventh grade scores. The application process relies heavily on test scores and grades, especially for the most selective schools.

But PSP suggested that because of the falloff in applications schools will be “looking more holistically” at students rather than relying on test scores.

David Saenz, a spokesman for the group, said high schools “have been heroic” in conducting virtual open houses and participating in the High School Fair, which was all virtual this year. Saenz said it has received 13,000 visitors.

Hite pushes forward with reopening plans despite Philadelphia teachers’ concerns

2020-11-06T02:21:18+00:00

Despite a surge in cases of coronavirus, Philadelphia’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley, and Superintendent William Hite said on Thursday they believe it’s safe to reopen school buildings to some students later this month.

Teachers will return Nov. 16, a week later than originally planned because of the small number of students who have said they will return in person.

The school district has said students in pre-kindergarten to second grade can return to school buildings Nov. 30 for a hybrid model, which would include two to three days a week of instruction.

But only 10,000 students have signed up. That’s less than one-third of the 32,000 students in those grades.

Parents decided last week whether they want their children to learn virtually or return for some in-person instruction.

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan said Thursday that it would violate the memorandum of understanding between the union and the district to bring teachers and students back to school buildings with the city’s current transmission rates. Philadelphia’s positivity rate is 8.5%.

Philadelphia’s teachers and the school district have reached a tentative contract agreement that includes a 2% raise and what union president Jerry Jordan calls “one of the most stringent safety plans in the nation” to regulate in-person schooling during the coronavirus pandemic.

He noted the health and safety plan is not part of the tentative agreement, yet something his team negotiated as a separate memorandum of understanding, or MOU.

The MOU outlines specific conditions that must be met when teachers and staff return to school buildings, including requirements for cleaning, the presence of hand sanitizer, and maximum occupancy for classrooms based on social distancing and ventilation.

Hite confirmed on Thursday that the MOU played no part in moving the return date for teachers, saying the decision was made based on logistics.

But Jordan said Hite hasn’t addressed the union’s concerns about increasing COVID-19 rates, lack of ventilation reports for some schools, and reports from union members about some schools being in “various stages of readiness for staff and students to return.”

Jordan noted, too, that the state department of education’s guidelines indicate virtual learning should be used by school districts if there’s a substantial increase in the community spread of the virus.

On Thursday, Farley acknowledged that Philadelphia’s positivity rate has been increasing, and “in response we are considering additional restrictions on high risk activities in Philadelphia.”

The education department’s recommendation for virtual learning is based on community rates higher than 100 cases per 100,000 population over a seven-day period or if more than 10% of the people tested were positive.

Farley said the education department’s recommendation is just that, a recommendation, and other school districts in the state are using a hybrid model with similar rates of infection in the community. Right now, Philadelphia meets the first criteria outlined by the education department, but not the second, he said.

“We know that if we have a complete lockdown and no one leaves home then the virus stops spreading,” Farley said. “We also know we can’t do that forever.”

The district’s reopening plan calls for some older students, including ninth graders and those in career and technical programs, to return to some in-person learning in January. Hite has said it’s possible that third through eighth graders and 10th graders to 12th graders — the majority of the school district — will not return to school buildings at all this school year.

Farley said there is a cost to keeping children home.

“We’ve been in the epidemic now for eight months,” Farley said. “During that time we have not had a single death from COVID in a child {in Philadelphia.} During that same time we’ve had at least seven children die from gun fire in Philadelphia. Kids need to be learning.”

Analysis: Just one third of elementary classrooms in Philadelphia meet minimum ventilation standards

2020-10-29T09:56:33+00:00

School Name	Classrooms safe for 15 or more	% of classrooms safe for 15 or more	Max number of students	% of last year's K-2 enrollment
Joseph H. Brown School	0	0%	0	0%
William Dick School	0	0%	0	0%
Franklin S. Edmonds School	0	0%	0	0%
Ellwood School	0	0%	0	0%
A.L. Fitzpatrick School	0	0%	0	0%
Stephen Girard School	0	0%	0	0%
William D. Kelley School	0	0%	0	0%
John B. Kelly School	0	0%	0	0%
Kenderton Elementary School	0	0%	0	0%
Anna L. Lingelbach School	0	0%	0	0%
Alain Locke School	0	0%	0	0%
John F. McCloskey School	0	0%	0	0%
General George G. Meade School	0	0%	0	0%
Samuel Powel School	0	0%	0	0%
Laura W. Waring School	0	0%	0	0%
Bache-Martin School	1	2%	15	9%
Louis H. Farrell School	1	2%	15	4%
Thomas Holme School	1	3%	15	5%
General Philip Kearny School	1	13%	15	15%
General George A. McCall School	1	3%	15	6%
Robert B. Pollock School	1	3%	15	6%
Bayard Taylor School	1	6%	15	6%
Stephen Decatur School	2	8%	30	10%
Edward Heston School	2	6%	30	21%
Robert E. Lamberton School	2	33%	30	26%
Henry C. Lea School	2	6%	30	14%
William C. Longstreth School	2	40%	30	24%
Anne Frank School	3	8%	45	7%
Thurgood Marshall School	3	6%	45	22%
Robert Morris School	3	8%	45	65%
Chester A. Arthur School	4	18%	60	44%
Francis Hopkinson School	4	100%	60	23%
Edwin Forrest School	5	36%	75	15%
Charles W. Henry School	6	21%	90	51%
Morton McMichael School	6	14%	90	90%
Benjamin B. Comegys School	7	24%	105	64%
William H. Loesche School	7	13%	105	21%
E. Washington Rhodes School	8	16%	120	94%
Dr. Ethel Allen School	9	30%	135	79%
Vare-Washington School	9	31%	135	97%
Overbrook Educational Center	10	63%	150	197%
Potter-Thomas School	11	37%	165	103%
Lewis Elkin School	12	36%	180	43%
William McKinley School	12	48%	180	151%
Gilbert Spruance School	12	100%	180	42%
Richard R. Wright School	12	43%	180	103%
John Barry School	13	33%	195	92%
Fitler Academics Plus School	14	93%	210	239%
Southwark School	15	83%	225	78%
Allen M. Stearne School	16	53%	240	131%
Philip H. Sheridan School	17	68%	255	81%
William H. Ziegler School	17	53%	255	158%
Cayuga School	18	72%	270	118%
Julia W. Howe School	19	83%	285	232%
John Welsh School	19	46%	285	317%
Edward Gideon School	20	20%	300	385%
Edwin M. Stanton School	20	100%	300	246%
James G. Blaine School	21	49%	315	227%
Julia de Burgos School	22	49%	330	146%
William Cramp School	25	83%	375	169%
Frances E. Willard School	25	63%	375	90%
Bridesburg School	26	70%	390	158%
John H. Webster School	27	73%	405	129%
Henry A. Brown School	29	81%	435	458%
Prince Hall School	31	76%	465	177%
Penrose School	32	82%	480	400%
Widener Memorial School	33	52%	495	1650%
Mayfair School	34	38%	510	72%
Henry W. Lawton School	42	93%	630	194%
Alexander Adaire School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Ethan Allen School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Add B. Anderson School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Clara Barton School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Mary M. Bethune School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Rudolph Blankenburg School	No report	No report	No report	No report
F. Amedee Bregy School	No report	No report	No report	No report
William C. Bryant School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Laura H. Carnell School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Lewis C. Cassidy Academics Plus School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Joseph W. Catharine School	No report	No report	No report	No report
George W. Childs School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Watson Comly School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Cook-Wissahickon School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Jay Cooke School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Kennedy C. Crossan School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Crossroads at Hunting Park	No report	No report	No report	No report
Anna B. Day School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Hamilton Disston School	No report	No report	No report	No report
James Dobson School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Tanner G. Duckrey School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Paul L. Dunbar School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Eleanor C. Emlen School	No report	No report	No report	No report
D. Newlin Fell School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Feltonville Intermediate School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Thomas K. Finletter School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Fox Chase School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Benjamin Franklin School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Samuel Gompers School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Joseph Greenberg School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Albert M. Greenfield School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Horatio B. Hackett School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Andrew Hamilton School	No report	No report	No report	No report
John Hancock Demonstration School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Avery D. Harrington School	No report	No report	No report	No report
John F. Hartranft School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Henry H. Houston School	No report	No report	No report	No report
William H. Hunter School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Andrew Jackson School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Abram S. Jenks School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Jenks Academy for Arts and Sciences	No report	No report	No report	No report
Juniata Park Academy	No report	No report	No report	No report
Francis S. Key School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Eliza B. Kirkbride School	No report	No report	No report	No report
James Logan School	No report	No report	No report	No report
James R. Lowell School	No report	No report	No report	No report
James R. Ludlow School	No report	No report	No report	No report
John Marshall School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Alexander K. McClure School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Delaplaine McDaniel School	No report	No report	No report	No report
William M. Meredith School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Thomas Mifflin School	No report	No report	No report	No report
S. Weir Mitchell School	No report	No report	No report	No report
John Moffet School	No report	No report	No report	No report
J. Hampton Moore School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Andrew J. Morrison School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Thomas G. Morton School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Honorable Luis Munoz-Marin School	No report	No report	No report	No report
George W. Nebinger School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Olney School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Overbrook Elementary School	No report	No report	No report	No report
John M. Patterson School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Thomas M. Peirce School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Sadie Alexander School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Joseph Pennell School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Samuel Pennypacker School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Rhawnhurst School	No report	No report	No report	No report
James Rhoads School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Richmond School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Theodore Roosevelt School	No report	No report	No report	No report
William Rowen School	No report	No report	No report	No report
George W. Sharswood School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Shawmont School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Isaac A. Sheppard School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Solomon Solis-Cohen School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Spring Garden School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Edward T. Steel School	No report	No report	No report	No report
James J. Sullivan School	No report	No report	No report	No report
John H. Taggart School	No report	No report	No report	No report
Martha Washington School	No report	No report	No report	No report

15 elementary schools do not have a single classroom that is safe for at least 15 students

As thousands of Philadelphia parents weigh whether to send their children back to school buildings, a Chalkbeat analysis of school air quality evaluations has found that two-thirds of elementary classrooms with completed reports lack even the minimum industry-recommended ventilation standards to safely hold 15 or more people.

And one-fifth of elementary schools have no classrooms that can accommodate that many people while meeting the air circulation standards.

Under the district’s hybrid plan, about 32,000 students in kindergarten through second grade would have the option of returning to school two days a week, with half the group attending on Mondays and Tuesdays and the other half on Thursdays and Fridays, starting on Nov. 30. Staff members are expected to start preparing their classrooms on Nov. 9, less than two weeks away. Parents must decide by Friday whether to send their children back.

Chalkbeat’s analysis is based on 79 reports that are available on the district’s website, out of 119 that officials say have been sent to principals. There are 147 elementary schools and 215 district-run schools in the city. The reports online are for 74 elementary schools and four high schools that house pre-kindergarten programs — Edison, South Philadelphia, Lincoln, and Washington, plus the Rivera building, which is a district office and conference center that houses a private pre-kindergarten program.

District officials have not explained why all 119 of the reports distributed to principals are not also available online.

The school district has had problems with air quality and ventilation in its buildings for years, an issue that has become magnified during the coronavirus pandemic. Transmission of the virus is believed to be higher indoors, and school buildings, unlike hospitals, weren’t designed to mitigate the spread of a contagious disease.

The standards used in these reports — 15 cubic feet per minute, or CFM, of airflow per person in a room — are general ventilation requirements, not those that experts say are sufficient to curb the spread of an airborne pathogen. Even by the lesser non-medical standard, an earlier analysis found 80% of school buildings had some ventilation problem.

In doing school-by-school, room-by-room evaluation of air flow, the district is trying to find out where its ventilation problems are the most egregious and assure that the classrooms being used have acceptable air circulation, while counting on social distancing, sanitation, hand-washing, mask wearing, and other safety measures to control virus spread.

Assuring the 15 CFM per-person standard “is just a piece of the puzzle,” said district chief operating officer Reginald McNeil. The other safety measures are “what helps lower the risk” of COVID-19 transmission.

For its analysis, Chalkbeat counted which classrooms would be safe for up to 15 students. That figure was chosen because the maximum class size under the teachers’ contract for the pre-kindergarten through second grade classes is 30 students, and under the hybrid system, no more than half of them would be in school on any given day.

National data suggest schools aren’t major sites of virus transmission, especially in the earlier grades. Outbreaks have been relatively rare as schools have reopened across the country. But an important aspect of safely reopening schools is community spread. Children can spread the virus, and in communities with high rates of COVID-19, it can be difficult to limit transmission.

Philadelphia’s positivity rate for the past seven days is 7.3%, the highest since early June, and it has been rising.

Every week, the state Department of Education rates each county based on the severity of viral spread and offers guidance about whether schools should stay virtual, could move to a hybrid model or fully reopen. Last week, it moved Philadelphia from the moderate to substantial risk category, which recommends all-virtual school.

Ventilation problems in aging school facilities have raised concerns for parents and educators about how COVID-19 might spread.

The lack of public information available also has made it difficult for parents trying to make an informed decision. As of now, reports are available only for about half the buildings that house the lower grades, and the district doesn’t plan to release the rest until Nov. 12, after Friday’s deadline.

Parents have been told that if they choose this week to send their children back to the buildings, they can change their minds at any time. The reverse, however, is not true: If they choose all-remote, they will not be able to return to school in person until the third quarter, in late January.

In weighing their options, parents are trying to decipher reports that are technical, confusing and, in some cases, seem to indicate that no parts of the building have what is considered adequate air circulation, or “air balancing,” in which there is continual cycling of indoor and outdoor air.

“I’m looking at a sheet with numbers with no other information on it,” said Lisa Hallowell, an environmental lawyer with a third grader and a kindergartner at the McCall School in Society Hill. “They’re asking for us to make a pretty big decision for all of our families and we just don’t have great information and we don’t have a lot of time to digest the information that we have.”

She said that the report for McCall showed that in her daughter’s classroom, “the occupancy allowed...was zero people.”

At William Dick Elementary in North Philadelphia, the “safe occupancy” level for all classrooms is listed as zero — likely meaning that there is no indoor-outdoor air circulation in any classrooms. At A. L. Fitzpatrick Elementary in the Northeast, which has 80 pre-kindergarten students, no classroom is adequately ventilated for more than four people at a time, according to the reports.

Three other pre-kindergarten sites — Edmonds, Kelley and Meade — don’t have even one classroom that can safely house 15 or more students, according to the reports.

And then there are other schools, like Richmond Elementary in Frankford, for which there are no reports yet at all.

“I am concerned because our ventilation report has not been completed,” said Stefanie Marrero, a mother of four with three students at Richmond, including a first grader. Parents, she said, are “left in the dark ... I want a copy of this report, I want to know if my kids’ school is safe to be in.”

Hallowell said she has decided to keep her kindergartner home. Marrero is inclined to sign up her first grader for the hybrid approach while she waits for more information.

A technical breakdown

Philadelphia school buildings, with an average age of 75, have longstanding issues with ventilation and air quality. Teachers have long complained about needing to open windows in the winter because the heaters were on overdrive — or conversely, they had to keep their coats on because the heat didn’t work. And the last time the district tried to open in late August, it had to close schools because of stifling conditions. While some schools have air conditioners, many don’t. In some buildings, windows can’t open or can open only a little bit.

Other school districts, such as New York City, rushed to purchase air purifiers and test and repair ventilation systems this fall. Since the 2017 study of all its school buildings, Philadelphia has invested in upgrading systems. The pandemic has accelerated this work.

“Because of the pandemic, we’re taking a deeper look into our ventilation systems now,” said chief operating officer Reginald McNeil in an interview.

The district’s capital projects plan indicates that it intends to spend more than $150 million on recommissioning or replacing heating, ventilation, and cooling systems in 20 schools from 2020 to 2026.

McNeil said that 17 elementary buildings, and 25 schools overall, have non-functioning ventilation systems that could not possibly be repaired in a month. Principals know which buildings, but they have not been publicly identified.

For these schools, McNeil said the district is planning to use window fans that can circulate outside air into the building. The fans do not have an air filtration system, he said, but they do have a rating for how many cubic feet per minute of fresh air they circulate in a room.

“But just because the ventilation systems aren’t functioning doesn’t mean you can’t use the building,” he said. In fact, most district schools did not regularly use their ventilation systems, which consist mostly of large house fans that bring outside air into a room.

Before the pandemic, he said, most ventilation systems “were not even turned on in schools.” Schools could be heated, “and when it got too warm, you would open a window. Because of the pandemic, we’re taking a deeper look into our ventilation systems now.”

Chalkbeat and WHYY also asked two air quality experts to evaluate the reports and explain what they reveal to parents and teachers about effectiveness in stemming the spread of COVID-19.

“The 15 CFM per person is intended to be good for everyday aesthetic complaints,” said industrial hygienist David Krause, citing the ability to mask body odor and regulate moisture levels. “This is irrelevant when it comes to pathogen control.”

In general, he said, “Schools are not built to do this.”

He said hospitals require at least six, preferably 10, complete “air changes” per hour, meaning outdoor air replacing indoor air. Even the classrooms with the best results would not come close to meeting that standard, he said.

The numbers in Philadelphia’s reports only “tell part of the story,” said William Bahnfleth, an engineering professor at Penn State University and chair of the new epidemic task force of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, or ASHRAE.

The district, he said, is to be commended for its “attempt to make sure the minimum ventilation rate is provided.” But for pathogen control, “that rate is not considered sufficient by ASHRAE. What you need is minimum ventilation, plus filtration.”

“But minimum ventilation without additional air cleaning probably is not sufficient protection,” Bahnfleth said.

Even before the pandemic, 41% of school districts in the country needed to update or replace their heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, or HVAC, systems in at least half of their schools, according to a report released in June by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. That’s about 36,000 school buildings nationwide.

“Now we want those systems to protect students and staff from COVID-19,” Bahnfleth said. “That’s a concern.”

Both Mayor James Kenney and city health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley take the position that it is safe to reopen schools for the youngest learners, citing scant evidence of classroom spread in some 50 Catholic, private, and charter schools that have already returned to in-person learning. At a press conference last week, Farley attributed an outbreak at the private Philadelphia School to a one-time safety lapse.

The district’s ventilation reports were completed by several vendors. Most reports list the room number and type of room — classroom, office, auditorium, gym, hallway.

The reports also indicate the amount of outdoor ventilation that a given room receives. As a result of the standard of 15 cubic feet per minute of ventilation for each person in the room, the district’s contractors divided this number by 15 to determine maximum occupancy levels.

Lewis also emphasized that the district is doing a square-foot analysis of each room to determine safe occupancy based on social distancing requirements, and the lower number would be the limit in a given room.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers has raised concerns about school ventilation.

The Caucus of Working Educators, an activist group within PFT, released a report on Tuesday based on its own analysis that said 66% of all rooms were unsafe for 10 students and one teacher, and 74% were unsafe for 15 students and one teacher. Its report also said 96% of bathrooms, 60% of nurse’s offices, and 58% of hallways and stairwells were unsafe for any occupancy, even before the pandemic. In total, the Caucus found that 1,700 rooms across all schools were unfit due to a lack of adequate ventilation.

Despite concerns, the district’s reopening readiness dashboard said 53% of schools are “fully certified for ventilation,” as of Wednesday. But Lewis said that ventilation “certified” means an air balancer has examined the school “and we have the results,” not that those schools had been cleared for safe occupancy.

Parents voice their concerns

With a Friday deadline looming, some parents will be forced to make a decision about sending their children back to school without air quality reports. District officials have said they don’t plan to release the remaining reports until well after that deadline, but are giving parents the option to change their minds if they choose hybrid and then are unnerved by the report for their school.

Parents also are concerned about whether the district can address basic safety and sanitation issues before schools reopen.

Kaija Sannicks, 31, of East Falls quit her job to keep her preschooler home. Her four-year-old is enrolled at Thomas Mifflin Elementary.

“They have problems keeping toilet paper in the bathrooms,” she said. “You really want me to trust that you’re going to keep my child safe from a highly contagious airborne disease? No, no.”

There’s not an air quality report for Mifflin yet, but she said it wouldn’t matter.

Richmond Elementary, where three of Stefanie Marrero’s four children attend, also has had an asbestos problem. Her oldest is at Kensington CAPA. Marrero, who was protesting last January over the asbestos with other Philly parents, teachers, and union leaders, said it’s “very hard” to trust the school district.

“Our school was one of the worst,” she said about the asbestos. “How do you expect K-2 to come back in without proper [personal protective] equipment and without ventilation, no fans, no air conditioners? How do you expect to teach children?”

Marrero plans to send her first grader back to hold his spot while she waits for Richmond’s report.

But she remains torn about what’s best for her family.

“Do I want my child to sit in a classroom for seven or eight hours with one teacher, and they can’t get up, there’s no recess, and still have lunch at your desk,” she asked. “Or should I keep him home where he can get up and move around — do I want that headache still? I don’t know. Because I have to deal with three other children. It’s very complicated.”

Philadelphia school buildings will not reopen if they don’t meet health, safety measures, Hite says

2020-10-23T01:37:06+00:00

Superintendent William Hite promised Philadelphia board of education members and the public on Thursday that school buildings will not open “for in-person learning unless we have confidence that every health and safety measure is met.”

Hite made the statement at the board’s monthly action meeting at which he presented his latest reopening update, including more details on the district’s ventilation inspections and results for city schools.

The district is planning for hybrid learning, a mix of virtual and in-person classes, to start Nov. 30 for 32,000 students in pre-kindergarten through second grade. Staff and teachers are scheduled to return on Nov. 9 to prepare.

Some parents and teachers questioned the plan, but there was nowhere near the same level of outrage and opposition that occurred in July, when Hite proposed opening schools in September using a hybrid model.
Board members asked several questions and sought more information, particularly around adequate ventilation in schools, but seemed largely satisfied with the report and the timetable.

Hite and the district’s new chief operating officer, Reginald McNeil, shared information on the ventilation assessments and air quality balancing occurring in schools. Hite said 119 schools have complete readiness reports conducted by contractors hired by the district, including ventilation, and 102 “are completely ready” for occupancy. Another 105 reports still need to be completed, and he promised that all reports for schools slated for occupancy will be available by Nov. 12. There are 80 reports online now.

Without identifying them, he said there are 25 schools, 17 of them elementary schools, that need major work to meet industry and public health ventilation standards, and they either will be kept offline or be equipped with fans as a temporary fix.

Parents have to decide between Oct. 26 and Oct. 30 whether to choose hybrid learning or continue all virtual.

“Verified air balancers are used to determine the number of people who can safely occupy a space,” McNeil said. The ventilation reports will include safe occupancy signs for each classroom based on the ventilation report and social distancing requirements,.

On July 30, the district passed a Health and Safety plan required by the Pennsylvania Department of Education outlines detailed protocols lans for maintaining safe conditions.

Hite said 99% of new cleaning positions have been filled and that 99.4% of all personal protective equipment, including masks, have been delivered.

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan said his team had received building reports on Thursday. The union reached a tentative agreement with the district Wednesday night that includes a “memo of understanding” that outlines detailed safety protocols the district must follow.

“Given the district’s years of deferred maintenance, and massive district-wide ventilation issues, reopening in any capacity will be enormously challenging, and our analysis of the ventilation reports and other standards will determine the feasibility of these efforts,” Jordan said.

‘I’m very worried’ — Virtual high school admissions in Philadelphia: Nothing like the real thing

2020-10-22T13:22:16+00:00

Two years ago, Tanya Lopez’s son Christopher, then in eighth grade, thought he knew exactly where he wanted to attend high school: Central. Science Leadership Academy-Beeber was on his list, but not under heavy consideration.

Then he visited the two schools. He found Central, with more than 2,400 students, too big and intimidating, his mom said. At SLA-Beeber, with an enrollment of just 600, he visited classes and shadowed students. He and his mom spent time talking to the principal, Chris Johnson, about the school’s project-based approach and its philosophy.

Christopher changed his mind on the spot, and is now a sophomore at SLA-Beeber.

“He’s incredibly happy,” Lopez said.

It is high school selection time in Philadelphia, a period of decision-making for students and families that can have a profound effect on their futures. But this year some fear that high school selection will be yet another means through which the pandemic exposes and exacerbates inequities, putting this year’s eighth graders at a permanent disadvantage.

The school district has an array of choices, including Central and Masterman, two of the highest-ranked high schools in the state. It has themed schools, including ones focused on science, the arts, civic engagement, and foreign affairs. It offers schools like SLA that take a project-based approach to learning and about 40 different career and technical education programs from barbering to welding to graphic arts and high-tech specialties.

The district wants all students to participate in the admissions process, even if they plan to attend the default option, their neighborhood school. It is called “find your fit.” The deadline is Nov. 6, just two weeks away.

Counselors are stressed, with some saying that they are having a harder time engaging their students in the virtual world.

Jennifer Dougherty, one of two counselors for 150 eighth graders at Wagner Middle School in East Oak Lane, is worried that this year’s process will not serve her students well.

“The district needs to do a big push,” Dougherty said. “If this was a regular school year, I’d just be meeting with kids constantly, I’d be in their face.”

Instead, she tries to interest them by dropping in on Zoom classes. “We go into classrooms and no one comments. It’s quiet, radio silence,” she said. “It doesn’t seem real to them. Our eighth graders don’t put on their cameras and they don’t speak. It’s so hard to communicate.”

Normally, she said when there were three weeks to go, she would have gone through the process with half to three-quarters of her students. Instead, at that point this year, she had met with only 30.

To speed things up, she planned socially-distanced outdoor conferences on school grounds with her students for last Friday. She penciled in 20 slots, and 13 were filled. But then it rained, and the meetings were canceled.

“I can’t imagine we’re the only school in this situation,” she said. “I’m very worried, but we’ll make it happen somehow.”

The school district did not respond to inquiries about whether the pace of applications this year is slower than prior years and whether officials have any concerns.

Kate Rodgers, the counselor at Dobson elementary, has only 25 eighth graders. Still, even with that small number “this year is a whole new level of difficulty” in connecting with students, discussing their options, and making sure they complete the application, she said.

For one thing, admissions criteria are murky – for instance, it is unclear whether some schools still require an essay. “Information changes all the time,” she said.

Both Dougherty and Rodgers are especially concerned that the district has chosen to use fifth and sixth grade test scores in evaluating applications. Usually, it uses seventh grade scores, but no test was administered last year after school buildings closed down during the pandemic.

“It just doesn’t seem right that what you did as a 10-year-old kid could affect a huge chunk of your life,” said Rodgers. “Where you go to high school impacts your post-secondary options. There are other ways to learn about kids than test scores.” She pointed out that many selective colleges have chosen to forego consideration of SAT and ACT scores in their admissions processes, at least temporarily.

Dougherty agrees, “My students have grown,” she said. “They’re not even the same person and we’re looking at how they did…when they were babies.”

Superintendent William Hite has said he wants to increase equity in the admissions process, and the district’s own research pinpoints test scores as the main barrier to achieving it. The admissions process has recently come under increasing scrutiny for its fairness and potential inherent bias, with critics citing the underrepresentation of Black students at some of the most selective schools and programs.

The district has promised more outreach to schools like Wagner where students rarely make it into the most selective schools, and some of that has occurred, Dougherty said. But the virtual nature of the interactions blunts the potential impact.

Beyond that, students and their parents worry, despite some schools’ best efforts, that they are missing out on vital information, especially because they cannot actually visit schools.

“It’s kind of weird,” said Eleanor Palmer, an eighth grader at J.S. Jenks Elementary in Chestnut Hill, about the admissions process. “You can’t really go into the school and see what it’s really like and get a feel of the environment that the school has.” Virtual “open house” doesn’t quite cut it, she said.

“Sometimes there are kids on it that answer questions and tell you about their experiences,” she said. “That’s pretty cool. But some are just teachers and counselors talking.”

Lopez’s younger son, Christian, also an eighth grader at J.S. Jenks, is going through the process this year. Mindful about how the visit totally changed things for her older son, she is ”concerned.”

A bunch of virtual open houses are “crammed in at the end of October,” she said, and they are trying to fit them all in. “but it’s not as easy as it was with my older son.” A lot of the open houses are made up primarily of pre-recorded messages, she said.

Lee Carpenter, Eleanor’s mom, said no one gets the same feeling from a virtual setting, although Zoom meetings can yield some insights.

“Some schools talk about their more stringent entrance requirements, others more on building community, others focus on one areas of study. Some involve students in the presentation. You can get a sense of what the philosophy of the school is, but of course there is no substitute for being able to visit,” she said.

Eleanor interjected: “There is no way to tell if you like a school if you can’t interact with people or be in the school,” she said. “That’s frustrating.”

Philadelphia teachers, district reach contract deal, avert strike

2020-10-22T02:03:00+00:00

He noted the health and safety plan is not part of the tentative agreement, yet something his team negotiated as a separate memorandum of understanding, or MOU.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, or PFT, has 13,000 members. Jordan announced that those attending a Zoom meeting Wednesday evening had indicated strong approval for the one-year pact.

The 2% raise is retroactive to August 16. In addition, members will receive their “step” increases, due based on additional experience and advanced degrees, starting on Jan. 4, 2021. “This is a significant win for us,” Jordan said in a press call with reporters, noting that 89% of the members present for Wednesday’s meeting voted in favor of the agreement. Union officials said about half the members were on the call.

He said the pact would cost the district an additional $31 million. “This is not an expensive contract for them,” Jordan said. The overall district budget is more than $3 billion.

The safety plan is in the form of a detailed memo of understanding outlining specific conditions that must be met when teachers and staff return to school buildings, which at this point is slated to happen next month, despite a surge of COVID-19 cases in Philadelphia.

Those conditions cover issues including rules for social distancing, safe building capacity, and the availability of hand sanitizer and masks.

“To be clear, buildings cannot and will not open if it is not safe to do so, period,” Jordan said.

Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite will present to the board of education Thursday his plan for reopening school buildings to about 30,000 pre-kindergarten through second grade students on Nov. 30. Teachers and other staff are expected to return on Nov. 9. The board will not vote on the reopening plan at the meeting.

The MOU contains a dispute resolution system, Jordan said, in which any problems will be solved within days and rely on the mediation of a “renowned” physician who specializes in public health. “This is going to be a very rapid process,” he said. “Our goal is not to have unresolved disputes because this virus is nothing to play with.”

He said the full text of the MOU would be released publicly before Nov. 9.

Of the proposed timetable for reopening schools for in-person learning, Jordan said he is taking school officials at their word that it can be met.

“I can only tell you what the district has said,” he told reporters. At the same time, he added, “what we have seen so far is that we are not ready.”

A point of contention for parents and teachers is whether schools, most of which are decades old, can be properly ventilated to standards necessary to stem the spread of the virus. Hite has said that all buildings are being tested for air quality, but the district has yet to release the inspection reports themselves. Its “readiness reopening dashboard” says that 21% of buildings “are fully certified for ventilation.”

Hite and Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson have said that the district has spent some $70 million on COVID-19-related costs, including signs for social distancing, masks, and sanitizer.

When the union contract expired on Aug. 31, Jordan asked his members for a two-week extension of negotiations. At the time, Hite said he was confident the two sides could reach an accord in that time period. Jordan also expressed optimism — although he accused the district of trying to “shake down” teachers by demanding they sign off on a school reopening plan before discussing possible wage increases.

Still, the talks dragged on for two months. Jordan said that elected officials, including Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, were instrumental in helping the two sides reach an agreement.

The district “thought they would break us, but it didn’t work,” Jordan said.

Asked for a response to Jordan’s announcement of a pact, district spokeswoman Monica Lewis said via email Wednesday that “at this time, there will be no comment on the matter.”

Jordan said the union sought a one-year extension because of the unusual conditions brought on by the pandemic. He said that the union will be seeking a four-year contract after this agreement expires. “Well be back at the table probably in January,” he said.

The PFT had not gone on strike since a weekend walkout in 2000. Before that, the last strike was in 1981.

During the 17 years that the district operated under the state-dominated School Reform Commission between 2001 and 2018, the PFT was prohibited from striking. During that time, the union went five years without a contract, during which members received no raises or step increases. Once among the highest-paid teachers in the region, city teachers fell behind surrounding districts. Salaries now range from $45,716 to $91,852.

The PFT’s membership includes secretaries, counselors, and paraprofessionals. There are approximately 8,000 teachers and 125,000 students in the district.

The American Arbitration Association will now send out a mailing to all PFT members for formal approval. That process will conclude on or about Oct. 29, Jordan said.

The district and the union disagreed over whether the district could afford to give teachers a raise. Hite and CFO Monson said that the pandemic had battered its usual state and local revenue sources, and forecast a yearly shortfall of $800 million by 2025. The union noted that the district had received more than $100 million in federal coronavirus aid.

Jordan said that while some parents might feel that teachers don’t deserve raises because they have not been in school buildings, the virtual environment has been a backbreaker for them.

“Our teachers and other employees are working harder this year than they’ve ever worked,” he said. “It requires a different set of skills” that they weren’t trained for.

He added: “I understand the frustration of parents” who must upend their lives because the children are home. “This is very frustrating for everyone.”

Despite virus case surge, schools should reopen for youngest students, Philadelphia health chief says

2020-10-20T21:58:18+00:00

City health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said Tuesday that he thinks it is safe to reopen schools for the youngest students next month despite a continued rise in COVID-19 cases in Philadelphia.

Based on the experiences of about 50 private, Catholic, and charter schools that have conducted some in-person learning for the past seven weeks, Farley said, there is very little evidence of spread within school buildings.

While 44 sites “have seen cases of either students or staff” testing positive, they have been “mostly isolated cases … with no evidence of spread within the facility,” Farley said at a press briefing. In 26 of these situations, the city recommended quarantines that were followed.

The exception has been at the private Philadelphia School, where so far there have been 15 cases in a “cluster” and where information indicates it was due to classroom spread. “This is the only situation where we think this has occurred,” Farley said, adding that he thinks this was attributable to a one-time “slip in [safety] technique.”

Superintendent William Hite last week outlined a plan to open school buildings to approximately 30,000 students from -pre-kindergarten through second grade. At tomorrow’s meeting, the Board of Education will hear about the plan, but does not plan to take a new vote, according to board spokeswoman Janice Hatfield.

Hatfield said that the Board on July 30 approved a general coronavirus health and safety plan in July that is required by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. “Since then the board has been monitoring the progress of the plan and is committed to opening school buildings only when it is safe to do so,” she said.

Under Hite’s latest plan, teachers and staff are scheduled to re-enter school buildings on Nov. 9 to prepare for the return of the approximately 30,000 students on Nov. 30.

Students will be split into two groups, with one attending school in person on Mondays and Tuesdays, the other on Thursdays and Fridays, with Wednesdays being virtual for all. The students will be kept in their own cohorts to minimize their contacts, and the district is promising strict social distancing and other precautions.

Parents will still have the option of keeping students at home for all-virtual learning, and the district has invested $6 million in technology so that teacher lessons can be streamed to those students. Parents are being asked to make that decision between Oct. 26-30.

At the briefing, Farley detailed the rise in cases in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and neighboring New Jersey. Philadelphia had 268 new cases on Monday, and the past week’s average of nearly 200 cases a day is the highest it has been since mid-May, he said.

“We may be entering a dangerous period with this virus,” Farley said.

Still, he added, “It is important for children to be in school” for their short-term and long-term mental health.

“Having talked to some people whose children have been back in school, they say that their children’s mental health has brightened up tremendously,” he said. “We also have a lot of other health problems in this city right on up to homicides, and having children not in school, having teenagers not in school, doesn’t help those other problems.”

Hite’s plan calls for some older students – ninth graders and those in career and technical education programs with minimums of hands-on hours required for certification – to go back in January. But he has also left open the possibility that third through eighth graders and 10th graders through 12th graders may not return to in-person learning at all this school year.

“I think it is important for us to try to make it work in schools … and I think that if they are really vigilant about safety measures, they can do so safely,” Farley said.

One particular area of concern has been whether the schools can be properly ventilated. All buildings are being checked for safe “air balancing,” Hite has said, but so far the district has only been sharing how many schools have been evaluated, not the details of the reports. Hite promised that the reports, including safe capacity levels for each school building, would be available this week – presumably before the board is scheduled to vote. At a committee meeting on Oct. 15, several board members also shared their concerns about ventilation.

Hite had originally planned to open schools for some in-person learning in September, which Farley had also said would be safe. But he retreated from that plan after an outcry against it at the July school board meeting.

Correction: The Board of Education will hear a presentation on returning to in-person learning at its Thursday meeting. A previous version of this story said the Board of Education would vote on a re-opening plan.

Philadelphia continues working to give thousands of families free internet access

2020-10-10T00:07:49+00:00

City officials declared on Thursday that more needs to be done to give families with school-age children free access to the internet through the PHLConnectED initiative.

Last month, city and school officials embarked on the two-year, $17 million PHLConnectED initiative effort to connect up to 35,000 households to the internet. The service is to cover the need for students, who are studying remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic. The school district gave out 2,500 mobile hotspots before the program ramped up.

However, officials estimated up to 18,000 families with school-age children still lacked internet access. The estimate was based on culling the Philadelphia School District’s list of families with children enrolled and determining which ones did not have an account with either Comcast or Verizon.

Chief Education Officer Otis Hackney said on Thursday that considerable progress has been made in identifying and reaching many of the families and assessing their needs, but the work continues.

Eligible households will be chosen through data gathered by the school district, the charter schools office, and internet service providers. The district or schools will reach out to the households directly through direct mail, email, robocalls, or text message to let them know they are eligible for the program.

So far, PHLConnectED has signed up 590 families for Internet Essentials and given another 642 MiFi hotspots through Verizon, according to Andrew Buss of the city’s Office of Education and Technology.

About 1,650 signed up for internet access as soon as schools closed but before April, when Comcast offered two free months of internet for new customers. After that offer, more than 6,000 families signed up.

PHLConnectED is reaching out to those 6,000 to let them know that through the program, they can keep the free service through June 2022, as long as they continue to have children in school.

“We are telling them it is important for them to move into PHLConnectED, because we didn’t want them to be disconnected after the 60-day window,” Buss said.

For the 1,650 who signed up as soon as schools closed, but before the two-months-free offer, Comcast is letting them know that they also can receive free service through June 2022 through PHLConnectED.

To help reach its immediate goal of serving 18,000 households, PHLConnectED is reaching out to another 7,400 or so families who have signed up for the Internet Essentials program. Comcast offered that program to needy families free in the spring, but some district families reported difficulty accessing it.

Hackney noted many households don’t believe that they won’t get a bill, or are reluctant to divulge personal information to another entity.

“There is a lack of trust some people have,” he said.

“There is an assumption that if something is free, people will automatically rush to avail themselves of it,” Buss said. “We’ve never found that to be the case.”

Alumni of Philadelphia’s selective Masterman school call for admissions changes as superintendent floats lottery idea

2020-10-09T03:43:25+00:00

Alumni of the Julia R. Masterman Demonstration School renewed their demands on Thursday for changes to the admissions policy for the city’s most highly selective school, which enrolls far fewer Black and Latino students than the district as a whole.

“When I was a student at Masterman there were students from every neighborhood,” Sarah Lee, a 1997 Masterman graduate told members of the school board. “Today the student body is not as diverse and does not represent the city of Philadelphia. Most students that attend are coming from a few select elementary schools.”

Lee noted that when she attended Masterman, nearly half of the student body was Black, compared to around 15% today.

Sarah Young, also a 1997 graduate, decried what she said was a lack of transparency in the admissions process.

“There’s no clear communication in the requirements for admissions and the choices seem to be made by one individual,” she said. “We need to ensure equity and access to education and specifically we need to support Black students in Philadelphia being accepted into magnet schools.”

Their testimony before the Philadelphia board of education committee meeting came hours after Superintendent William Hite addressed possible changes in the district’s selective admissions policies in a call with reporters. Citing equity concerns, he suggested that a lottery for all “qualified” applicants would be used to replace “school-based” decisions made late in the process.

“We’re first looking at children who meet the criteria, and then once you meet the criteria we’re looking at it based on a lottery, not some form of school-based selection,” he said.

By the afternoon, the district issued a statement explaining that while the admissions process for this year has been “revised,” there will be no lottery — at least not for the current crop of eighth graders applying now for high school.

“While a lottery may be manageable in future years, during the current school selection process, we are not conducting a lottery for admission to any of our special admission schools,” the statement said.

The whirlwind day marked by Hite’s remarks, followed by the clarification and the alumni testimony, reflect the delicacy of this issue. Black and Latino students are significantly underrepresented at Masterman and Central High School, the city’s two most selective schools, which have rigid test score requirements. The cutoff to be considered are scores at the 88th percentile or above.

During the summer, amid the Black Lives Matter protests following the police killing of George Floyd, students and alumni at Central and Masterman called on the district to overhaul admissions policies to increase the numbers of Black and Latino students. They also demanded that the schools adopt policies to combat what they described as pervasive racist practices and attitudes in the schools.

The principals of the schools promised to act, and Hite told Chalkbeat then that he thought the coronavirus and America’s racial reckoning had finally created the right atmosphere for the district to take a hard look at selective admissions.

“More individuals are pointing to this as one of the systemic inequities we faced in Philadelphia for many years,” he said at the time.

Before the district walked back his statement, Hite said that any lottery would only occur after students met other qualifications set by the schools and their principals. And district data show that the test score cutoffs are the biggest barrier to admissions at the most selective schools, especially Masterman and Central.

There is no indication, however, that the district intends to eliminate or change the test score threshold to qualify for either Central and Masterman.

Instead, the revised plan for this year will use older test scores, which means sixth grade results for Masterman High School and second grade ones for Masterman middle school. Traditionally the schools use seventh and third grade tests, but because of COVID-19 school shutdowns, there were no tests administered last school year. In addition, the district will consider multiple years of grades and attendance.

Extensive research the district conducted on the selective admissions process found that the major reason for the underrepresentation of Black and Latinx students at the top schools had to do primarily with test scores. The reports urged that to correct the problem, the district should do more recruitment, reaching out to students who are just below the cutoffs and “making that segment of the process more equitable.”

According to district data, Black students make up just 14% of the students who score in the 90th percentile or above, despite being nearly half of the district’s student population. Hispanics, who make up about 21% of the district’s enrollment, account for 6.6% of the highest scorers.

Data show that historically, just about all the Black and Hispanic students who meet the test score threshold for Central and Masterman are admitted. So it is unclear how a lottery would improve diversity at those schools so long as the test score cutoff remains.

In the 2019-2020 school year, 20% of the students at Central were Black and 7% were Latino. At Masterman, 15% of students were Black and 7% were Latino. And Black student enrollment has been steadily falling since 2011-12, when about a third of Central’s students and 30% of Masterman’s were Black.

At Thursday’s press briefing, Hite said that the planned selective admissions policy changes “are providing more young people who had the ability to apply with the opportunity to apply.

The afternoon statement reiterated the concern over equity, emphasizing plans to step up recruitment in schools and areas of the city that rarely send students to Masterman.

“Our goal, throughout the admissions process, is to ensure that students and staff at our special admit schools reflect the diversity of the city’s population,” it said. “To this end, despite COVID-19, more special admission schools are increasing their student recruitment capacity with the help of equity coordinators and expanding their selection panels.”

According to the district’s statement, Masterman Middle school starting this year “will conduct interviews to provide potential candidates the opportunity to share their unique experiences.”

Past efforts to alter the test-heavy system became a contentious political issue. White parents said that access to these schools was one of the factors that kept them in the city. Asian students, who are also overrepresented at Central and Masterman, have expressed concern about being denied spots they have earned.

The alumni who spoke at the board meeting said that Masterman’s problems did not end with admissions, but said a culture of racism was present in the school. Some of that was outlined last summer on the Black at Masterman Instagram page.

The board will vote Oct. 22 on a resolution to to hire an equity coordinator for Masterman. District chief of staff Alicia Prince said that was part of the district’s year-long effort of “building out our equity coalition” and promoting an “anti-racist environment.”

The district has a wide array of high school choices divided into three tiers: neighborhood schools, citywide admissions, and selective admissions. All Philadelphia public school students are expected to apply to high school, even if they plan to attend their neighborhood school. By November 6, they must list five high schools they want to attend, even though this year high school fairs were virtual, school visits were canceled, and students had limited access to their guidance counselor, due to COVID-19.

The choices encompass what the district calls “hundreds” of opportunities for specialized learning, including about 40 Career and Technical Education options as well as themed schools for science, history, and the arts, as well as a focus on project-based learning.

Philadelphia teachers mulling ‘work to rule’ action as contract talks stall

2020-10-07T11:44:47+00:00

Philadelphia teachers are weighing a job action as contract negotiations have yet to yield an agreement.

Teachers in the school district have been working without a contract since Aug. 31 and are seeking a one-year extension with what Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan has called a “modest increase” in compensation.

On Monday, Jordan emailed his 13,000 members, which also include secretaries, counselors, nurses and paraprofessionals, and raised the possibility of a “work to rule” action in which they would do the minimum required within school hours under their now-expired contract. He sought members’ input on such a move.

How “work to rule” would play out while educators and students are teaching and learning remotely is not known.

Last month, Jordan said that the district was trying to “shake down” the teachers by insisting they sign off on a plan to reopen school buildings before discussing a possible pay increase. At the same time, however, he asked his members for a two-week window to continue negotiations and reiterated that he considered a strike or other job action to be a last resort.

Without divulging details, both Jordan and Superintendent William Hite said at the time that they were hopeful about reaching an accord, although they disagreed about whether the district could afford to raise teacher salaries.

Now, following more than a month without an agreement, the rhetoric is ramping up. The district is planning to reopen school buildings under a hybrid learning plan in November, after going fully remote in March and starting the year exclusively online.

“Compensation is the outstanding issue,” said the union’s legislative affairs director Hillary Linardopolous in an email to Chalkbeat.

Before COVID-19, the perpetually cash-strapped district was planning to end fiscal 2020 and 2021 with money in its coffers. But due to a plunge in state and local tax revenue as a result of the pandemic, it is now forecasting a shortfall exceeding $800 million by 2025 to maintain its current level of service and pay additional COVID-19-related costs.

“We know the district has the funds to secure steps, lanes, and across-the-board wage increases for a one-year extension,” Linardopolous said. Steps and lanes are the increases teachers get for accumulating additional years of experience and advanced degrees.

She noted that other city unions have negotiated raises this year. The police union received a 2.5% increase, while AFSCME District Council 47, representing white collar workers, and District Council 33, representing blue collar city workers, each got 2%.

The Board of Education, which governs the district, has no taxing power and relies on the state and city for almost all its revenue. In February, Mayor Jim Kenney had sought a small increase in the property tax rate to help the schools, but the city council never took up the proposal.

When the district was under state control, teachers were forbidden from striking and they went without a contract for more than five years. During that period, salaries were essentially frozen, and many teachers never made up the difference they would have received for additional experience and education. Partly as a result, teachers salaries in Philadelphia, once among the highest in the region, have fallen behind surrounding districts.

This is the first contract being negotiated since the district returned to local control in 2018, ending 17 years under the state-dominated School Reform Commission.

Despite new virus cases, Philadelphia schools ‘committed’ to November reopening, district says

2020-10-07T00:04:08+00:00

Despite an increase in confirmed cases of coronavirus in Philadelphia, district officials said on Tuesday they still are “committed” to reopening schools in November, after the first marking period.

District officials announced in late July that the school year would have an all-virtual start, with a tentative reopening date of Nov. 17. At the time, Superintendent William Hite said that date was just a target for a “phased in” return to in-person learning.

In a statement on Tuesday, district officials said they “remain committed to beginning this transition in November after the first marking period and are in constant communication with public health experts.”

On Tuesday, the city’s health department reported a “substantial increase” in daily case counts of COVID-19. Dr. Thomas Farley, Philadelphia’s health commissioner, said the numbers were a reason for concern. Since Monday, 250 new cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed in the city, bringing Philadelphia’s numbers to 37,812 since the beginning of the pandemic.

Since August, there have been about 295 cases involving children ages birth to 9 and about 855 cases involving ages 10 to 19, according to the city. That’s less than 3% of the total.

Most of the cases involving children, however, have been outside of schools, city officials said.

District schools haven’t been open since the spring, while some Catholic schools and charter schools reopened this fall. The city’s student access centers, which opened last month and aren’t run by the school district, have reported just one case and a temporary closure at Simons Recreation Center in West Oak Lane.

“We are continuing to have isolated cases in students and staff but we have not yet seen any clusters in the K-12 schools where it is clear the spread has happened in the school,” Farley said, referring to daycare centers, private schools, universities and colleges. “It appears that most cases and perhaps all of the cases, people are bringing it to the school and not necessarily spreading it in the classroom.”

James Garrow, a spokesman for the city’s health department, said contact tracing efforts have found that a “key element” of the spread has come from social gatherings outside of the classroom.

District officials said Tuesday in a statement that they will continue to work on a plan to transition to a hybrid model, with some in-person learning, and will share more information “shortly.” That includes a reopening date.

The mayor’s office said on Tuesday that they are working with the school district about “what a move away from all-virtual education would look like” and said such a move is “still dependent upon what the disease looks like in the city.”

There is no “magic number,” however, that Philadelphia is using to make decisions, Garrow said in an email on Tuesday. “As we’ve said since the beginning of this pandemic, the trends and overall situation are much more important than any particular single data point,” he said.

In his last briefing Hite expressed concerns about funding if the district were forced to push back its reopening date. Mayor Jim Kenney on Tuesday vowed the city would continue to try to fund its schools the best it can.

“The city is facing a $750 million deficit and the school district is looking at $650 million,” the mayor said. “At some point in time we have to decide where our priorities are, whether we are going to develop the revenue and get the revenue to fund education or not. So that remains to be seen as to what city council, the state legislature, the federal government, and the taxpayers are willing to do.”

Half a million Pa. kids are supposed to be learning to read right now. Are they?

2020-10-05T19:42:21+00:00

North Philadelphia second-grader Zyiah Satterwhite is one of a kind.

The precocious 7-year-old named her Russian Blue cat “Goose.” And while others her age watch children’s shows, Zyiah’s favorite is the hit horror series “Stranger Things” on Netflix. Between giggles, she swears it’s not too scary for her.

Zyiah is also one of about 570,000. That’s the number of Pennsylvania students in grades K-3 — the four-year window where schools expect children to master the basics of reading.

Zyiah’s literacy progress is squarely middle of the pack, according to her mom, Yolanda Biggers. She doesn’t love reading, but she’s at grade level.

“I don’t read a lot,” Zyiah explained. “But a little bit. I like reading a little bit.”

After the coronavirus pandemic hit, Zyiah’s mom gave up her shifts as a part-time nurse to focus all of her attention on Zyiah and her two older sisters. Biggers, 38, turned the dining room of their rowhome into a makeshift classroom — stuffed with every conceivable school supply.

While Zyiah’s dad works long hours as a dollar-store manager, Biggers stays home to help Zyiah log into her classes and stay focused through the virtual school days at Luis Muñoz-Marín Elementary.

“It’s kinda stressful ‘cause I love, like, getting up and stuff,” said Zyiah. “I don’t feel like sitting in a chair and listening.”

Like any second-grader, big words stump Zyiah sometimes. These days, she goes to her mom for help. Biggers reads the word back to her daughter, but that doesn’t feel like a sufficient lesson.

“The skills that the teachers have, as far as phonics, and being able to break words down and showing your kids how to put words together and sound them out — that’s key,” Biggers said. “That’s a learned skill. And that’s something that you have to learn to teach.”

Experts agree. There is a science to reading instruction, a carefully structured method for teaching kids to decode words and match sounds with letter combinations. Most parents don’t know that science.

“I’m confident in my parenting skills,” said Biggers. “But I’m not confident in my educational skills.” Small gaps now — big gaps later

It’s been more than six months since the coronavirus forced many schools to halt in-person classes.

The immediate consequences of that disruption are obvious. Many parents can’t work. The typical social patterns for school kids have gone kaput.

But what about long-term consequences? What could six months of disrupted education do to a kid six years from now? How about 16?

Experts predict this absence will widen the achievement gap between high- and low-income students. The ripple effects, they warn, could last a lifetime for some children.

A skill like reading helps explain how this unprecedented interruption of face-to-face instruction could cascade through the years and decades to come.

Reading is education’s skeleton key. It opens the door to other subject areas, amplifying a student’s knowledge and confidence across subjects. Kids who struggle with reading often suffer the opposite fate, unable to tackle material they may have otherwise aced because they can’t access it. A child’s third-grade reading level, a prominent study from Hunter College showed, is frighteningly predictive of their chances to graduate high school.

“That is the worst-case scenario we have to be worried about,” said Elizabeth Farruggia, deputy chief of specialized services for Mastery Schools, which runs 24 charters in Philadelphia and Camden. “Every year the gap continues to get larger if we don’t close it.”

Many students in virtual school have already spent about 10% of their total K-3 classroom time learning online. That percentage could conceivably double or triple before kids return to in-person school.

“I think we’re still too early in this to actually know the implications, but they are bound to be huge and multidimensional,” said Jenny Bogoni, who heads Read by 4th, an early literacy campaign overseen by the Free Library of Philadelphia.

The damage done

The first task is determining how badly students regressed in the spring, when American schools abruptly closed their doors and hastily arranged online lessons.

Schools weren’t prepared for the massive disruption. Some districts — like Philadelphia’s — suspended instruction for weeks as they scrambled to acquire laptops, and then offered classes only as review, without consequences for stalled progress.

Shaimaa Mustafa emigrated from Egypt to Northeast Philadelphia with her three daughters in December. By going to school and interacting with other kids, her youngest, third-grader Juamana, started to pick up English quickly. When school closed, she struggled to keep the momentum.

“It was good for the first three months,” said Mustafa, 42, who mostly speaks Arabic at home. “After that, we struggle.”

One widely cited study estimated that in the 2019-20 school year the average child made about two-thirds of the reading gains they would have made in a normal school year. That research — modeled on previous studies on absenteeism and summer vacation — will soon be supplanted by the work of academics who’ve tracked students this year to see if the so-called “COVID slide” is stronger or weaker than feared.

Last school year’s damage is only part of the equation, though.

There’s a lot experts don’t yet know about how effective instruction will be this school year. Huge swaths of students continue to learn online and others are in unusually arranged physical classrooms.

Some researchers think a carefully constructed Zoom lesson can roughly approximate the kind of reading instruction that usually happens in person.

But even well-designed lessons can’t account for a student’s lagging internet connection.

And lesson plans don’t account for the fact that North Philadelphia sixth-grader Karellys Ramos’ parents aren’t native English speakers — meaning sometimes she relies on her two older sisters.

“My sister calls my mom so my mom can help her with the word, even though my mom sometimes doesn’t understand,” said Ililana Irizarry, 16, the eldest sister. “So when my mom doesn’t understand, she calls us.”

And good pedagogy cannot account for the inherent difficulties of making intimate, personal connections in a virtual setting.

“[Reading] is the hardest thing in the world for them under the best of circumstances,” said Angela Marks, who runs Reading Allowed, a nonprofit that matches struggling readers with tutors.

She’s already seen in her practice how tough it can be to coax buy-in from students online — and that’s with the benefit of a one-to-one relationship.

“If they can disengage, they’re going to disengage,” she said. “Because we all disengage from things that are too hard for us.” ‘The whole community pitching in’

Because online instruction — and each child’s access to it — will vary wildly, so too will outcomes.

Some students’ brains are wired in such a way that they’ll learn to decode even if they don’t get huge doses of reading instruction. Others who struggle because of dyslexia or other issues need more direct support. Some of them will manage to get that support over the coming months.

Those are kids like 9-year-old Andrew Knox, a third-grader at Community Partnership School, a private school in North Philadelphia. The school has provided Knox with a reading specialist since first grade — and it’s done wonders for his self-esteem

“He’s doing so much better,” said his mom, Sakora Miller, 29. “But that only comes from a family — the whole community pitching in and working together.”

During the pandemic, Knox has continued to meet virtually with a tutor three times a week. His school also offers an in-person option for families, like his, that want it.

Miller says her son is thriving. She thinks it would be a different story if he was in a school with less support.

“He would have got lost,” said Miller. “He wouldn’t love school.”

Experts worry about those lost kids — the students who most need explicit reading instruction, but aren’t getting it right now. Those could be students with a diagnosed learning disability or those who just aren’t the most natural language decoders.

What happens when they return? Will they have the support and care needed to fight through the accumulated deficits? Or will they drift further into academic frustration?

“Some kids are gonna be minimally impacted. Some kids are gonna be hugely impacted,” said Fumiko Hoeft, a researcher who studies reading development at the University of Connecticut and University of California San Francisco. “And the teachers will have to deal with that widened gap when they come back.”
School districts are trying to measure those gaps, but even that task is complicated. The diagnostic tests many schools use are typically administered in-person. That’s required some to use new tests, which produce results that can’t be compared to prior years.

In a typical school year, says Elizabeth Farruggia of Mastery Schools, they’ve found the average student needs about three weeks after summer vacation to return to the reading level they’d reached at the end of the previous year. They’re not quite sure what to expect now.

That’s why Mastery is using a software system that will take student results from a diagnostic exam and generate individualized reading plans for teachers to follow. The more carefully they can pinpoint each student’s reading strengths and weaknesses, the quicker they believe students will regain lost ground.

“We have to extend the amount of time they need to catch back up,” said Farruggia. “But it doesn’t mean they’re not gonna catch back up.” Room for optimism

The silver-lining hope is that COVID will reveal which online reading tools are most useful, paving the way to more options for better instruction when the virus recedes.

And there’s a universe of tools out there. Hoeft, the University of Connecticut researcher, is studying the effectiveness of a digital reading game developed in Finland to see if it can help young children mitigate COVID-related reading loss.

“While [COVID is] creating a divide right now, I’m really hopeful that this will create some good solutions for the future education of our children,” said Hoeft.

There’s also a role for parents. Even if they can’t do some of the more technical reading instruction, parents can help their children build vocabulary and critical background knowledge that feeds reading success.

Shaimaa Mustafa, the recent Egyptian immigrant, recently linked up with a family literacy program that’s helped develop her English proficiency and given her strategies to help her daughter.
After initially struggling during the COVID shutdown, Jumana made big reading gains, her mom said. She’s gone from reading simple picture books to a 100-page chapter book. The nonprofit also showed Mustafa a website where celebrities read books aloud for children.

“I use it every day before we sleep,” said Mustafa.

This constellation of strategies, experts hope, will prevent catastrophic reading regression among the nation’s youngest learners.

Parents like Yolanda Biggers, Zyiah’s mom, hope it will be enough to keep their kids engaged and on track. Biggers is confident that between Zyiah’s cheerful disposition and the support she’s getting from home, she’ll be able to make up for whatever’s lost this year.

“She’s young enough to adapt,” Biggers said. “Kids are resilient.”

For most students, it may be hard to notice the imprint left by COVID on their reading ability.

“You’re not going to likely have a whole group of kids who can’t read at all,” said Bogoni with Read by 4th. “You’re just going to have kids whose reading skills are less good than they should be.”

What happens when kids read maybe 10% worse than they otherwise would have? It’s an impossible question to answer, but a scary thought.

It’s the kind of thing West Philadelphia mom Sarina Baker, 36, thinks about with her son, Roman — who just started kindergarten.

Roman is a bright kid, but he’s struggling with the basics of letter and sound recognition. Just before the pandemic, Baker got a tutor for Roman through a shelter where they had been living and he started to embrace the challenge of reading.

But when school went online, Baker felt her son’s progress stall.

“This pandemic definitely slowed down the progress that we were making,” said Baker. “Now we’re kinda back to the attitude. He doesn’t wanna do it. We’re working on it for hours.”

As Roman’s enthusiasm drops, so does his mom’s self-esteem.

“It makes me feel like, ‘what am I doing wrong?’” she said.

Baker knows Roman will learn to read. That’s not her fear. Her fear is that he won’t learn quickly enough to thrive in school and unlock his other gifts.

“Now I feel like he’s just gonna [learn] just enough to get by,” she said. “I don’t want that for my child.”

Roman is only 6 years old. He still has his entire academic career ahead of him.

But at least when it comes to reading, the clock is already ticking.

‘It’s a difficult time’: Assuring safe virtual spaces for Philadelphia LGBTQ students

2020-09-30T12:41:47+00:00

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reword and properly attribute phrases that appeared verbatim in a press release from the Human Rights Campaign.

Before Science Leadership Academy was forced to close its doors last year over asbestos concerns, Ashton Krause, 17, was in the process of creating a student support group for LGBTQ students at the school just north of Center City.

Now with district students forced to learn virtually, Kraus believes a group is needed more than ever because of circumstances LGBTQ students may experience during remote learning.

“LGBTQ kids are stuck in their house and you don’t know if their parents accept them or what their situation is at home,” he said. “It puts a lot of pressure on LGBTQ kids especially if they are in an uncomfortable environment and they have to be there all day. That can be overwhelming.”

For some LGBTQ students, remote learning has removed them from physical bullying at school, but virtual classrooms don’t always provide safe, protected spaces filled with support.

“In the flurry of getting ourselves prepared for online learning some schools may have yet to develop content that translates to an online platform,” said Lauren Overton, principal at the Penn Alexander School in West Philadelphia.

Lauren Overton is the principal at the Penn Alexander School in West Philadelphia.

“That’s definitely something we are concerned about and want to make sure that schools are building communal spaces for LGBTQ students to have safe space. Some students who identify as LGBTQ have support, and then you have many who do not.”

Some studies indicate many LGBTQ students don’t have support at school or home. A 2018 survey by the Human Rights Campaign found that only 26% of respondents said they always feel in their school classroom, with only 5% saying all of their school teachers and staff support LGBTQ people. Some 67% of survey respondents said they had heard negative comments about LGBTQ people from family members.

“Being home around this time can be a challenge emotionally to LGBTQ students if they don’t have an outlet,” Overton said.
School district’s Policy 252

In an effort to create a safe learning space for LGBTQ students, school officials, educators and activists in 2016 designed a provision for the Philadelphia School District called Policy 252. The policy aims to protect non-binary and transgender students from discrimination based on gender identity. It also establishes specific guidelines for pronoun usage and gender neutrality in the classroom.

“The district got a lot right in approving the policy,” said Amy Hillier, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who helped draft Policy 252 for the district. “For starters, they [the district] listened to trans students and allowed trans and queer students to help craft the policy. They established a progressive trans-affirming policy at just the right time—before Trump came to office and revoked trans-affirming guidance for public schools.”

Hillier noted she would not characterize some of the current limitations of 252 as “getting it wrong” so much as not being willing or able to take the next step of consistently monitoring and enforcing implementation.

“That’s been challenging for a district struggling with basic things like funding, attendance, asbestos/lead, and now internet access for families,” she said. “Unless and until there’s a network of social workers or other staff who have support for trans (and LGBQ more generally) students as a primary job responsibility, it’s hard to imagine all students in the district will benefit from the strong policy existing on paper.”

But glitches do exist for Policy 252 in the virtual space. For one, if a student chooses to be called a name different from their biological name, oftentimes the virtual system will go by their birth records and not the student’s requested name and hurtful to the student.

Acknowledging pronouns, addressing discrimination outside of just physical violence in Policy 252 was promising, said Ernest Owens, LGBTQ rights advocate and vice president-print for the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.

Ernest Owens is an LGBTQ rights advocate and vice president-print of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.

“I don’t think enough instructors are getting proper LGBTQ sensitivity training outside of just enforcing the policy,” he said. “I would have preferred Policy 252 to mandate LGBTQ sensitivity training for staff/faculty so that they would be able to feel as if these guidelines were not just bureaucracy, but a true necessity.

“I think the first thing that needs to happen is for the district to survey LGBTQ students and families on what might be happening to them right now,” Owens added. “From there, the district should assess what needs to be adjusted/modified in the current Policy 252 guidelines to combat such discrimination in the virtual realm.”

Owens thinks politicians should amplify and support the district on these efforts without making it a politically divided issue. All students, he said, including LGBTQ youth, deserve to learn in a safe, affirming environment.

The district recently released mandatory professional development for all staff in the district to better understand Policy 252, said Rachel Holzman, deputy chief of the office of student rights and responsibilities.

“It became apparent particularly in the virtual world because we use Google Classroom that many students were feeling very unsupported by their ‘dead name’ showing up, so we changed names and gender in a way that when it flows down Google Classroom the student is reading their chosen name,” she said. “That makes the students feel supported and comfortable and this is done really between the students and me. This is a student-driven right that they have.”

A teacher who identifies as nonbinary first noticed the display name glitch on Google Classroom and brought it to the attention of school board member Mallory Fix Lopez, who championed for it to be corrected.

“I think we have the policies that support our LGBTQ students and the district is fully behind it,” Fix Lopez told Chalkbeat. “We need to figure out how all our policies are upheld and assure it’s consistent. [Superintendent William] Hite is 100% committed to this and has been a driver behind the work. He just doesn’t often get credit for it.”

Court decision a big win

A ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week is seen as a victory for youth advocates in Philadelphia concerned about the support and safety of LGBTQ students during remote learning.

David J. Berney was the lead attorney in the case Nicole B. v. School District of Philadelphia.

In the case, Nicole B. v. School District of Philadelphia, a fourth grader at Williams C. Bryant Elementary School in West Philadelphia, was bullied and harassed because he did not conform to male stereotypes.

When school officials failed to intervene, the classmates continued to harass the boy, and later raped him in a school restroom. The court ultimately decided in the family’s favor after years of dismissed complaints and lawsuits.

“Students who are LGBTQ or gender expansive have the same rights as other students and schools are required to intervene and correct their policies and practices that discriminate against students based on sexual orientation or gender identity,” said Kristina Moon, staff attorney at the Education Law Center, which filed an amicus brief in the case.

The successful appeal challenged the time children have to file a complaint under the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act. The normal deadline for adults is six months. Whether that six-month time period is paused for a child was an open question.

Kristina Moon is a staff attorney at the Education Law Center, which filed an amicus brief in the case Nicole B. v. School District of Philadelphia.

David J. Berney, the lead attorney in the case, said it addresses the statute of limitations.

“I think it implies through some of its language that students are protected from school-based bullying, based on a protected classification,” he said. “An ‘a protected classification’ is gender identity, sexual orientation.”

“In light of the decision that the supreme court issued we believe that one, students are protected if they’re being sexually harassed based on sexual orientation or gender identity; two, we believe that students now have according to the supreme court until the age of 18 and shortly thereafter to file because they would have six months after the age of 18 to file; three, for students...who are actually in a brick and mortar school right now the protections would apply as they normally would have; and finally four, for students who are doing this virtually, their classmates aren’t permitted to harass them virtually,” he said.

Berney added his fourth point is also a form of illegal harassment and can be grounds for lawsuits under the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act, because most schools recognize that cyberbullying is something that needs to be addressed and students need to be protected.

Creating safe spaces

Hurdles for LGBTQ students engaging in remote learning range from disproportionate access to internet and technology to lack of an environment that’s conducive to remote learning, said Shawnese Givens, interim executive director of The Attic Youth Center.

The Attic is the only organization in Philadelphia that exclusively serves LGBTQ youth. The pandemic has taken a toll on the center, located near 16th and Spruce in Center City. Once a hub of after-school and weekend activity, its hours have been cut to three days a week. Also, in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19, youth can’t currently access the physical space at the center.

The Attic is the only organization in Philadelphia that exclusively serves LGBTQ youth. Students shown enjoying an outing.

“There are also other hurdles that aren’t as easily identified such as the impact of the loss of peer connection and a sense of belonging, which is particularly critical for LGBTQ young people who do not always receive acceptance at home,” Givens said.

She said it’s incredibly difficult for her staff to not be able to connect with young people in person. The opportunity to check in with a young person whose demeanor is suddenly different, or to encourage a young person to attend a particular group or meet with a case manager is not currently possible. Similarly, while virtual mediums are an excellent way to engage youth who already know about the center, they are working to find ways to engage new participants.

“It’s a difficult time for anyone who works with young people or students as we try to navigate a new landscape for our work,” Givens said. “I know that school leaders have the same concerns that we do and are attempting to find solutions to technological disparities, consistent engagement, and meeting the other complex needs of students.

“The best advice I can give to a struggling student is to know that there are adults who want to help,” she added. “Don’t give up finding the help you need. If the first person you asked wasn’t responsive or didn’t understand, keep trying. We’re here and we care.”

To help students struggling with their remote learning, workers at The Attic are providing backpacks filled with school supplies, said Hazel Edwards, coordinator of the center’s education and training department called the Bryson Institute.

At this time, the center is also offering a hot meal, food pantry items, and personal hygiene products for students.

“Our only way of engaging with young people has been virtually,” she said. “Students want to be in the building and want to be engaged and they can’t. Unfortunately those hugs or giving a young person a physical face are no more.”

Another resource for LGBTQ students is through the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, or GLSEN, said Overton, who is a founding board member for the renewed chapter in Philadelphia. The chapter hopes to grow teacher capacity and increase the number of GSAs in Philadelphia.

GSAs are groups for LGBTQ students and their allies. The acronym used to stand for the Gay Straight Alliance, but critics thought it was too exclusive, so now its called the Gender and Sexuality Alliance.

The biggest thing is to empower teachers to understand terminology and how to build an inclusive environment, Overton noted.

“Growing up I went though all of the learnings about the civil rights movement and never knew that Bayard Rustin was a gay man,” she said. “And I wonder if that would have been a positive addition to my learning so that I could have seen where other folks existed in the system who had a similar identity as me in some ways. Of course I’m a white person and Bayard is a Black man, but seeing where gay folks have been a part of movements and organizing in all things in education, it’s so important that we have opportunities to see ourselves and to see others.”

In offering advice to city students who are struggling, Krause said some good can come from online.

“You can find anybody and anything through social media,” he said. “You can FaceTime and keep up with your friends’ life and see how they are doing. That’s the only way to keep in touch with people nowadays. Especially when stuff like the pandemic happens.”

Online resources for LGBTQ students:

The Attic Youth Center
The center creates opportunities for LGBTQ youth in Philadelphia to develop into healthy, independent, civic-minded adults within a safe and supportive community. The Attic is currently offering book bags with school supplies and providing hot food and hygiene products for students.
(215) 545-4331

Want to start a GSA at your school?
Learn the steps to start a student group at your school through GLSEN.

GLSEN School Council
Provides space for LGBTQ students to be leaders.

Preferred name request
Transgender and gender nonconforming students can use their preferred name for virtual learning such as Google Classroom. Have a teacher, principal or staff member fill out this form.

Additional resources from the Education Law Center
The Rights of LGBTQ, Gender Non-Conforming and Nonbinary Students
Understanding cyberbullying

In a virtual classroom, how do you care for kids threatened by gun violence?

2020-09-30T05:15:20+00:00

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit which covers guns in America.

On a screen full of faces, the lone black square rang alarm bells for the Philadelphia teacher. The boy on the other side hadn’t turned on his camera and his microphone was muted. According to the rules for remote learning at John B. Stetson Charter School, the student was supposed to keep his laptop camera on during class. The teacher alerted Edwin Desamour, the dean at the middle school.

A few days later, during a meeting with the student and his mother, Desamour discovered that the 13-year-old student and his mother had been without a consistent home since the school reopened in late August. They’d been bouncing from space to space, staying with friends and family — and the student was keeping his camera off and staying quiet in class to avoid bothering his hosts. “The kid said, ‘I don’t want to make too much noise on the computer in someone else’s house,’” Desmamour explained. The boy had also figured that if other students couldn’t see he was relocating, they wouldn’t ask him about it. “He didn’t want kids to see that he was changing houses,” Desamour added.

The school had adopted uniforms so kids wouldn’t have to explain why they didn’t own the newest pair of jeans, but teachers hadn’t considered that students might feel judged for their backdrops during virtual classes. “Before, you got teased for clothes,” Desamour said, “and now it’s because a kid sees the background of your house.”

With school districts around the country operating remotely to avoid spreading COVID-19, teachers and administrators are confronting a full range of complications caused by virtual learning. In Philadelphia, educators have tried to address a specific challenge: When kids aren’t spending time in classrooms, it’s harder to keep them safe. Close to 1,450 people have already been shot in the city this year, eclipsing the total for all of 2019. The violence has taken an especially cruel toll on Philadelphia’s children. On the first day of classes for public schools, a quadruple shooting left two teens dead and two more wounded. Jaheim Lamarre and Zahquesz McFadden, both 17, were two of the 13 children killed by gun violence this year, and among the 111 children injured by gunfire.

Absenteeism spiked in many urban districts after schools abruptly switched to remote learning in the spring. Now, experts are worried that thousands of young people may again go without the benefits of the classroom during the new academic year.

Children learn critical emotional and social skills at school. “If we leave kids to their own devices, many of them are going to suffer,” said Anna Harvey, director of The Public Safety Lab at New York University. “Kids need a lot of adult support to thrive.”

“Physically being in school is protective, particularly for young men. It reduces the extent to which they become involved in violent incidents,” Harvey said. School places children under the supervision of adults and keeps them occupied for hours during which disputes might otherwise escalate.

The threat of gun violence was very much on Desamour’s mind when he counseled the student who was reluctant to turn on his camera. Stetson Charter School serves three neighborhoods in North Philadelphia. Forty percent of area residents live in poverty, compared to about 25 percent citywide. Those same neighborhoods have been the backdrop for much of the city’s violence. The three policing districts that closely overlap the neighborhoods served by Stetson account for 110 of the 335 homicides in the city this year, according to Philadelphia Police Department data. Rivalries between neighborhoods, and sometimes just an unfamiliar face on the block, can be a recipe for more violence.

Moving from one neighborhood to another can pose a threat to a child’s safety, Desamour said. Still, picking up on the cues that a child is moving and may be at risk is a challenge when school staff can’t see the student on screen. He and his staff insist that students keep their video switched on, partly so they can spot signs that a child may be at risk.

Outside of his duties as middle school dean, Desamour has spent the last decade working in street-level violence intervention. He uses what’s often categorized as the credible messenger model. Desamour was convicted in connection with a fatal shooting at 16 and spent eight years in prison. He says he served part of the stretch in the same cell as his father.

In Philadelphia, as in other cities, gun violence is highest during the summer months, and when in-person education slammed to a stop in March, “it felt like summer started early,” Desamour says. Desamour approached a local drug dealer who had recruited one of the teenage boys he mentors. At first, he says, the boy was just transporting drugs, but he was soon asked to look out for rival crews, and to fend them off with a gun if needed. Desamour was able to convince the dealer, a man who knows Desamour’s background, to leave the boy alone. But as the pandemic has choked off jobs in the city, dealers have found it easier to enlist new workers, Desamour says. “We were struggling to keep a hold on the kids.”

When COVID struck Philadelphia, it complicated all the city’s struggles — its pre-existing conditions. The School District of Philadelphia teaches more than 200,000 students, and officials say that gun violence has touched almost all of them. “They know someone in the family or someone in the community who has been shot or killed,” said Jayme Banks, the district’s director of Trauma-Informed School Practices. As they prepared to resume classes, administrators realized that they had to contend with the murders and nonfatal shootings that had surged in its wake. “We couldn’t open school and act like this hadn’t occurred,” Banks said.

During the summer, Banks and the district’s mental health staff began preparing to provide remote support for children emotionally wounded by the violence on the street. The district named its plan “Healing Together.” One of its central components was to train teachers how to spot children who might be dealing with a crisis.

In addition to their regular classes, students’ weekly schedules now include a 30-minute block that essentially functions as group therapy. Teachers ask the kids to respond to prompts that are designed to reveal things about their well-being without being too intrusive or embarrassing them in front of their peers. It can be as simple as describing their day or something they’re looking forward to. As the students give their responses, the teachers scan for indications of trauma or stress occurring off-screen. “Teachers can look and see the kid slipping through the cracks. They will look at their expressions. They will look at participation — someone, for example, who is in their favorite class, but is not showing their face,” Banks said.

Like many aspects of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 crisis, schools have approached trauma needs in a piecemeal fashion. Local districts act with great autonomy in how they teach, grade, and administer discipline; behavioral health is no exception. Early in the pandemic, while governors were ordering classrooms to close, few states provided specific guidance on how to handle the behavioral health services that are often provided on school grounds. In the districts that contract with private providers rather than employ their own social workers, it wasn’t clear if those third-party firms could even bill for video-conferencing sessions that felt dramatically different from the in-person therapy for which they were hired.

“This is a stress test on how our education system does big responses,” said Michael Kelly, a board member of the School Social Work Association of America. “And it’s been a wake-up call that those capabilities aren’t there.”

Philadelphia’s public schools have social workers on staff, paid for through federal Medicaid funding that the district long ago earmarked for this purpose. Going into the current academic year, the district added social workers so that each campus would have a social worker assigned to it. Still, virtual counseling is an imperfect substitute for the person-to-person interactions that happen during normal schooling.

“When a kid comes through the door, you know something’s off,” Desamour said. “We can do preventive things before this kid explodes. A lot of times, the kids won’t initiate the contact, you have to recognize it and reach out. But online, it’s hard to capture those things.”

The pandemic has also compromised some of the privacy that schools could offer when students needed help. Where does a child go to talk about problems at home, when they are at home? “The kids don’t know who is listening, and they will sometimes say, ‘I don’t want to talk about that because my mom is here or my brother might hear me,’” Kelly said.

Most worrisome are the students who have fallen out of touch with the school system. The district estimates that 18,000 homes where its students live are not connected to the internet. Similar technology gaps have exacerbated the inequities of remote learning in other cities. And then there are occurrences that school officials across the country didn’t imagine. In Washington, D.C., smoke alarms have routinely interrupted online classes, leading the Fire Department to launch a citywide push to remind families to replace the batteries in their smoke detectors.

Philadelphia schools don’t expect to hold in-person classes until mid-November, at the earliest. Until then, Desamour and his teachers and social workers are masking up and walking through the neighborhoods where his students live, bringing help to students and families who’ve shown signs they may need it. And they are finding at least one silver lining.

School buildings can be intimidating places for parents in poor communities, Desamour says: “They are thinking that at the school there are all these smart people. They don’t give themselves enough credit and speak up for themselves or their kids.” When a meeting happens at the kitchen table or on a stoop, the dynamic shifts. Parents open up and talk more — and teachers and social workers get a better feel for their students’ lives.

“We are all in the predicament where we have to talk to each other now,” Desamour said. “We should have been talking before, but now we have to.”

Talk of closing schools, tax breaks top Philadelphia school board meeting

2020-09-18T23:39:22+00:00

During a contentious six-hour meeting the Philadelphia Board of Education unanimously passed a controversial corporate tax break, while one member proposed closing schools and another said she was “disgusted” by newly restrictive speakers’ policies.

“If you really believe that Black lives matter, having that conversation about closing schools right now was utterly ridiculous,” said teacher Keziah Ridgeway, a member of the Melanated Educators Collective, or MEC,. “Y’all have money, in the words of Tupac, to fund everything else, but you don’t have money for our schools.”

Fellow educator and MEC member Dana Carter told the board it needed to stop planning service cuts and start holding Superintendent William Hite accountable for documented missteps.

“The miseducation of Black children leads to Black deaths,” Carter said. “How are we discussing school closures without talking about the $51 million we fumbled at Ben Franklin?”

During the meeting on Thursday, Hite updated the board on plans for reopening and online access, and vowed to reexamine controversial online policies that require hours of screen time for young students. “We’ve heard a great deal [from] teachers and families about the struggles,” he said.

The board also formally swore in two new non-voting student representatives, Keylisha Diaz of the Philadelphia Military Academy and Toluwanimi Olaleye of Carver High School for Engineering and Science. Member Leticia Egea-Hinton urged the pair to ask “tough questions” about district policy and practice.

“When you talk, we listen,” Egea-Hinton told the new student reps.

But the evening’s bitter discussions, which featured a new policy to mute public testimony when speakers stray from their registered topic, left many feeling that the board created three years ago is doing no better than the School Reform Commission, its state-run predecessor, at delivering equitable education or holding executives accountable.

“Board members seem to salivate over the closing of public schools,” said Kelsey Romano, a teacher at Saul High School and a co-chair of the district’s equity committee. “We will not forget the $600,000 office renovation and the employee paid for two full-time jobs in two districts. The trust is all but shattered.”

The evening’s most contentious debate concerned the proposed Keystone Opportunity Zone tax break for Hilco Redevelopment Partners, which board members approved with one abstention, pleasing trade unions and economic development officials, but infuriating advocates who saw it as a needless giveaway.

The session also featured a sobering financial presentation from chief financial officer Uri Monson, detailing millions in new costs - including rising cyber-charter payments - and millions more in lost revenues, thanks to plunging tax collection projections. Monson’s gloomy forecast was followed by a surprising suggestion from board member Lee Huang: that the district begin considering closing schools to save money.

“We may be forced to have that conversation,” Monson replied.

Huang acknowledged that closures can be “highly traumatic,” and critics swiftly countered that they wouldn’t save money either. Councilwoman Helen Gym called Huang’s suggestion “a terrible take” that doesn’t take history into account.

“Multiple studies on mass school closings around the country AND here in Philadelphia challenge the assertion that mass closings improve finances,” Gym tweeted.

The evening exposed other rifts. Led by Robin Cooper, the head of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, or CASA, a string of principals and school staffers blasted the district for what James Murray, head of Rowen Elementary in West Oak Lane, called “systemic racism and inequality.” Among CASA members’ concerns: inadequate personal protection equipment, an overly aggressive push to reopen buildings, and discriminatory hiring by the district.

Tension among board members was also apparent. Members Mallory Fix-Lopez and Angela McIver spoke against the new policy to mute public testimony that veered off topic. Board President Joyce Wilkerson defended the policy as reasonable, but Fix-Lopez said it left her “disgusted.”

The evening was not without its bright spots for officials. Hite’s decision to suspend “leveling” of school staff earned him thanks from parents and teachers.

Education advocate Tamir Harper, a 2018 Science Leadership Academy graduate, praised the Hite administration’s recent work and assured the board, “we will get through this.”

Program to connect Philly residents to the internet will ramp up in the next few weeks, officials say

2020-09-18T20:44:45+00:00

Sometimes when Ashley Chalmers Young’s second grader, Zion, tried to do his homework last spring, his mother would get an important phone call, and he’d have to stop.

“All we had was mobile internet,” through her cellular service, Young explained. And in the era of at-home pandemic schooling, this wasn’t sufficient to keep Zion engaged.

Young, who used to drive for Uber and Lyft but hasn’t worked since the onset of COVID-19, has high hopes for Zion, who she calls her “little professor.” She tried to sign up for the low-cost Internet Essentials program through Comcast, but said she could never make it happen, either by going to a Comcast store or calling a phone number she was given. “They were giving me the runaround,” she said. “It was difficult to do what they were asking.”

Young, her husband Antoine and two sons live with her mother Mary, who likes to volunteer at Zion’s school, Philadelphia Hebrew Public Charter in East Falls. One day while there, her mother “mentioned what we were doing to get online and the school was nice enough to loan us an internet box,” Young said.

That box is a mobile hotspot that the school distributed through PHLConnectED, a citywide program that aims to make sure all Philadelphia families have reliable internet access, especially at a time when those without it cannot take advantage of free public education.

City officials told the board of education on Thursday that PHLConnectED is getting off to a slow start. But they expect it to ramp up quickly and officials forecast that 7,400 households will be up and running by the end of September.

“We knew that in the first two, three, four weeks, it would be slow,” said Mark Wheeler, the city’s chief of information technology. “We know from many of our partners that it takes multiple mechanisms to get people to sign up or participate.”

The $17 million, two-year program, funded by a combination of public and philanthropic funds, was announced on Aug. 6 with a goal of signing up 35,000 city households to broadband access within two years. This would happen either by giving them access to Comcast’s Internet Essentials program, or through providing individual T-Mobile hotspots to those for whom that is the best option. This would include homeless families and the housing insecure.

“We are so grateful for this program,” said Emily Hurst, the executive director of Philadelphia Hebrew Public, a new charter in East Falls that has 250 students in grades K-2. “It’s a herculean effort by the city, the philanthropic community and the school district.”

Hurst said so far, the school has handed out 22 hotspots, and has helped “a number” of other families sign up for Internet Essentials, which under PHLConnectED is free for two years.

At Hebrew Public, more than 10 percent of her families had a need, Hurst said. Hotspots have turned out to be a more practical solution for many families, not just the housing insecure, because some students spend their days in multiple households. “Our families are creative and resilient, and a lot of families are piecing together care for their kids,” she said.

A map of the number of student households without internet from page 9 of the PHL ConnectED presentation by city officials to the Board of Education, September 17, 2020.

Superintendent William Hite has estimated 18,000 city students lack broadband service that is fast enough for doing schoolwork. PHLConnectEd is available to students enrolled in the district, the city’s more than 80 charters, and the Catholic Independence Mission Schools. The district, the individual charters, and the mission schools have all compiled a database of students who potentially qualify for the program, he said.

Using this information the program has reached out to 9,700 households with students who qualify for codes that allow participation in Internet Essentials, Wheeler told the board.

In addition, he said, 1,000 mobile hotspots from T-Mobile have been assigned to eligible students, based on determinations by their school that this is their best option. But he emphasized this doesn’t mean that many have received them.

“This is an eligibility number as opposed to a pickup number,” Wheeler said. “We know from partners who work with families who are under different types of stressors, it does take multiple outreach mechanisms to get them to participate.”

Hite said at Thursday’s board of education meeting that through PHLConnectED, so far 495 have fully connected to the internet, 274 by activating their codes for wired access, and 221 through hotspots. To reach Wheeler’s goal, that means nearly 7,000 people will need to successfully connect in the next two weeks.

Wheeler and Otis Hackney, the city’s chief education officer, are optimistic this will happen.

They told the board that since PHLConnectED started a 211 hotline on Aug. 24 about 2,500 families have called it. Soon, the hotline, run by United Way and available in 150 languages, will be upgraded to not only confirm eligibility, but to directly contact callers to the internet service provider that fits their needs. They are hoping this will help more families actually complete the connection process.

The city is basing its projections for fully connecting thousands more students quickly on the experience in Chicago, Wheeler said, which also started slowly but then saw a surge in participation.

“Chicago also had the same situation, [at first] it was low. After getting the word out...they saw a snowball effect, and we believe we are going to be on the same trajectory,” he said.

Since starting its program in July, Chicago has signed up 25,000 households through its Chicago Connected program, which has a $50 million budget and is organized more centrally than Philadelphia’s effort. Chicago’s big surge occurred in the week before school opened.

Hite has also been in touch with officials in Chicago, where he learned that persistence is key. “It takes multiple touch points, from using the code to getting the internet installed,” he said. “ We will continue that outreach, we have social workers and case workers visiting homes of students we have not heard from.”

One of the obstacles Chicago has faced is skepticism from families that the internet access will be free and they won’t get a bill.

To allay such fears and help families complete the process, another component of PHLConnectEd is the availability of “digital navigators” who can assist with the final steps. People at several nonprofit community organizations providing navigators said that so far, however, the demand for them has been low.

“We are working on doing more on the ground outreach,” said Lois Seffu, the family literacy coordinator at the immigrant advocacy groups SEAMAAC, Inc. “I don’t know, maybe it is still a thing of people not understanding what we’re offering.”

But Seffu and others working in outreach also expect that to change.

Andy Stutzman, who is organizing digital navigators through Drexel University’s ExCITe Center, said he thought there was some confusion over whether those who call the 211 hotline should be forwarded to the navigators. According to Wheeler and Hackney, that is being corrected.

“Everything is moving so quickly, we are working out bumps in the road for that,” Stutzman said. “We are expecting more calls in the near future.”

PHLConnectED BOE Meeting 9 17 2020 Submission (PDF)PHLConnectED BOE Meeting 9 17 2020 Submission (Text)

Hite reviews opening week in Philly during pandemic, says annual teacher transfers may be delayed

2020-09-10T23:09:36+00:00

Philadelphia Schools Superintendent William Hite indicated Thursday that the annual practice of moving around teachers based on actual enrollment rather than predictions will likely be delayed this year until more solid attendance information is received from schools.

Rethinking the persistent but unpopular ritual, known to educators as “leveling,” is another example of how this year’s school reopening is different from any other. Hite said that despite early glitches — a server crash on the first day, Zoom bombings in a few classrooms — the 2020 start of the school year “is going as well as can be expected” under the circumstances.

“This is messy, something we have not experienced before,” Hite told reporters in his weekly press availability. “Routines are changing dramatically for families and for educators. Given all of that, individuals have been patient and flexible and ...I attribute that to the fine work our teachers and our administrators are doing on a daily basis.”

Last week, Hite reported 82% of enrolled students had signed on for their virtual classes. He did not provide updated numbers, and said students who do not log on by Friday will be dropped from the rolls.

Schools are in touch with all of their students’ families trying to determine whether the absent students from the first week are due to a decision to enroll elsewhere, lack of internet access, or are simply declining to log on, he said.

“It could be any combination of those things,” he said.

Kindergarten registration also is way down. This year, there were 6,799 registrations for kindergarten, compared to 9,293 at this time last year, district spokeswoman Monica Lewis said.

This can wreak havoc on usual staffing; for instance, Houston Elementary School in Mount Airy is in danger of losing one teacher as a result of low kindergarten numbers. The school also could lose a third-grade teacher because third-grade numbers are down too.

Lewis said that “it’s too soon to speculate” what’s behind the trend, adding that historically kindergarten enrollment stabilizes by the end of September. Kindergarten also is not mandated in Pennsylvania.

Accurately determining school-by-school enrollment is key to transferring teachers.

It happens in October as the district determines its staffing needs based on where students actually show up. Its major purpose has always been to more efficiently allocate resources, but some teachers and parents have long maintained that it disrupts school communities and derails student learning.

This year, as school starts virtually, it is especially crucial that students maintain some sort of stability, they argue. Some parents have started a petition urging the district to abandon the practice.

Hite said that the district does not want to transfer teachers only to have to hire new ones if more students return when some in-person schooling resumes. The district is now scheduled to begin a hybrid model Nov. 17, in which most students will attend two days a week and do remote learning the rest of the time.

He did not promise to delay teacher transfers until November, but signaled if teachers are moved before then it would be due to extreme circumstances.

“Leveling is bad enough, we don’t want to do it twice,” he said. “However, if we have some teachers that have no children assigned to them or one child, we have to think about how best to use those resources. And we don’t know any of that until we see data from the schools.” This scenario could very well occur at schools where kindergarten registration has plummeted.

Hite once again urged people who lack internet access to take advantage of the city’s PHLConnectED program, through which eligible families can either receive mobile hotspots or a code through which they can obtain devices necessary to log on.

City officials said they were “still reconciling data” on whether the program has been successful in connecting students, according to a statement from the office of innovation & technology.

The office is still trying to reach families and contacting students who are on the rolls of individual teachers but have not yet logged on.

Hite also noted on Thursday that climate managers and other school officials, including principals, may start working from their buildings as early as next week to prepare for the return of some in-person learning. “There are still things we have to do in the schools,” he said, including making available laptops that have not been distributed to students and organizing textbooks and other materials.

The district’s reopening readiness dashboard reports that only 11% of school buildings have been “fully certified for ventilation” safety. But Hite said the schedule was on track for all buildings to be inspected by trained monitors before any classes resume inside. Information for individual schools is provided on the dashboard.

Hite also said he was not concerned about low utilization of city-run access centers where students can go during the day for supervision doing their schoolwork. While only 223 of more than 800 registered students showed up on Tuesday, the first day of operation, 336 showed up on Wednesday, said a spokeswoman for the city’s department of children and families — a 50% improvement.

“Individuals are trying to get into routines that are different than any of us have experienced in the past,” he said. “I’m not concerned. I think families will start to use those.” In surveys, he added, “we heard loud and clear that individuals needed a place for their children.”

Four in five Philly students logged on for first day

2020-09-03T22:10:38+00:00

On the first day of virtual school in Philadelphia, about 82% of the school district’s students logged on — a significant improvement over the spring when the daily average hovered around 60% after schools were suddenly forced to go online.

Superintendent William Hite said Thursday that engagement varied by school “from 100% to numbers that are much lower.” He said more details would be available later.

Wednesday’s opening was marred by problems with bandwidth and internet speeds, but those issues have been largely resolved, he said. In a weekly call with reporters, Hite said the “sheer volume” of students logging on affected the speed of the servers. The district’s technology team adjusted the servers to control capacity, he said. On Thursday, speeds had improved.

“We added capacity overnight, and so far this morning, it appears the servers are meeting the need,” he said.

District officials have estimated that 18,000 students still lack internet access, a figure Hite said is based on responses from 22,000 families who have been contacted by school officials. Of that number, 1,700 didn’t have a means to get online. “Based on the individuals who responded, we’re extrapolating through the whole population,” Hite said. The district enrolls close to 125,000 students.

But he said it would be “simplistic” to conclude that the 18 percent who did not log in on Wednesday all lack internet access. “Schools are collecting information,” he said. “I could be that they don’t have a Chromebook or forgot it was the first day. We can’t put it on one thing.”

Hite and Deputy Mayor Cynthia Figueroa said that families who need to get online should call the city’s hotline at 211 and enroll in the PHLConnectED program. If eligible, they will get either a code and self-install kit for use in their home, or be provided with a hotspot if they are housing insecure.

The district is still handing out Chromebooks at three locations and repairing and reprogramming them at two of the sites. Tech support is also available by calling 215-400-4444. Many families waited until the last minute to get devices, and for the past few days lines have formed outside district headquarters at 440 N. Broad Street.

The district resumed providing “grab and go” meals, which can be picked up on Thursday mornings between 9 a.m. and noon at 62 sites throughout the city. Each box will include five breakfasts and five lunches for each child. Hite emphasized that families will not have to produce student ID numbers to pick up the meals as had been previously thought. In the wake of the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a waiver that allowed districts to serve all children free meals, not just those enrolled in schools. After saying it would end the waiver on Sept. 1, USDA has decided to extend it.

On Tuesday, 31 city-run access centers, where children can go to be supervised while their caregivers work, will open around the city. Those centers, which can accommodate up to 800 children, “are near full, but not at full capacity,” Figueroa said.

On Sept. 21, another group of centers will open, and Figueroa expects an ultimate capacity of just over 2,200 slots. She said 1,800 families have applied so far, and 1,400 have qualified. Students who have special needs are eligible, she said; if any have a personal aide, the number of children accepted at that site will be adjusted.

The centers, depending on their size, expect to accommodate one or more cohorts of 22 children. Supervising personnel will include employees of the Parks & Recreation department, the public library, and community-based organizations.

Philadelphia’s school year starts with doubts — and resolve to make virtual learning work

2020-09-02T02:09:52+00:00

On the eve of the official start of school, parents and students arrived at C.W. Henry School in Mt. Airy to pick up books and supplies for the coming year.

The theme of the day: Making the best of a bad situation.

Eighth-grader Micah Kearney-Lester isn’t thrilled that summer’s over, but he’s not too concerned about having to start school online.

“It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t really like being at school that much,” he said as he stood outside Henry on Tuesday with a bag full of workbooks.

Kearney-Lester’s mother says she is uneasy about him starting a new school year online, but she likes what she has seen so far. As disrupted as the spring semester’s emergency shift to online learning was, said Andrea Kearney, “I saw him become a more independent student. More hands-on.”

She hopes virtual learning might accelerate students’ engagement with technology they’ll rely on for years to come.

“It’s a 21st century moment,” she said.

That same mixture of unease and hope hangs over Philadelphia, where the school year opens Wednesday with all-virtual instruction. Teachers and parents expressed lingering concerns over the quality of online learning, how to make it accessible for all children, and whether buildings will be ready for a return to the classroom later in the fall.

Officials originally wanted to begin the year with a hybrid plan, but postponed in-person learning until at least mid-November after a clamor from teachers and parents that it would not be safe.

That left principals across the city scrambling to plan for virtual learning even as they began preparing buildings. Robin Cooper, head of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, said that her members “taught themselves what was needed for their teachers and their students. Never have I been more proud to be president of this resilient group.”

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers met Monday night, just hours before its current contract expired and agreed to extend negotiations for two weeks so the union and district could agree on a safe reopening plan. PFT President Jerry Jordan said that the district was tying negotiations on wages to such an agreement, which he called “forcing my members to choose between modest increases and their lives.”

He had asked for a one-year contract extension with “modest” raises in base pay, which “acknowledges the enormous challenges of COVID, and aligns with what other cities have done,” he said. He said the union wants more clarity on conditions before his members go back to work in buildings. “Negotiations are far from complete” but an accord is “doable,” he said.

Another lingering concern is the number of students who won’t be able to get online. With students expected to log on by 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, city and district officials say that there are still thousands of households without reliable internet access. They can’t yet say how many signed up for the new PHLConnectED program, launched in August to expand broadband access for students.

“We are using various tactics to engage parents,” said Mark Wheeler, the city’s chief information officer, who said there would be an update next week.

Meanwhile, students as young as kindergarten are being expected to engage via computer for hours each day. The city is opening dozens of “access centers” for K-6 students whose parents or guardians work outside the home and cannot afford child care. Students at the locations can be supervised during the school day and connect to the internet. The buildings, mostly recreation centers, are being rewired to accommodate more robust connections, Wheeler said.

On Sept. 8, 32 centers will open, with others set to start Sept. 21. Each center will have one or two cohorts of 22 students. Officials said that so far 1,147 interest forms have been completed, and 920 students are eligible.

Teachers and principals have been working all summer to solve other problems and to stay connected with students. The outreach to families has helped form closer bonds, said Stephanie Andrewlevich, principal of Mitchell Elementary School in South Philadelphia.

“No one would choose this,” she said, but finding out a parent works nights “gives us a new way to connect,” she said.

Some high schools held virtual freshman orientations, including Paul Robeson in West Philadelphia.

“Communication is a game changer for students and parents experiencing anxiety,” said Robeson Principal Richard Gordon. “We have to react ourselves to be learners in this virtual space.”

Jessica Morris, a third-grade teacher at Andrew Jackson Elementary School, lives in the neighborhood and said she has been visiting her students’ homes. Students have also been visiting her.

“I would be so relieved to get back into the classroom with my students,” she said. “That feels almost like a fantasy right now. But it’s something I want very much, and I hope it can happen in a safe way.”

At Henry on Tuesday morning, as staff handed out workbooks and children played on the nearby jungle gym, a consistent theme was that while the district’s all-online reopening may be less than ideal, it’s better than risking exposure to COVID-19. Parents hope this fall’s online academic offerings are better than last spring’s.

“I feel really nervous. The end of last year was pretty horrible. I’m hoping they have learned some stuff,” said Faridha Traylor, parent of a Henry student.

Traylor said she’d considered online charter schools and home schooling, but decided to keep her eighth-grade son connected to Henry, where he has relationships and support. She and other parents said the staff and principal worked hard to engage parents, using Facebook meetings and direct outreach to keep them informed.

“My son’s first-grade teacher stopped by our house. Dropped off a trifold with his name, a hook and supplies and a little pencil case and a plastic sleeve he can put his schedule in. Adorable,” said Alison Wear, parent of three Henry students.

But the coming challenges are vivid, Wear said. The quality of this year’s academic offerings remains to be seen. Also unclear is whether the district will be able to successfully prepare buildings for reentry, including keeping them clean.

“Soap in the bathroom — they never have it,” said Kearney-Lester, the Henry eighth-grader.

Above it all hangs the question of social justice, with a rising chorus of support for aggressive anti-racism policies and training. Solving for equity at a diverse school like Henry is “absolutely” essential, Wear said, and the pandemic has raised the stakes.

With the principal focused on day-to-day administration, the school’s parent group has taken the lead on community outreach, Wear said, “helping to facilitate a kind of redistribution of resources — school supplies, [child] care during the day. They’ve done some work to survey parents and find out what they need, or what they have in abundance.”

Perhaps the biggest question for these parents is whether students can maintain the kind of personal relationships with teachers and peers that are critical to learning.

“All three of my children have a teacher that’s familiar to them,” Wear said. “They knew each other … but this incoming class doesn’t have that relationship.”

Philadelphia opens hotline for people who need internet access

2020-08-26T23:21:53+00:00

This story has been updated with comment from Comcast.

Families of K-12 students who lack broadband access can call 211 for information about how to get online for the coming year through PHLConnectED, the public-private project designed to make low-cost internet more widely available across Philadelphia.

The hotline, announced this week, is being operated by United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey and will be available 24/7 with information in 150 languages. Callers will be able to get information including referrals to resources and a phone number for families to call to set up service if they qualify.

“The pandemic has only underscored what we already knew to be true — digital access is essential for education and work opportunities,” said Bill Golderer, president and CEO of United Way.

But just a day after the hotline was announced, groups that advocate for the poor, including the Movement Alliance Project, renewed their demand that internet service providers and policymakers do more to guarantee universal, free access as long as schooling remains online. And they called for the service providers to foot more of the bill.

In Philadelphia, school will be online only at least through mid-November. And as of last week, the school district had identified 1,931 families who said they did not currently have service and need help connecting, Superintendent William Hite told the Board of Education.

PHLConnectED, announced earlier this month, is a two-year, $17 million joint project of the city, school district and internet service providers to expand broadband access for families and make it free or low-cost for two years to those who qualify. Officials estimated it would reach 35,000 families who now lack internet service.

It’s funded through a combination of philanthropic and public dollars, and the goal is to raise enough money to extend it beyond two years. It will include $7.2 million from the city for wired internet access, $5.1 million for hotspots, and $1.7 million for a multilingual cadre of “digital navigators” who can help families with training and technical support.

Any Philadelphia resident with a student in the district or charter schools who currently doesn’t have service, who only have mobile internet service, or is homeless or “housing insecure” is eligible. There is no income threshold, said a Comcast spokesman.

Access will be free for two years to families who qualify through Comcast’s Internet Essentials program for low-income households, which normally costs $10 a month. Mobile hotspots for those who are “housing insecure” will be provided by T-Mobile.

The district is calling more than 40,000 families “to make sure they are aware of the service,” said spokeswoman Monica Lewis. “We are hopeful that as many families as possible take advantage of this program so their children can get the resources they need to successfully engage in digital learning.”

In a statement, Mayor Jim Kenney said the city was “thrilled” to launch the hotline, and called PHLConnectED “a critical step in bridging the digital divide in Philadelphia.”

Advocates for low-income families say that PHLConnectED is a meaningful step, but far from enough. They’re calling on Comcast to increase speeds for Internet Essentials, lengthen its free-trial period, and open up residential hotspots for public use. They also want the program opened up to some district employees, including paraprofessionals, who may not be able to afford the service.

Wednesday was a “day of action,” with rallies in seven cities, including Philadelphia, calling on internet service providers to do more. About 20 people marched outside Comcast headquarters Wednesday afternoon, according to rally organizer Zach Wright.

City Council member Helen Gym and other advocates for low-income residents say that Comcast and other providers can afford to fund the program themselves and should do so, especially with the city and district budgets strained by the pandemic.

Wright said it’s “unacceptable” that schools are still having to pay something out of pocket for their students’ access.

“Comcast receives huge tax breaks from both the city and state,” Wright said. “They should step up to the plate willingly. If they don’t, they should pay their fair share, and we should use that money to create a municipal public Wi-Fi.”

Comcast’s two headquarters buildings, the tallest in the skyline, were constructed using a city tax abatement program that forgives taxes for 10 years for new development.

The company and city officials have said the advocates’ call for opening residential hotspots for public use is technically problematic and would slow service for paying customers. Comcast has also said that its free offers for Internet Essentials and the opening of commercial hotspots in the city provide means for online access for just about everyone in the city.

Late Thursday, a spokesman issued a statement, saying that solving a problem as “vast and complex” as the digital divide requires collaboration with the school district, elected officials, nonprofit community partners, and other private-sector companies.”

Philadelphia principals and teachers unions doubt safety of buildings as they prepare for return of students

2020-08-19T00:00:36+00:00

Philadelphia School District officials have asked principals to return to their school buildings as soon as this week to begin distributing materials and preparing for limited face-to-face instruction that could start in mid-November.

“Students need their textbooks. Our teachers need access to their materials,” Evelyn Nuñez, the district’s chief schools officer, wrote to principals last Friday.

She called this week’s re-entry a first step toward preparing schools to be the site of meetings between teachers, students, and families. Superintendent William Hite has said some teachers have asked to teach from their classrooms, and he wants other staff to have building access to facilitate contact with families.

And while Nuñez said union leaders were consulted, teachers and principals worry that loose controls around building access could expose them to the coronavirus even if students aren’t present.

“School leaders want to be safe, period. Asking school leaders to continue to venture in and out of buildings at every command is similar to asking them to play a dangerous game of Russian roulette,” said Robin Cooper, head of the principals union, the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, or CASA, in a statement.

“Virtual learning means just that … minimal risk for all involved,” Cooper said. “There is not one person who should have to compromise their health.”

Officials at the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers had no comment. However, in a letter to members obtained by Chalkbeat, president Jerry Jordan said that he wanted to stem rumors that allowing teachers to retrieve materials needed for remote learning meant “that it’s ok for principals to schedule faculty meetings, grade groups, or other in person events in schools...this is a one time effort.”

District officials responded to Jordan and Cooper’s concerns by insisting that this week’s return will be handled safely and responsibly, and will not turn into demands for in-person encounters beyond what safety protocols allow.

“Nothing in my letter said anything about staff meetings, bringing teachers together, any of that,” said Nuñez.

At the same time, Nuñez said that this week’s return is part of preparing for the resumption of limited in-person learning. Summer cleaning is slated to wrap up this week and comprehensive ventilation assessments are scheduled to be complete by early October, clearing the way for some staff to start working from buildings in preparation for students’ arrival.

Hite has said that hybrid instruction could begin on Nov. 17, but that some buildings also could open to provide limited student support before that date. That could include use as “learning centers” now being designated by the city as places where children who cannot safely stay at home can be supervised during the day.

Nuñez said it is reasonable to think that staff would start working from buildings more regularly “by the end of October, beginning of November.”

A year like no other

Opening school is always stressful, Nuñez said, and while this year “brings a new layer of concerns,” it also offers “excitement and opportunity to grow, professionally, in leading in a digital setting.”

Principals have between Wednesday and August 31 to plan for distributing classroom materials, including the district’s newly purchased workbooks for English and math, which are meant to supplement the virtual learning program. All students are eligible for the workbooks, which means that principals have to prepare to hand them out safely.

Principals had a dry run last spring when they distributed laptops and lunches, and many came up with creative solutions, Nuñez said. Some “took regular grocery bags, say for first grade, and put two or three workbooks in the bag, and folks didn’t even have to come into the building,” she said.

Interim facilities chief Alicia Prince said that the district’s summer cleaning will be completed this week, leaving only those buildings with ongoing renovations potentially unsafe for staff. The district still is completing industry-standard ventilation tests that measure safe airflow levels, which should be done by October, she said.

Jerry Roseman, the PFT’s environmental specialist, has called ventilation the district’s biggest safety challenge, declaring in July that “there is a very small fraction of rooms that you can safely use. We have a $4.5 billion capital backlog going back 25 years … a lot of that is ventilation and windows.”

Officials assure, but staff still worry

District officials promise that airflow assessments will cover all rooms and spaces in each building, but CASA’s Cooper worries that the effort to make buildings available to the district’s neediest students, which she supports, will result in pushing staff too quickly into risky situations.

“A lot of our people are trying to protect their families. If I live with my 90-year-old grandmother, I want to make sure I’m not bringing anything home,” Cooper said.

Cooper said that this year is anything but typical, and that it’s a mistake for district officials to compare principals’ current worries with those of years past.

“For Dr. Nuñez to downplay the immense stress that administrators are under … is borderline dangerous,” Cooper said. “It sends a message that says while the district values our students, we don’t value our employees and won’t hesitate to place you in unsafe buildings.” She plans to testify at Thursday’s Board of Education meeting.

“We are dedicated school leaders who want nothing more than to be in a safe, clean, learning environment where each one of us are able to go home every evening without fear of [COVID] contamination. This is not a privilege, but a right.“

Jordan, of the teachers union, wrote to his members that while remote teaching is hard, “the vast majority of buildings, due to ventilation issues, are unsafe for re-occupancy at any level of capacity.”

“I cannot in good conscience advocate for a policy that has the potential to threaten your lives,” Jordan wrote.

Nuñez acknowledged that there is a high level of distrust between the administration and staff that must be addressed, and vowed that this week’s limited return to buildings is just the start of what will be a carefully-managed process.

“We’re trying really hard to follow through on what we say we are going to do,” she said, noting that some central office staff members have already returned to their offices.

“Many of us have returned back to work,” she said, “and we’re practicing the same protocols that we’re asking them to practice.”