Chalkbeat

5 things to watch for Philadelphia’s 2026-27 school year

2026-08-21T16:47:13+00:00

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Philadelphia schools will open their doors to students next week as educators and families brace for what could be a tumultuous year.

The upcoming school year will be the last for nine district schools as Superintendent Tony Watlington moves forward with his plan to close schools beginning in 2027.

Meanwhile, school leaders say they’re also focused on improving student attendance and boosting academic performance.

“We are going to get our reading scores up,” Brenda Elliott, the district’s deputy superintendent of academics, told Chalkbeat. “We are committed to ensuring every one of our students are reading on grade level.”

That could be difficult. Test scores released last school year showed that third grade reading scores declined, with fewer than 1 in 3 able to read proficiently. Amid low test scores and looming school closures, some members of the City Council say they want more control over education issues.

Janis Butler has been an educator for 53 years. But this will be her first year as interim principal at Fanny Jackson Coppin Elementary School. Her goal is to make sure “not only that the staff feels supported, but the students feel supported as well.” If she’s able to do that, “they will all rise to the occasion,” she said.

What’s Butler — who used to be a district student herself — most looking forward to on the first day back? “To give some hugs,” she said.

Here are five things we’re watching as the school year gets underway:

Philadelphia gears up to begin closing schools

With the Board of Education’s approval in April, the Philadelphia school district is implementing a sweeping facilities plan that includes closing 17 schools over the next decade.

Schools slated for closure at the end of this year include Lankenau Environmental Science High School, Paul Robeson High School, and Overbrook Elementary, which have mounted fierce resistance with the backing of members of City Council.

The plan also includes colocating several schools and upgrading nearly 170 others. This year, we’ll see whether the district is able to get any closer to scraping together the additional $2 billion it needs to pay for the upgrades — or whether it will scale back some of what it’s promised.

Lankenau High School students Tyrone Ware, right, and Niyasia Bounds say they don't know what they would do if their school closes. The district plans to close Lankenau at the end of the 2026-27 school year.

The district has pledged to help families affected by the closures. We’re keeping our eye on what services are available, and how families at closing schools decide what school to attend next.

Political fights over schools could escalate

Members of Philadelphia’s City Council are not conceding defeat on school closures.

Led by Education Committee Chair Isaiah Thomas, a group of councilmembers has demanded that the district and school board “return to the negotiating table” and consider removing some schools from the closure list. They’ve threatened lawsuits, called for board members’ resignations, and have even gone as far as to explore shifting to an elected school board.

There’s been no signal from the district that it’s reconsidering, but the political debate will no doubt continue into the school year.

Mayor Cherelle Parker has been conspicuously absent from public debates about school closures recently. In 2024, Parker declared that her administration would form a committee to review the district’s facilities plan. But that committee never materialized.

Shortly before the closure vote, Parker stood in lockstep with Superintendent Tony Watlington. Once a majority of her appointed board approved the plan and councilmembers began to raise objections, Parker receded from the conversation.

The mayor “supports the plan” and will work with the district, City Council, and state lawmakers “to identify the funds necessary to move forward with (building) improvements,” Debora Carrera, chief education officer for the Parker administration, said in a Friday email.

What will happen with any buildings designated for closure that could be conveyed to the city? Carrera said “no concrete plans have yet been identified.”

Will Philly’s new curriculum decisions pay off?

The district is about four years into a major, multimillion-dollar curriculum overhaul. Math came first in 2023-24, followed by English in 2024-25, and science this past school year. Some educators have welcomed the new materials, but many have told Chalkbeat they dislike the new curriculum and remain skeptical of its usefulness for students.

Math scores have improved and reading scores have fallen, but the Philly school district has opted not to release school-level data from last school year’s tests to educators and principals. While the state reviews some of the PSSA and Keystone exam data, district spokespeople say the data can’t be used to compare student performance or for selective admissions this school year. That makes it difficult to determine how students are faring.

Philadelphia district officials say their plan this year is to get reading scores up. Test scores released last school year showed that third grade reading performance declined.

The district has also said by next school year, they’ll offer an algebra course to all eighth graders. That means this year, they’ll have to expand access to more than 50 schools that don’t currently offer the class.

The district will overhaul charter school evaluations

The school board’s charter school office is expected to release a new way to evaluate charters, called Project RISE, this fall. If schools don’t meet certain standards, the board could choose not to renew their charters, kicking off a process that can lead to closing the school.

Recent charter nonrenewals have led to tensions between charter leaders and the school board. Charter leaders have alleged the process is biased. A handful of charters have sued the district over its decisions.

School board members have also called for an examination of enrollment in some charter schools. Separately, they’ve approved the first new charter school in nearly a decade, which will open this fall.

National debates over tech, vouchers come into focus

In Philadelphia, individual schools are largely on their own to determine how to manage students’ scream time and cellphone use. This year, we’ll keep our eye on whether that changes as Gov. Josh Shapiro calls for a bell-to-bell cellphone ban and more regulations on minors’ artificial intelligence use.

Shapiro has also yet to say whether he will opt into the Trump administration’s school tax credit program, which could funnel money to private schools. We’ll be following what he and other Democratic governors ultimately decide.

Are there other stories you think we should be covering? Reach us at philly.tips@chalkbeat.org to let us know your questions and ideas.

This story has been updated to include comment from Mayor Cherelle Parker’s office.

Rebecca Redelmeier is a reporter at Chalkbeat Philadelphia. She writes about public schools, early childhood education, and issues that affect students, families, and educators across Philadelphia. Contact Rebecca at rredelmeier@chalkbeat.org.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia City Council members say they will ‘use every tool in our arsenal’ to stop school closures

2026-07-28T21:31:51+00:00

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Members of Philadelphia’s City Council say their fight to stop the district’s school closure plan is far from over, and they’re prepared to use several tactics to force changes before closures begin next year.

“We’re going to use every tool in our arsenal to make sure that we protect our children,” said Isaiah Thomas, chair of the City Council’s Education Committee, at a press briefing Tuesday.

The district plans to close 17 schools beginning in the 2027-28 school year and reshuffle those students elsewhere under a sweeping facilities plan approved by the Board of Education in April. The plan would also co-locate several schools and upgrade nearly 170 school buildings.

The facilities plan is meant to ensure students go to class in quality buildings and families can access more opportunities, such as prekindergarten and AP classes. It’s also supposed to help the district adapt to its declining enrollment, which has left hundreds of empty seats in several schools.

The City Council doesn’t have a direct say over the closures, but it does control some district funding. Last school year, several members vehemently opposed the plan, and Thomas called for board members’ resignations after they voted to approve it.

With the upcoming school year slated to be the last for several schools, council members say they plan to use their power to continue pushing for changes. Some said they were looking to keep Paul Robeson High School and Lankenau Environmental Science High School in particular off the closure list.

Thomas said he is still considering potential legal action over the closure plan. Councilmember Curtis Jones said he is considering requiring an independent audit of the district’s spending on services such as school lunches.

School Board President Reginald Streater said in a statement that the board “values City Council’s partnership and remains committed to engaging stakeholders throughout the plan’s implementation.” The board will continue to review community feedback about the plan, Streater added.

The district will work closely with students, families, and staff, as well as elected officials and community members, “to ensure every transition is thoughtful, transparent, and centered on student success,” school district spokesperson Monique Braxton said in a statement.

The district shared its facilities plan after dozens of community engagement sessions and surveys of residents across the city. The initial proposal included closing 20 schools, but following protests, the district removed three from the list the board approved in April.

“It is no secret the facilities plan is unpopular,” said Councilmember Nina Ahmad, who has opposed the district’s plan to close Lankenau Environmental Science High School in particular. “If three can be taken off, then more can be taken off.”

Thomas said he plans to mobilize Philadelphians to continue their fight against the closures.

“You’ve got to care more about these 17 schools closing than you do about LeBron James coming to Philadelphia,” Thomas said, referencing the recent NBA news that the famed basketball player will join the Philadelphia 76ers. “This matters more.”

Philadelphia charter school group sues district over renewal process

2026-05-14T17:03:54+00:00

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A group that represents 70 Philadelphia charter schools alleges the Board of Education and district’s approach to charter renewals is “coercive and exploitative” and is asking the court to limit the district’s power over charters.

The lawsuit that Philadelphia Charters for Excellence filed Thursday demands that the district end its practice of including enrollment caps and legal waivers, known as surrender clauses, in charter agreements. Surrender clauses require schools to give up their charter if they don’t meet certain conditions.

The lawsuit asks the Court of Common Pleas to rule that any board decision to not renew a school based on its surrender clause is invalid.

It also asks the court to rule that schools do not need to sign new charter agreements as a condition of renewal. Some Philly charter schools have continued to operate on out-of-date charter agreements for years.

“Charter schools in Philadelphia have spent years navigating a renewal process that treats legal compliance like a negotiating chip,” said Cassandra St. Vil, CEO of Philadelphia Charters for Excellence, in a statement. “Schools are told to sign agreements they never agreed to, under conditions the law does not permit, or risk losing the authorization that tens of thousands of students and families depend on.”

In response to the lawsuit, board members said in a joint statement Thursday that they have “tried to use the tools that are available to us under the charter school law to authorize, evaluate, and hold charter schools accountable.”

“We have a duty to hold every charter school accountable for academic success, sound operations, and fiscal integrity in exchange for the high level of autonomy they have in operating schools,” they added.

A state audit of the district’s renewal process released in 2024 found it was in compliance with all relevant state laws.

The lawsuit comes just hours before the district’s Charter School Office is expected to present charter school renewal recommendations to the Board of Education. Of the 11 schools up for renewal this year, district documents show the office will recommend two for non-renewals, eight for five-year renewals with conditions, and one for a one-year renewal with conditions.

Not renewing a charter school kicks off a legal process that can lead to closing the school.

The renewal process has been tense in past years, with charter school students crowding into board meetings to protest recommendations of non-renewal. Last year, the board voted to move forward with not renewing charters for two schools. The schools, People for People Charter School and KIPP North Philadelphia Academy, then sued the board over the non-renewal decisions. A judge granted them an injunction prohibiting the board from moving forward with closures.

One of the schools recommended for non-renewal this year, Global Leadership Academy Charter School Southwest at Huey, did not meet several academic and financial standards set by the district. Over the past four years, fewer than 10% of students at the schools achieved proficient scores on state math tests, and fewer than 20% scored proficient on reading tests — both lower rates than the district average.

At the other school recommended for non renewal, Philadelphia Montessori Charter School, students have shown little to no growth on state math and reading tests over the past two years.

This story has been updated to include a statement from Board of Education members.

Your guide to Philadelphia’s upcoming school closure vote

2026-04-23T14:53:50+00:00

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Update: Board officials announced Thursday afternoon they will now meet April 30 to consider the resolution that includes the closures.

The Philadelphia Board of Education is moving ahead with plans to vote Thursday on the school district’s proposal to close 17 schools.

The closure plan, which the district first announced in January and initially targeted 20 schools, has received major pushback from school communities and local officials who worry shuttering schools will destabilize students, spark bullying and fights, and rob communities of vital resources.

“If we slow down just a little bit and just took more account for what the community says, what students say, we might get better results on how we should move forward,” said Overbrook Elementary School Principal Kenneth Glover at a Wednesday rally to save his school, which is on the closure list.

This week, students, educators, and policymakers launched a full-out campaign for the board to delay the vote. At the City Council earlier this week, members blasted School Board President Reginald Streater and Superintendent Tony Watlington, saying they were not sufficiently consulted in the planning and selection of the schools to be closed and modernized.

But Streater declined to postpone the vote. He said only that he would bring their concerns back to the other board members.

Watlington and district officials have said the closures and general rightsizing of the district are necessary and will expand educational opportunities for students. Over the past decade, enrollment in Philadelphia’s public schools has declined by more than 17,000 students. That’s left many students to learn in half-empty, inadequate school buildings that are costly to maintain.

District leaders say their facilities master plan, which includes the closures, will offer students safer school environments and will help the district better serve the needs of Philly students and families.

Here’s some additional information about the closure vote, and how you can get involved.

Where’s the most updated list of which schools would close?

The district is proposing to close 17 schools, modernize 169 schools, and colocate six schools.

The district’s facilities master plan website has more information about plans for each school.

Where is the vote happening and how do I participate?

The vote is part of the Board of Education’s Monthly Action Meeting, which is held at 440 North Broad Street and livestreamed online here. The meeting begins at 4 p.m.

You can submit written comments here (you must include your name and the subject line “Board Comments”). Or you can drop a statement off at the board office at the North Broad Street address.

What happens if the board votes yes?

If the board approves the resolution, the district and board will then move forward with required legal steps to close schools. The district may still make changes to the plan during that part of the process.

Per the plan, most closures would not go into effect until 2027. District officials have promised that schools identified for closure will have a planning year, during which staff and families will work with a “transition team” to ease students and teachers through the changes.

What other actions could the board take?

The board could decide to table the vote to give the district more time to receive community input. Board members could also vote against the closure plan and send it back to the district to make changes.

However, Watlington has said this version of the plan is the “final, final set of recommendations” he is putting forward.

How much will the facilities plan cost?

The district doesn’t have a firm plan to fund the proposal, which comes with a $3 billion price tag. Alongside the closures, the broader facilities master plan includes renovations to nearly 170 schools. That means fixing bathrooms, painting walls, and patching ceilings, among other repairs.

Watlington said the funding will come from a combination of philanthropic donations and district funds. However, the district is also facing a $300 million budget shortfall, which Mayor Cherelle Parker hopes to partially close with a controversial rideshare tax.

What will happen to teachers if their school closes?

Watlington has said no teachers will lose their jobs due to the closures. But the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers union has not thrown their support behind the plan.

PFT President Arthur Steinberg joined calls this week to delay the vote and is planning to host a protest outside of the district building ahead of Thursday’s vote. Steinberg said the union is working on an alternative proposal that it plans to release in the next few weeks.

Sammy Caiola covers solutions to gun violence in and around Philadelphia schools. Have ideas for her? Get in touch at scaiola@chalkbeat.org.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Feud over Philadelphia’s school closure plan leads to threats against district funding

2026-04-22T22:08:29+00:00

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In the hours before the Philadelphia Board of Education is scheduled to vote on its school closure plan, political threats and finger-pointing have reached a fever pitch.

City Councilmembers who say they were caught off-guard by the board’s sudden decision to hold the vote to close 17 schools this week have summoned Superintendent Tony Watlington and Board President Reginald Streater to multiple budget hearings, where they have threatened district funding. They say they felt misled by district leaders and — as Councilmember Nina Ahmad put it — “sandbagged.”

Meanwhile, at rallies to save individual schools from closure, state lawmakers have declared that they have long memories and will not forget the outcome of Thursday’s vote. They’ve said if the board votes to close beloved schools in their districts, they’ll be less likely to advocate for increased state aid for Philly schools.

“The administration, the legislative body, and the school district all look like you’re fighting against each other,” said Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, who at a Wednesday hearing asked Streater to delay the planned vote as a signal of political goodwill.

Streater refused to accept or reject the request, saying he would confer with the board members and come to a decision before Thursday.

The fiery political rhetoric signals that the relationship between city government, school board members, and district leaders has been damaged. Still, there are few alternate proposals to get the district the money it says it would need to maintain buildings and close its budget hole. And as angry as elected leaders are about the situation, many of those same officials are among the biggest champions of education funding who might be loath to punish the district by cutting school aid or withholding their support for increasing it.

“I don’t want to talk about school funding until we get a facilities plan that we all agree upon,” Councilmember and Education Committee Chair Isaiah Thomas told Chalkbeat. “You can’t tell us that we have to get in line with your facilities plan and then tell us we have to get in line with your funding plan. That’s disingenuous.”

The only proposal to increase city funding for the school district on the table right now is Mayor Cherelle Parker’s $1 rideshare tax, which at least one councilmember has said is “dead on arrival” if the closure plan moves forward as written. That proposal would provide an estimated $54 million to offset 340 planned staff cuts — a drop in the bucket for a district facing a $300 million deficit and which has been chronically underfunded by some $1.8 billion annually, according to a Commonwealth Court judge.

Members spent Tuesday and Wednesday questioning and excoriating Watlington, Streater, and the city’s Chief Education Officer Debora Carrera. But when it comes to voting to send the district money, “we always come through,” Councilmember Cindy Bass said at Wednesday’s budget hearing.

At that same hearing, Parker called for unity but did not back down from her tax proposal that has become increasingly unpopular at the City Council.

“I know it’s good theater for people to see what they consider to be our going to war, the administration, versus the council, the legislative branch versus the executive branch in opposition, with the school board in opposition with the school superintendent,” Parker said.

For many elected leaders, the issue might be a defining feature of their time in office. Their speeches over the last few months at rallies to keep schools from closing may help them get attention from families and latch onto a cause that’s spurring civic engagement across the city.

Parker, who appointed all of the board members, is up for reelection in 2027. All 17 City Councilmembers have indicated they intend to seek reelection in 2027, and this year, every member of the state House of Representatives is on the ballot.

“As we go through budget season in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, we will remember that vote on Thursday,” state Rep. Morgan Cephas, a Democrat, warned board members at a Tuesday rally to keep Lankenau Environmental Science High School open.

Still, no City Councilmember has put forth a plan to help the district close its budget deficit or allocate more money to prevent closures.

“It’s complex for y’all. It’s complex for us. We’re trying to work as a partnership, and everybody’s gotta do a little bit of give and take,” Council President Kenyatta Johnson said Wednesday.

Education advocates say councilmembers could draw on the city’s budget surplus, shift the amount of tax revenue set aside for the district, or adjust the split of the city’s soda tax revenue to send more money to schools, for example. Thomas told Chalkbeat Wednesday he won’t entertain alternatives until they reach common ground with the facilities plan.

But holding up all city funding for the district appears unlikely.

Bass said Wednesday that not one councilmember “has taken a single vote against any level of funding” for the district in the past.

Thomas said if the board moves forward with a vote on the closure plan Thursday, he’s prepared to consider “plenty of options.”

Chalkbeat reporter Rebecca Redelmeier contributed to this story.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

See how your school would be affected by the Philadelphia district’s proposed staffing cuts

2026-04-17T21:21:11+00:00

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Nearly every Philadelphia school would lose staff next year under the district’s preliminary plan to eliminate 340 school-based positions to plug its budget hole.

But some schools would suffer more than others, according to a school-by-school breakdown of the proposed cuts created by the district and obtained by Chalkbeat.

Schools that receive additional funding because they used to be part of the district’s Acceleration Network, which Superintendent Tony Watlington dissolved in 2024, would be hit particularly hard. And climate staff, who are in charge of creating a safe environment and monitoring hallways, would lose the largest number of positions.

West and Southwest Philadelphia and Kensington are three of the neighborhoods where schools would receive the deepest cuts. The members of City Council who represent those areas say they’re already worried the school district is disproportionately hurting their neighborhoods through its separate plan to close schools beginning in 2027. The preliminary budget cuts add salt to the wound, they say.

In total, the district would cut around 149 teachers, 23 counselors, 119 climate staff, and 47 other support and administrative staff from its full-time equivalent positions.

These cuts are not yet finalized, and district officials say there will be openings for all school-based staff whose positions are eliminated.

The projected cuts represent estimates from before principals finalize their school budgets, according to a statement from the district’s Chief Financial Officer Mike Herbstman about the school-by-school breakdown. That means the breakdown could change. Schools with shrinking enrollments could lose more positions outside of these cuts.

There’s still a chance the cuts don’t go through. Mayor Cherelle Parker, who’s publicly opposed the proposed staff reductions, has championed a rideshare tax that she and Watlington said earlier this week would enable the district to avoid eliminating school-based positions.

Debora Carrera, the city’s chief education officer under Parker, noted at a press conference that climate staff intervene to defuse conflicts at school: “They are the eyes and the ears of our schools. They know when children are struggling or suffering.”

But the $1 per ride tax requires approval from the City Council. It’s unclear if members will support it.

And that proposal would not save the 220 building substitute positions the district also plans to cut.

In the meantime, schools are moving forward with preliminary budgets for next year that include cuts that teachers have said could derail learning. Last week, teachers began receiving notice that their schools plan to eliminate their positions and they should apply to others.

Former Superintendent William Hite launched the district’s Acceleration Network as a way to funnel additional resources to struggling schools in hard-to-staff neighborhoods.

When Watlington did away with the network two years ago, he said the 13 schools previously in the network would keep the additional funding.

This new round of proposed cuts would end those extra resources and apply additional cuts to those schools. The result is these schools would lose the most positions under the preliminary plan.

Former Acceleration Network school James Rhoads, for example, would lose the full-time equivalent of more than 13 staff, including four teachers and nine climate staff. Another former Acceleration Network school, Delaplaine McDaniel, would lose four teachers and around five climate staff.

Schools that could close avoid potential 2026 cuts

The Board of Education has not yet approved Watlington’s proposal to close 18 schools beginning in 2027, but Watlington has said schools on that closure list will be protected from budget cuts this year.

Still, some City Council districts where several schools would close under the district’s plan are home to schools that are also being hit hardest by the budget cuts.

For example, the district that includes Kensington, Hunting Park, and Frankford would lose the equivalent of 63 full-time school staff members. It’s also where several schools are slated for closure.

“Many of those positions are filled by people who are from the neighborhood or who have been in those schools for many years,” said Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, who represents the area. Together, the proposals for staff cuts and school closures are “causing additional challenges and stress on my community,” she said.

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, who represents parts of West and Southwest Philadelphia, said in a statement that she was “dismayed” that the proposed budget cuts would eliminate 51 full-time equivalent school staff positions in her district.

“This harm is compounded by the fact that the current version of the School District’s facilities master plan invests less in our communities than almost any other Council District,” said Gauthier.

Lozada said she did not have a position yet on Parker’s proposed rideshare tax. Gauthier said she was reviewing the proposal.

“We need to be careful about new taxes that we know will fall on consumers, especially if they won’t stop the closure of our neighborhood schools,” said Gauthier.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Meet the Philly kids fighting to keep their schools from closing

2026-04-03T17:11:20+00:00

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Eighth graders Alexis Rodriguez and Dominic Wolbert spent the week before a recent Philadelphia Board of Education meeting getting ready.

They had taken hours to write their speeches and get feedback on them from their teachers at Stetson Middle School. They had overcome some nerves and discomfort.

When their names were called to speak at the March meeting, they looked directly at the school board members and told them: Don’t close our school.

“Stetson for me was a place where I could learn, and grow, and befriend people who I hold very close to me,” said Rodriguez, 14. “Phasing out our school is to crush the feeling of safety and belonging.”

With their testimony complete, the two middle schoolers ducked out of the board meeting around the two-hour mark to grab chips and soda from the vending machine. It was still a long night ahead, with dozens of other students, teachers, and parents signed up to speak out against the closures.

Stetson Middle School students Dominic Wolbert (left) and Alexis Rodriguez practiced their speeches to the Board of Education before giving their public testimony at a recent town hall meeting.

In the months since Superintendent Tony Watlington released his proposal to close 18 schools, students have been front and center in the fight against the plan. Kids as young as 6 have testified at school board meetings. High schoolers have planned walkouts, analyzed district data, and built relationships with members of the City Council to try to push change. Some students spent part of spring break attending a training on how to organize against the closures.

Watlington has said the plan will mean all students go to class in quality buildings and have more access to desirable programming, like AP classes. The $2.8 billion proposal also includes modernizing more than 100 schools.

Students Chalkbeat spoke with said they didn’t regularly attend school board meetings or keep up to date with local political decisions. But the school closure debate was one that mattered to them and mobilized them. Some said working together to fight the school closures has forged new deep bonds within the schools. Others said it made them question why it seems students and families have so little say in school decisions.

Qeni Corinaldi, a senior at Parkway Northwest High School for Peace and Social Justice, said the proposal to close his school got him wondering about who has power over schools in the first place.

“It went from, ‘Oh, my school’s being shut down’ to ‘I’m going to learn more about it,’” Corinaldi said.

After he spoke to teachers and friends, attended a school board meeting, and did some research, he had questions. Why did the mayor get to decide who was on the school board? How did Watlington get his position? Why did it seem that Watlington and the school board were in sync, if they were supposed to be separate entities?

When he realized how much power was concentrated in the hands of just a few people, he was shocked. “The power structure is not what democracy is all about,” Corinaldi said.

Students overcome nerves to publicly criticize school closures

The board will make the ultimate decision about which schools close, but they have not yet said when they will vote. In the meantime, students are pulling every lever they can to try to push the board to make changes.

At Lankenau Environmental Science High School, students have helped organize an event showcasing the school’s programs and ties to the 400-acres of natural land surrounding the campus. At Parkway Northwest, students led a roundtable discussion with Councilmember Cindy Bass to share their perspective on the closure process.

Parents and teachers have helped younger kids get involved too.

Students at John Moffet School in Philadelphia rally on Wednesday, March 25, 2026, to oppose the district's plan to change their school from an elementary school to a middle school.

At a rally outside John Moffet Elementary School, which the district wants to turn into a middle school, 9-year-old Morgan Chism had a simple question about the plan: “Why do I have to walk a mile just to get to school?”

Chism’s grandmother, Brenda Riggins, said he had been raising questions about who makes decisions about education ever since Moffet parents started organizing people against the facilities plan.

Riggins said Chism has always been a civically engaged kid — he would prefer to watch cable news and not cartoons, she said — but this moment has gotten him to ask questions about the deeper issues of inequality that plague the city. Even if he doesn’t fully understand the depth of them yet.

Another Moffet parent, Lina Ahmad, said her son Yahya was really sad about the change planned for the school. But speaking up to try and spare the school has given him new energy, she said.

At the rally, Yahya was too small to see over the podium but spoke confidently about his love for his school. “I don’t want to move,” he told the crowd of parents and teachers. “The school is actually one of the best schools. I don’t want to leave.”

Fitler Academic Plus 8th grader Ana Urena testified at a recent school board meeting to urge the Board of Education not to close her school.

Ana Urena, an eighth grader at Fitler Academics Plus who testified at the board’s recent town hall meeting, said she was nervous about speaking in front of the crowd. But she realized that the decision at stake was one that could lead to thousands of students losing their schools. “That’s what really motivated me to do it,” she said.

She said she hopes that by sharing her perspective, the board will put student voices front and center.

“When I’ve heard the board speak, when I hear the adults that have the power to fix this, all I hear is money. Billions of dollars, millions of dollars. It doesn’t matter,” Urena said. “I don’t hear the students.”

Chalkbeat Philadelphia Bureau Chief Carly Sitrin contributed to this story.

The Philly City Council can’t stop school closures directly. Here’s what 2 members are trying instead.

2026-03-26T15:17:19+00:00

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A second member of Philadelphia’s City Council wants to introduce zoning changes that could influence the school district’s school closure plans and what would happen after closures.

Councilmember Jeffery Young Jr., whose district includes parts of North Philadelphia where the school district wants to close three schools, told Chalkbeat he is looking into proposing legislation that would limit how their respective properties could be redeveloped.

The proposal “would be very similar” to a bill that Councilmember Jamie Gauthier introduced last week to restrict the zoning for four West Philadelphia schools, Young said. That bill would rezone the school parcels to civic, educational, or medical use, which would mean any developer looking to build commercial or residential property would have to go through the lengthy process of getting a zoning variance.

“Rezoning the parcels gives the community more say in what will happen,” Young said. He added that he has not finalized his plan yet because he is in discussions with other members of the City Council whose districts send students to schools in his.

In theory, Young’s proposal could complicate the district’s plan to close certain schools, because it could be harder for the district to sell or offload those buildings if the schools do close.

The City Council has no direct say over which schools close — that decision is ultimately up to the Board of Education. But they do largely get to determine changes to how land can be used in their districts, following a Philadelphia government tradition.

Gauthier’s zoning proposal has not yet passed, but is likely to. The legislation is under review by the Committee on Rules.

District leaders have said the list of schools to close is based on data about building quality, enrollment, and the programs they can offer. Many of the buildings slated for closure are over a century old and require costly repairs. District enrollment has also shrunk over the past decade, leaving many schools with more than 100 empty seats.

But some school communities worry they’re being targeted for closure because their buildings sit on valuable land. Young and Gauthier say rezoning school buildings would ensure the district isn’t motivated to close schools based on their resale value, and that neighborhoods have a say over what happens to the land if their schools close.

“Look around you, several new buildings are going up as we speak,” Gauthier said Monday at a rally outside of Paul Robeson High School in West Philadelphia, one of four schools that would be closed or repurposed in her district. “What does it say that we’re making space for all of these uses, but the district won’t even try to find something for our kids?”

But urban planning advocates say restricting zoning doesn’t guarantee benefits for the neighborhood. Instead, it could cause greater strain on the cash-strapped school district by limiting who would want to buy old school buildings, they say.

“Trying to take real estate out of the equation by trying to limit the upside that somebody might pay to do a residential conversion of a school is really just hurting the school district,” said Jon Geeting, policy and advocacy director for Build Philly Now, a local economic development think tank. “I just don’t really think we’re helping anything by making it harder to redevelop.”

City Council wants more say on school closures

In addition to Robeson, the schools in Gauthier’s district that the district plans to close or relocate are Blankenburg Elementary, Martha Washington School, and Parkway West High School. Her bills would designate all of them as “Special Purpose” zoning, along with Motivation High School, which the district removed from the closure list last month.

That designation would zone the land for uses like schools and libraries. To build something else, developers would have to receive a zoning adjustment. Receiving that adjustment can be a political and time consuming process, with no guarantees.

Geeting and some other advocates say they worry zoning restrictions could lead to vacant school buildings sitting empty — a problem the district is already dealing with from the last round of school closures. It has around 20 school properties that have been vacant for years. Last year, a woman’s body was found behind one of them.

Gauthier “supports finding productive use for vacant school buildings,” Harrison Feinman, Gauthier’s director of communications, said in a statement. “But it is inappropriate to plan the redevelopment of schools while students are still in them.”

Superintendent Tony Watlington has said this round of proposed closures would not lead to any vacant buildings. Of the 18 schools slated for closure, the district plans to repurpose 10 for district use. The district wants to convey the other eight to the city or sell them.

Mayor Cherelle Parker has said she supports the plan, and has indicated she wants to turn some closed schools into housing. But none of that is a done deal. The Board of Education still needs to approve Watlington’s plan.

In the meantime, Young said he’s been looking into introducing a rezoning proposal to ensure his constituents’ perspectives are considered in school decisions, but he did not release further details. The district plans to repurpose two schools slated for closure in his district, Robert Morris and Laura W. Waring. But it wants to convey James R. Ludlow School to the city for redevelopment.

Young said his district has plenty of other vacant land that could be redeveloped for housing.

Young has flexed his power with respect to the school district in other ways. On Tuesday, he held his own town hall about some proposed closures in his district, which district officials attended. And earlier this year, he introduced legislation that would enable the City Council to remove members of the school board. Currently, only the mayor has power to do so.

His aim, he said, is to ensure school decisions serve the local communities he represents.

“The people in those communities directly hold me as their council member accountable for the local issues,” Young said. “Education is a local issue. I’m the only person that they can directly take their frustration out on.”

‘I try to build them up’: How a dean with corrections experience tries to keep North Philly students safe

2026-03-16T20:59:34+00:00

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When Art Green was working for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections a few years ago, he noticed the inmates getting younger and younger — and it ate at him.

“I would talk to the young people, I would try to get the young people on track,” he said. “But moving forward, I thought about maybe catching these young people within high school settings, maybe having the same conversations with them without them being incarcerated.”

Now Green, a Philly native and self-proclaimed former troublemaker, is rounding out his first year as dean of students at the YESPhilly Accelerated High School. It’s a credit recovery school within the School District of Philadelphia, serving students ages 16-23 who were unable to complete their education at their original school.

The campus is in a part of the city experiencing elevated levels of poverty and crime. That means Green does a lot more than desk work.

Green coordinates with school security, local law enforcement, transit officials, and other agencies to make sure that the school building — and all the vital services it provides — remain available and accessible to kids.

Chalkbeat talked with Green about keeping students safe, and giving them the tools they need to move forward.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What does a typical day look like for you?

I come in in the mornings. I make sure that the outside of the school, the perimeter is safe. Once I enter the building, I open up, I make sure that every room is inspected. My main purpose is working in the front, making sure that I speak with every student entering the building. I make sure that I greet them.

What I’m actually doing is temperature-checking to make sure that they’re ready to get to learning. I want to make sure that no one bothered them in their transportation to or from school. I may need to refer you over to our counselor. I may need to refer you over to the principal, someone that can help you. Or maybe it’s something I could help you with.

At lunch time, it’s crowd control, controlling the traffic within the hallways, making sure there’s no loitering in the bathroom. After lunch, I pretty much slow the day down a little bit and prepare for the release of the students.

How does the environment surrounding YESPhilly affect what happens inside the school?

The challenge that our students face, of course, is crime. Everyday movement, bums, different people saying things to them and they may get a little intimidated. I try to make sure I look out the window, stay within the perimeter, or make sure I can see them when they get here, but also let them know when you get here you’re here in a safe environment. I walk all the way around a one-block radius to show my face.

I want to talk to everyone, even the people that may be on drugs and stuff like that, I let them know: “This is a school. You can’t be around this area. You can go over here. Is there something I can do for you? How can I support you?” I want everyone to know that this is a safe place.

I have to stay active and involved with every aspect of that student, whether that student is with the Department of Health Services or that student is with a guardian, whether that student is in a homeless shelter. It does not matter. We have a purpose that we need to serve. The young people [are] the client[s], and they are our future.

How do you talk to students about violence they might see on the news or in their communities?

It’s a very scary time that we’re living in. I let them know that the answer is the young people. When I give you these teachings, I need you guys to go home, have these conversations with your parents about the stuff that you’re learning. Have these conversations with your peers, the ones that’s involved in gang violence. Because in school, we talk it out and we walk away and no one gets hurt.

As far as the gun violence side, I let them know the values that I’m teaching, use them. If you see danger, separate yourself. If someone tries to introduce you to having a weapon or joining a gang, XYZ, seek help. I try to build them up, to give them that strength.

I can’t be with them every walk of the way. I wish I could. But I try to give them enough tools that when that decision comes to separate yourself, where you see danger, to go the other way.

How do you take care of yourself when you’re not at work?

I bowl heavy. I’m really into bowling. I’m into landscaping and it’s about that time I start putting my seeds down and getting the mulch out and flowers and taking care of a plant and just seeing how you can make the garden look. I play basketball, I run track. And other than that, I take care of my students. Whatever they have to do on their free time when they’re off. We have a lot of programs making sure they get to and from the programs. If they text me, I’m here.

Everything’s good because I committed my life to trying to save our young people.

This story is part of a collaboration between Chalkbeat Philadelphia and The New York Times’s Headway Initiative, supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) via the Local Media Foundation.

Sammy Caiola covers solutions to gun violence in and around Philadelphia schools. Have ideas for her? Get in touch at scaiola@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia’s small themed high schools under threat as district plans to close, consolidate buildings

2026-03-06T20:55:20+00:00

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Creating small, themed high schools was once a key component of Philadelphia’s education reform strategy.

The intent behind schools like Paul Robeson, Lankenau, Motivation High, Building 21, and the U School was to offer students more intimate settings, the chance to form close relationships with teachers, and the opportunity for a very different kind of learning experience than what large, comprehensive high schools provided.

Now, however, most of these schools face uncertain futures under the district’s facilities plan, which would close 18 schools and is now being considered by the Board of Education.

Superintendent Tony Watlington’s plan would move most of the small schools into nearby neighborhood high schools and either close them entirely while creating a dedicated program in the larger school, or have them maintain a separate identity in the building with their own principal and staff —the so-called co-location strategy.

“We can’t keep all the small boutique high schools and the neighborhood high schools,” Watlington told the City Council at an early February hearing on his plan. “We don’t have the resources to do all of it.”

In comments to the Board of Education last week, he repeated his conviction that small schools can exacerbate inequality of opportunity. “There is too much disparity in this city,” he said. “What we want to do is level the playing field.”

Research attempting to quantify the benefits of small high schools is limited Generally, the smaller schools have higher attendance and graduation rates, with students more likely to pursue — if not finish — a postsecondary degree.

“Kids have a higher sense of agency and graduate with a deeper understanding of who they are, and what they want” in life, said Simon Hauger, founder of The Workshop School.

And parents and students love them, saying in surveys that they feel safer in these schools and “part of a real community,” Hauger said. Under Watlington’s plan, Workshop would eventually move into Overbrook High School.

In the superintendent’s vision, neighborhood high schools would establish or strengthen a multitude of different programs that could satisfy the needs of all students, a model that already exists at schools like Northeast High. While he expressed some praise for small schools to the City Council, he said in most cases they lack opportunities for students to take Advanced Placement courses, access robust art and music programs, and participate in sports.

Nevertheless, most City Council members have criticized the plan. And members of the public complained bitterly at neighborhood meetings.

Students from Motivation High, which Watlington originally wanted to move into Bartram, and Parkway Northwest, which is slated to become an honors program at Martin Luther King, have been particularly vocal in opposition.

Students at Parkway Northwest High School for Peace and Social Justice walked out of their classrooms last month to protest their school's proposed closure.

“The school may be small, but small means great,” said Samantha Brumfield, the home and school association president at Paul Robeson High School.

That type of criticism may have had some impact. Initially, Watlington proposed closing Robeson and making it an honors program within Sayre High School. After hearing the public’s dismay, he changed the plan and now proposes combining Motivation High and Robeson into one building. And after an outcry from students and parents at Lankenau High, which has an environmental focus, he changed his recommendation to move these students into W.B. Saul High of Agricultural Sciences rather than to Roxborough. That, however, has not mollified the critics.

Supporters of the small high schools say they were established for a reason that’s still relevant.

“What I love about Paul Robeson is that we teach children to build their own brand,” said Elana Evans, Robeson’s special education compliance manager. Due to the close relationships, teachers can help students figure out “who do you want to be,” and “help you get there.”

But Board of Education President Reginald Streater, a graduate of Germantown High School — a historic neighborhood school that closed in 2013 along with 23 others in the district’s last wave of downsizing — clearly agreed with Watlington when he told the City Council that maintaining so many small high schools in the district is “unsustainable.”

Philadelphia’s small high schools took decades to develop

The history of high schools in Philadelphia is complex. It was fueled by educators’ desire to improve student experiences. But race was also a factor as neighborhood demographics rapidly changed and student enrollment in many schools grew more diverse.

These small high schools were established in Philadelphia in several waves, starting in the 1960s and taking off in the early 2000s under former superintendent Paul Vallas.

Until the 1960s, the vast majority of students in the public system went to neighborhood high schools, although three vocational schools opened in the 1920s and 1930s to teach students trades: Bok, Mastbaum and Dobbins. Two prestigious magnets for the top students, Central High for boys and the Philadelphia High School for Girls, both opened in the 19^th century.

Some of the neighborhood schools, like Olney and Bartram, in their heyday had an enrollment of 4,000 or 5,000 students. They were, for the most part, divided into several distinct “ability” tracks that often served to keep classes largely segregated even as the overall school enrollment became multiracial.

Former mayor Wilson Goode, who is Black and went to Bartram, told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2004 that despite his desire to be in academic classes, his counselor told him he was better suited to an “industrial arts” program within the school. He had to persist to be put into the academic, college-bound track, he said — and even then, despite making the honor roll, his counselor discouraged him from applying to college.

A key moment was in 1963, when the city was undergoing rapid demographic change. That year, district leaders created so-called Motivation programs to handpick what they termed promising but average students in the neighborhood schools and prepare them for college. A frequent effect of this, unintended or not, was to isolate within the program a school’s dwindling number of white students.

In a facilities plan the district released in January, officials proposed closing Southwest Philadelphia's Motivation High School. But now, the plan calls for keeping Motivation High open and combining it with Paul Robeson High School.

What is now Motivation High School was originally the Motivation program at Bartram High. What became Lankenau High School was once the Motivation program at Germantown High School.

Then in 1967, educators created the Parkway program, which they called a “school without walls.” Through Parkway, students could get academic credit for real-world experiences rather than spending most of their time in traditional classrooms.

They also had more control over their learning, creating their own educational plans, working in real jobs, and taking advantage of museums and other cultural and historical resources.

Eventually, three Parkway programs opened — Parkway Center City, Parkway West, and Parkway Northwest. Over the years their education approach became much more traditional, if theme-focused: Parkway Northwest, in Mount Airy, organized around peace and justice studies, for instance. If Watlington’s plan is approved, only the original Parkway will remain; Parkway West would move into Science Leadership Academy at Beeber, and Parkway Northwest into Martin Luther King.

Parkway Northwest focuses on peace and social justice studies. Students and teachers say they worry it will be hard to keep that focus if they are merged into a larger building.

The district’s next wave of new high school creation, in the 1970s, came in response to a 1968 desegregation lawsuit. Philadelphia opened several themed special admissions schools with strict requirements, including the High School for Creative and Performing Arts, commonly known as CAPA, and Carver High School of Engineering & Science. Officials anticipated that these schools would attract a racially diverse student body, which for the most part they did.

The small schools that opened later, starting in the 1980s, are known as “citywide admissions” schools. They also required students to apply, although their standards are more relaxed.

Changes were taking place in large neighborhood high schools too. Before the small schools movement took off, the district attempted to provide more personalized learning for students by investing heavily in “small learning communities” that were autonomous, offered their own courses, and had distinct enrollment, among other features.

But these communities were also designed to counteract the strict ability tracking that was still a feature in neighborhood high schools.

Watlington made key change at Philadelphia’s small schools

Especially in the smaller schools that Watlington called “boutique,” principals historically were able to shape their incoming classes as they saw fit and admit students who may have otherwise fallen short based simply on their grades, attendance and test scores.

However, in a sign of things to come, Watlington and the board put an end to that discretion in 2022, setting up a system that largely removed human judgement and was instead based on an algorithm they said was more fair and equitable. That system, however, made it harder for some schools to fill their spots.

“The new enrollment system was the beginning of the end for these citywide schools,” said one school leader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly. “Everybody’s enrollment for the most part has declined in these schools … there’s no longer any flexibility.” For instance, Motivation’s enrollment dropped from 331 in 2022-23 to 151 this school year.

Others involved in the founding and development of these schools said that even co-location with a larger school will have an impact. And they say that uncertainty about the schools’ future is likely to affect enrollment even more.

Students at Philadelphia's Lankenau Environmental High School say their school's campus, near a nature center and urban garden, make the school special. The district wants to close Lankenau and merge it into Roxborough High School as an honors program.

Joshua Kleinman has worked at the U School, which uses a project-based learning model, since its inception in 2014. But he prefers to see an upside in Watlington’s plan, saying that many of the new small schools have long struggled with inadequate and even inappropriate facilities.

U School leaders have “fiercely advocated for a facility we deserve since opening our doors,” Kleinman said. If Watlington’s $2.8 billion plan led to modernized and specialized school facilities, “it would be one of the most ambitious in the school district’s history.”

But Thomas Gaffey, who helped establish Building 21 in 2014 to help all students “develop their passion” in a small, supportive setting, is more pessimistic.

“You can’t take a program like Parkway and put it within a big comprehensive high school,” he said, “and expect it to stay the same.”

Philadelphia district removes 2 schools from proposed school closure list

2026-02-26T22:00:00+00:00

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The Philadelphia school district no longer plans to close Russell Conwell Middle School and Motivation High School, Superintendent Tony Watlington announced Thursday.

The decision to spare the two schools from proposed closures comes after nearly a month of intense community pushback against the district’s sweeping facilities plan. Watlington has said the plan would help the district provide more resources and opportunities to all students, and would also include investments in schools that remain open.

The changes also follow concerns of some prominent city officials who have so far opposed the plan. The district has also altered the plan to switch the schools some students would relocate to.

But 18 schools — most of which have mounted strong protests against the closure plan — would still close beginning in 2027.

Watlington presented the updated plan to the Board of Education Thursday afternoon. The board will ultimately decide whether that plan goes through, but it’s unclear when members will vote on it.

Watlington said at a press briefing before the board meeting that the changes represent the district’s commitment to listening to community feedback.

“Our community, quite frankly, made some suggestions that had merit,” Watlington said. “The fact that we can’t make all the changes that people across this great city recommended should never mean that we can’t make some of the changes.”

In addition, under the revised plan, Lankenau Environmental Science High School would merge into Walter B. Saul High School as a career and technical education program. That’s a shift from the initial proposal to merge Lankenau into Roxborough High School as an honors program as officials initially proposed. However, the Lankenau building would still close.

Meanwhile, students from Paul Robeson High School would relocate to Motivation, rather than Sayre High School. That means rather than joining a neighborhood high school, current Robeson students would remain at a small, criteria-based school.

Lastly, Lewis Elkin Elementary School would no longer add grades to become a K-8 school. Instead, it would remain a K-4 school and students would attend Conwell after graduating. Conwell would have an honors program that students could apply for through the district’s school selection process.

In total, more than 4,500 Philadelphia students would still have their schools closed in the coming years. The plan has the same price tag of $2.8 billion, which the district says would require extra philanthropic and public funding on top of district funds.

Philadelphia City Council seeks leverage over school closures

Members of Philadelphia’s City Council don’t have any direct say over the closure plan. But that hasn’t stopped them from speaking out about it.

Last week, council members grilled school leaders over the plan. President Kenyatta Johnson said members would not “rubber stamp” the plan, and some members indicated they could withhold funding from the district in the city budget process to back up their views.

Several prominent members rallied in particular support of Conwell Middle School in Kensington. City Council Education Committee Chair Isaiah Thomas previously said he would “never support” a plan that included closing Conwell, a school he attended. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, whose district includes Kensington, said Conwell “should not be on that list.”

When asked about political influence over the plan, Watlington said his team listened to all Philadelphians and “took all that feedback together.”

Watlington said his team heard from Conwell alumni and accounted for feedback that the district should invest more in Kensington, which the district categorizes as socially vulnerable. But he denied that the district played favorites.

“We landed on these recommended changes not reflecting any one voice or sector more than the others,” he added.

Fewer students would switch to neighborhood high schools

When he announced the school closure plan last month, Watlington said one of its major goals was to reinvest in neighborhood high schools. The initial proposal would have closed five criteria-based magnet high schools or citywide admissions high schools with low enrollment. Students at four of those schools would instead attend neighborhood high schools.

But at crowded community meetings, many high school families said they chose small schools for a reason. Some said they would leave the district entirely rather than send their children to larger neighborhood high schools.

Many neighborhood high schools have been in a tough position in Philadelphia, juggling hundreds of students with few resources. Some have a reputation for chaos and violence. School leaders said funneling more students into those schools would enable them to create more opportunities. But now, they seem to be walking back that strategy.

Only one closing school — Parkway Northwest — would still merge into a neighborhood high school. It would become an honors program at Martin Luther King High School, even though many families have said they would not want to send their children there.

“All children in all of our schools are important, and we think they all deserve the very best,” Watlington said. “We also won’t hide from the fact that we heard some feedback from individuals who said that they prefer the smaller, boutique high school experience.”

Pennsylvania’s teaching workforce is in trouble. ‘Strategic staffing’ could change that.

2026-02-23T22:41:50+00:00

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Teaching in Pennsylvania is at a breaking point, according to a new report.

The rate of educator attrition is rising, turnover is disproportionately impacting urban and rural districts, and on the ground teachers are reporting feeling burnt out, overworked, and underprepared.

All of this creates an inhospitable environment for student learning, according to new research from PA Needs Teachers, a statewide coalition led by the Teach Plus advocacy group and the National Center on Education and the Economy.

Their solution is to radically reimagine what it means to teach in Pennsylvania schools. The report’s authors, including Philly teacher Trey Smith, are proposing shifting from a traditional one-teacher-in-front-of-one-classroom approach to something that’s more collaborative that would help students as well as educators.

In the various models they propose, small groups of educators and support staff work together to schedule, plan lessons, give constructive feedback on their teaching, and help each other grow.

New teachers would receive mentorship and guidance, experienced teachers would be compensated and recognized in their schools, and paraprofessionals and tutors would pay extra attention to struggling students.

In practice, a group of 100 students may share a team of six educators who get guidance and support from a “lead teacher.” That would replace a model, for example, of four teachers each responsible for their own separate classroom of 25 students with little feedback on their individual teaching styles.

The report authors call it “strategic staffing.” Smith thinks of it as a teaching team. And schools in Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, are primed for this sort of innovation.

“I really want us to think about, how are we honestly accounting for what teachers know and how they can grow?” said Smith, who teaches at Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy in Southwest Center City. “Teachers are not all the same, so whatever system we design, we can’t treat teachers like widgets or cogs in a big machine.”

Smith said any new teaching model has to “maximize the talent we have,” including teachers with varying levels of experience and classroom management skills.

New teachers with the least classroom experience are often given the most challenging school assignments. Black or Hispanic students and those from low-income families are therefore the least likely to receive the most experienced, qualified teachers in Pennsylvania.

And Philly, which employs less than 20% of the state’s teachers, accounts for 30% of statewide attrition, according to the report.

As a digital literacy teacher, Smith is a specialist. That means when other teachers need coverage, either because they’re absent or trying to find time to plan ahead, he’s often the first to get the call to step in. But what he said he really wants is to be in constant conversation with other teachers to game-plan and get creative about ways lessons can interlock and students can engage with the same ideas across multiple subjects.

“I have no collaborative planning time with my colleagues and my grades because I’m their coverage,” Smith said.

Doylestown middle school teacher Jill Weller-Reilly, another co-author of the report, said if the state wants teachers to stay in the field, schools need to provide educators with opportunities to grow and advance in their careers.

“We don’t lose new teachers because they can’t do the job. We lose them because we don’t help them learn how and set them up for success,” Weller-Reilly said.

According to Teach Plus polling from 2025, 70% of educators nationwide said they “definitely” or “probably” would want their school to adopt such an approach.

The report authors note there are no state-level limits on class size at the K-12 level, and the state does not mandate a specific student-to-teacher ratio. As a local control state, Pennsylvania school districts have a fair amount of autonomy for things like budgeting, teacher time, and compensation. Those factors could make “strategic staffing” easier to implement.

However, union negotiations and limited district resources do mean districts like Philly would have to get buy-in from multiple parties to launch a strategic staffing model.

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg signaled some interest in the idea, saying in an email to Chalkbeat that “districts including ours must be more innovative with resource allocation to improve hiring, retention, and professional support.”

But change can be notoriously hard for educators, administrators, and school communities. And the report’s proposal comes with a cost.

While most strategic staffing models are intended to be budget-neutral after schools have gone through the design process, the Teach Plus advocates said, there are significant up-front costs to getting one of these models off the ground.

Teach Plus wants state lawmakers to establish a grant program and a way to evaluate the effectiveness of Pennsylvania’s programs alongside similar models like North Carolina’s Advanced Teaching Roles program. State evaluations of the North Carolina program are beginning to show promise, with some data demonstrating it helped improve students’ math and science scores and teachers’ perceptions of their jobs. North Carolina’s program costs about $16.5 million to run annually in 17 districts.

Another major hurdle to establishing strategic staffing in classrooms is simple exhaustion with new initiatives. Philadelphia, like other major city school districts, has experimented with innovative teaching and learning models in the past, only to have them fade away or lose funding and attention.

But Smith said if the changes are born from the bottom up, and truly take educators’ ideas into consideration, it could make Philly a prized destination for future teachers.

“I still am hopeful if the approach is such that it really honors what teachers know and think, that’s how the model can work,” he said.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Appeals court: Philadelphia magnet school admissions policies may be discriminatory

2026-02-03T21:35:38+00:00

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A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the Philadelphia school district’s admissions policy for selective high schools could have had the “purpose and effect of discriminating on the basis of race.”

The ruling revives Sargent v. School District of Philadelphia, a lawsuit that alleges the district’s controversial selective admissions policy is unconstitutional because it favored some races over others. A district court judge had previously dismissed the case. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision cites the Students for Fair Admissions Supreme Court case that ended the use of race-based preferences in college admissions to send the case back to the district court for a trial.

The decision reopens questions about what methods, if any, Philadelphia school leaders can use to create more diversity in the district’s elite high schools, which historically have been disproportionately white and Asian American.

It also bolsters a long-running campaign by conservative legal activists to end the use of race-neutral factors in K-12 admissions policies. School districts have been barred from using race as a factor in school admissions and enrollment decisions for nearly two decades, but courts have generally held that using race-neutral factors, such as geography or income, to promote diversity are allowed. The Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to take up cases that could upset that status quo, but conservative legal groups continue to bring challenges, such as the Philadelphia lawsuit.

In 2021, the Philadelphia school district overhauled its admissions process for magnet high schools, which are widely considered to be the city’s most desirable public high schools. Unlike neighborhood high schools, students must apply to magnet schools and not all are accepted. Before the admissions process changed, principals of magnet schools had discretion over which students they admitted.

The new policy created a lottery system that prioritized students from certain ZIP codes and also required students to meet higher academic and attendance standards. School leaders at the time said the changes were part of an effort to make the school district an “antiracist institution.”

In its ruling, the federal appeals court said the new policy increased Black and Hispanic students’ chances of admission to some of the city’s top magnet schools, including Palumbo, Carver, Central, and Masterman, while decreasing Asian American and white students’ chances.

A school district spokesperson said Tuesday that the district does not comment on pending litigation.

Before the change, white students had long been overrepresented at Central and Masterman high schools, two of the city’s top schools. More recently, so had Asian American students. In 2020, some Black students at Central urged the district to overhaul its admissions policies to address the declining percentage of Black students admitted to the school.

Some parents and students immediately pushed back against the new system, which they said prevented some high-achieving students from accessing top schools.

Three parents whose children did not get into their top-choice school under the new policy sued with support from America First Legal Foundation, a conservative nonprofit law firm. The parents have children who are Black, white, and biracial. They alleged that because students from predominantly Black and Hispanic ZIP codes who met admissions criteria had an automatic in, the policy had a discriminatory effect.

In sending the case back to the lower court, the appeals court justices noted that top district officials, including then-Superintendent William Hite, had openly discussed wanting to address racial disparities, especially in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. That did not necessarily mean the policy was discriminatory, but it requires the lower court to more fully consider those arguments, the justices wrote.

America First Legal was founded by Stephen Miller, a top advisor to President Donald Trump. Trump has used executive orders to ban analyses that examine disproportionate impacts in considering whether policies violate civil rights, and his Education Department has used a similar legal theory to pressure school districts to end diversity policies that rely on race-neutral factors.

Since Sargent was originally filed, the district has made some changes to the admissions process, including allowing students to rank multiple choices and giving students who attended middle schools attached to selective high schools priority access to those schools as well. It has kept priority ZIP codes, but has made some changes to which ones are included.

Magnet school admissions policies contested across the country

Many school districts don’t have a network of selective admissions high schools like Philadelphia or New York do. However, the districts that do have garnered legal scrutiny. As school districts have tried different tactics to diversify these schools, conservative legal groups, often working with Asian American parents, have challenged changes to admissions policies they see as proxies for race in Boston, New York, and Fairfax County, Virginia.

Justin Driver, a professor of constitutional law with Yale Law School, said the Supreme Court may not necessarily get involved in this case, with the “ball in the Philadelphia School District’s court.” The district could change its policies rather than appeal an unfavorable ruling, and even if it did, the Supreme Court might not agree to take the case.

“They could decline to do so because of what lawyers refer to as percolation,” he said. “We want to see how other courts are going to wrestle with these issues. But I do think that from a preliminary view, the facts of this case are similar to other cases.”

As in the case of other admissions policies challenged, “George Floyd’s death was sort of the cataclysmic event that made them rethink the policy here,” Driver said.

Erin Wilcox, a senior attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, has represented plaintiffs in similar cases, including Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. In that case, Pacific Legal argued against an admissions process that awarded additional points to students from underrepresented schools or from low-income families.

The Supreme Court declined to hear that case in 2024. But Wilcox said she believes that “eventually the court will grapple with this issue,” now with a split of opinion between circuit courts on this issue.

Wilcox said Supreme Court justices dissenting on these cases have written some “pretty fiery” dissenting opinions.

For example, Justice Samuel Alito wrote of the Fairfax case: “The Court’s willingness to swallow the aberrant decision below is hard to understand. We should wipe the decision off the books.”

“Maybe ... some justices putting that out there so forcefully, which is not something they do all that often, might be having an impact on some of the appellate court judges across the country,” Wilcox said.

Wilcox said the plaintiffs she’s represented have fought to get into magnet schools in pursuit of a rigorous education.

“In a lot of cases, students have been preparing or trying to go to these schools for years,” she said.

Derek Black, a constitutional law expert with the University of South Carolina, said he believes just because administrators may have had a goal of increasing racial parity in enrollment doesn’t mean the resulting admissions policy is discriminatory. Nor, he said, should that goal alone trigger the heightened judicial standard that’s applied to policies that consider race.

“As I read the facts, no, not a single student was admitted based upon his or her race,” he said. “That means it’s race-neutral.”

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

Here’s how to give feedback on Philadelphia’s school closure proposal

2026-01-30T21:32:20+00:00

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Do you have thoughts on the Philadelphia school district’s proposal to close 20 schools? School leaders say they want to hear from you.

The district’s school closure plan, which officials released last week, would result in nearly 5,000 students having their schools closed and several others schools being relocated or co-located to other buildings.

Superintendent Tony Watlington has said the plan will result in better educational opportunities for students, including more access to AP classes, more pre-kindergarten seats, and more capacity in some of the district’s most-desirable schools. It would also help move students out of deteriorating buildings.

But Watlington has not yet officially presented that plan — which has quickly become controversial — to the Board of Education, which will ultimately decide which schools close. Before he does so, district leaders have said they want to meet with students, educators, families, and community members connected with each school they want to close.

The district plans to host virtual and in-person community meetings with each school it proposes closing. Meetings will begin on Feb. 2 and go until Feb. 21.

Two district-wide town halls are planned for President’s Day, Feb. 16.

Watlington has said he will formally share the plan with the board on Feb. 26.

Several board members said during their meeting Thursday that they plan to attend some of the meetings and hope others do as well. “The community has a right to speak out,” said board member Cheryl Harper.

Anyone can register for the community meetings, including virtual options, on the district’s website.

Here’s where and when they’ll be:

Week 1 — Monday, Feb. 2 to Saturday, Feb. 7

Feb. 2: Russell Conwell Middle School, 4:30 to 6:00 p.m, Virtual

Feb. 2: Warren G. Harding Middle School, 4:30 to 6:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 2: Robert Morris Middle School, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 2: Paul Robeson High School, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 3: General Louis Wagner Elementary, 4:30 to 6:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 3: John Welsh Elementary, 4:30 to 6:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 3: Penn Treaty High School, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 3 Lankenau High School, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 4: Parkway NW High School, 6200 Crittenden St., 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 4: Lankenau High School, 201 Spring Lane, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 5: Russell Conwell Middle, 1849 E. Clearfield St., 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 5: AMY at Northwest, 6000 Ridge Ave., 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 6: Laura Waring Elementary, 8:30 to 10:00 a.m., Virtual

Feb. 6: Overbrook Elementary School, 8:30 to 10:00 a.m., Virtual

Feb. 7: Blankenburg Elementary, 4600 W. Girard Ave., 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., In-Person

Feb. 7: William T. Tilden Middle School, 6601 Elmwood Ave., 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., In-Person

Feb. 7: Paul Robeson High School, 4125 Ludlow St., 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 7: Parkway West High School, 4725 Fairmont Ave #2, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., In-Person

Week 2 — Monday, Feb. 9 to Thursday, Feb. 12

Feb. 9: Blankenburg Elementary School, 4:30 to 6:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 9: Fitler Academics Plus Elementary School, 4:30 to 6:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 9: James R. Ludlow Elementary, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 9: Motivation High School, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 10: John B. Stetson Middle, 4:30 to 6:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 10: William T. Tilden Middle, 4:30 to 6:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 10: Parkway West High School, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 10: Parkway NW High School, 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 11: Pennypacker Elementary School, 1858 Washington Lane, 4:00 to 6:00 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 11: Motivation High School, 5900 Baltimore Ave., 5:30 to 7:00 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 12: Penn Treaty High School, 600 E. Thompson St., 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 12: John B. Stetson Middle, 3200 B St., 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., In-Person

Week 3 — Monday, Feb. 16 (President’s Day) to Saturday, Feb. 21

Feb. 16: Community-wide Town Hall, 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., Location TBD

Feb. 16: Community-wide Town Hall, 4:30 to 6:00 p.m., Virtual

Feb. 18: General Louis Wagner Elementary, 1701 W. Chelten Ave., 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 18: John Welsh Elementary, 2331 N. 4th St., 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 19: Overbrook Elementary School, 2032 N. 62nd St., 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 19: James R. Ludlow Elementary School, 550 Master St., 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 20: Pennypacker Elementary, 8:30 to 10:00 a.m., Virtual

Feb. 20: Academy for the Middle Years at NW, 8:30 to 10:00 a.m., Virtual

Feb. 21: Laura Waring Elementary School, 1801 Green St., 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., In-Person

Feb. 21: Fitler Academics Plus Elementary, 140 W Seymour St., 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., In-Person

Feb. 21: Warren G. Harding Middle School, 2000 Wakeling St., 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., In-Person

Feb. 21: Robert Morris Middle School, 2600 W Thompson St., 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., In-Person

Philadelphia parents resist district’s plans to close 2 Kensington middle schools

2026-01-28T20:10:06+00:00

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This story was originally published in the Kensington Voice.

Ashley Jenkins plans to send her 2-year-old daughter to Conwell Middle School in Kensington. Two of her sons graduated from the school, and another is in sixth grade.

“It’s a safe haven,” Jenkins said. “Conwell is not only a school to us. The teachers are their aunts and uncles … I can’t imagine losing Conwell.”

But that plan may now be upended.

The School District of Philadelphia announced on Jan. 22 that Conwell and Stetson middle schools are among 20 schools it plans to close starting in 2027. The timeline for closures remains unclear. Some schools will phase out over several years, while others will close more quickly.

The district also plans to expand Lewis Elkin and William Cramp elementary schools into K-8 schools. Conwell students would be reassigned to AMY at James Martin, on East Ontario and Richmond streets. Stetson students would be phased into Elkin and Cramp. Both middle school buildings would be converted into district swing spaces.

The proposal is part of the district’s long-awaited reorganization plan, driven by declining citywide enrollment and building issues, including asbestos and poor ventilation.

The proposal has drawn opposition from City Council members, parents, alumni, and educators, who see the schools as integral resource hubs and safe spaces in their communities.

Conwell Middle School graduates and brothers Syncere Clark Williams and Rayneal Woods Clark with brother and current Conwell student Yahshua Woods and younger sister Lailah Hall at Rayneal's high school prom in 2025.

Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, who serves on the City Council’s Education Committee and whose district includes both middle schools, said the announcement caught her by surprise.

To many community members, Lozada said, Conwell is more than school.

“They are part of a family,” she said. “Conwell should not be on that list.”

Conwell operates a food pantry twice a week. Her office just delivered a freezer to the school last week.

The district has cited underenrollment as a reason for the closures, according to Lozada. Districtwide enrollment has declined by about 17,000 students over the past decade. The drop has been steeper in Kensington: Enrollment at Conwell fell from 176 students in 2022 to 109 in 2025 — a 38% decrease.

While Conwell is a magnet school, more than half of its students live in the surrounding neighborhood.

“The reality is that it’s underenrolled because of the neighborhood,” Lozada said. “It’s a public safety issue. It’s not because successful academic learning is not happening there, or that the teachers are not coming anymore, or that the building is falling apart. It’s more about what’s happening on the outside. So, instead of responding and making the neighborhood safer, the [students, teachers, and faculty] are being compromised and almost punished.”

Santysha McDuffie said Conwell has supported her family year after year. She picks up Thanksgiving turkeys and winter coats from the school, where her kids are in sixth and eighth grade.

“Whenever we’re having issues, the school is always there to help,” McDuffie said.

Santysha McDuffie's daughter Madison sitting in the Conwell Middle School library, where McDuffie said she likes to spend time.

McDuffie lives about a 15-minute drive from Conwell and chose the school over other options after researching and receiving a recommendation from a friend for her son, Lawrence.

“He’s a smart boy, and he needed a school that was going to keep him on his toes,” said McDuffie, adding that her son has been challenged because he has been assigned high school-level work.

“He’s excelling in it, and he loves it,” she said.

McDuffie’s daughter, Madison, is also thriving.

“I know she’s safe there,” McDuffie said. “She feels more like herself. She’s opening up.”

Recent investments raise questions about school reassignment

The district’s proposal to close Conwell comes after hundreds of thousands of dollars were invested in the school in recent years, raising questions about how the closure aligns with those expenditures.

Conwell was designated $333,333 in opioid settlement funds, one of six Kensington schools to receive money from lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and distributors. As of December 2024, about $109,950 of those funds had been allocated for science equipment, including 3D printers, and for after-school programs like the Conwell Media Team. The media lab itself is a recent development. In 2023, the media lab teacher crowdfunded for gear.

Additional opioid funds were designated for a therapeutic space, student support amenities, and schoolyard improvements, including space for an outdoor farming program, and a washer and dryer for students’ clothes.

Separately, Principal Erica Green used a $20,000 Lindback Award she received in 2022 to upgrade the school’s science lab and expand STEAM programming.

Meanwhile, the school opened a new turf soccer field in 2024.

The proposed reassignment of Conwell students to AMY at James Martin also raises questions about how the district is applying its own school rankings, which are part of its decision-making process. The district ranked the building, programming, capacity, and neighborhood vulnerability for every school it operates in the city.

According to district data, AMY’s building is rated poor and its programming unsatisfactory. Conwell received higher rankings in both categories, with its building and programming classified as fair.

Superintendent Tony Watlington said during a press conference last week that no students would be moved into buildings rated poor or unsatisfactory. He also said that 90% of students would be reassigned to schools with comparable or better academic outcomes.

The district’s plan also calls for modernizing 159 school buildings, but it has not provided details on how those upgrades would affect schools slated to remain open, including AMY.

The district did not respond to a request for comment regarding this reassignment in time for publication.

Stetson Middle School is ‘neighborhood fixture’ in Philly

A majority of Stetson Middle School students live in the surrounding neighborhood. Stetson’s enrollment has declined since the district contentiously revoked the school’s charter status in 2022, after a years-long battle between the Philadelphia Board of Education, families, and the charter company, ASPIRA. Enrollment fell from 616 students that year to 511 in 2025 — a 17% decrease.

Since the district’s announcement, a petition has launched in opposition to Stetson’s proposed closure and has over 520 signatures.

The petition raises concerns about potential overcrowding at Elkin and Cramp elementary schools, where Stetson students would be reassigned. The district has labeled both schools as underutilized.

“Schools like Stetson serve as community hubs where families connect,” the petition states. “This loss could fragment our closely-knit community and erode social ties.”

Tony Rocco, who taught full time at Stetson for nine years before retiring in 2019, teaches an after-school photography class there twice a week.

“Stetson has become a fixture in the neighborhood,” Rocco said.

While the school has had its challenges, Rocco said he has watched generations of families pass through, and has seen students like Benny Martinez-Russi flourish.

Martinez-Russi, 19, graduated from Stetson and is now a first-year student at Temple University on a full academic scholarship.

“If I drive past the area, I’m gonna feel nostalgia,” Martinez-Russi said.

He was quiet when he started there, but teachers, including Rocco, whom he described as a father figure, helped him warm up.

“I see the good work that gets done in that school every day and the difference that every teacher tries to make for their kids,” Rocco said. “It breaks my heart to see Stetson and the parents, potentially again, having to go through yet another bunch of changes.”

Photography teacher Tony Rocco, left, with Benny Martinez-Ruzzi, middle, a Stetson Middle School alumnus who's now a Temple University student.

District data shows Stetson’s building faces bigger structural challenges than Conwell’s. Stetson’s building was rated unsatisfactory, with a score of 41%, and its programming received a score of 25%. The neighborhood’s vulnerability score was flagged as “high risk.”

The district defines high neighborhood vulnerability as places with many social and economic challenges, including those that may have experienced school closures in the past.

A state hearing officer’s report found that ASPIRA made progress improving Stetson’s climate but fell short on academic and financial promises. A charter appeal board voted 4-1 to revoke the school’s charter status in 2022, about three years after the school board voted to not renew ASPIRA’s contracts.

“I just hope that they’re thinking through, as much as possible, about the decisions that they make,” Rocco said. “Do you have a better plan for Stetson, or is this something that is just dollars and cents in a spreadsheet, where you’re trying to figure out how to save money? Because those are my kids.”

In Norris Square, the district plans to close John Welsh Elementary. The district rated the building as poor.

Under the proposal, Welsh students would be reassigned to John Hartranft and William McKinley elementary schools. The plan is to modernize and repurpose the Welsh building into a year-round high school.

In Frankford, the district wants to close Warren G. Harding Middle School. The James J. Sullivan School, John Marshall School, Henry W. Lawton School, and Laura H. Carnell School would expand, with Sullivan moving into the Harding building.

In Fishtown, Penn Treaty High School would also close.

Councilmember Jeffrey Young, whose district includes Penn Treaty, said the district told him Penn Treaty students would be phased into a high school in the Kensington catchment area. William Bodine High School would move into Penn Treaty’s building to expand capacity.

What’s next for the proposed Philadelphia school closures?

Education Committee Chair Isaiah Thomas will meet with every council member to discuss proposed closures and community needs, Lozada said.

Then, she said the education committee will review each council member’s priorities and bring them to the school board and the district.

Lozada said she will host community meetings to gather feedback. The district has also scheduled community engagement sessions for every school slated for closure throughout February.

“I would want none of them to close, but if we have to close them — if we can’t get to a point where we can’t save them — then I want the transition to be as easy and as safe as possible, not just for our children, but for our teachers,” Lozada said.

According to the district, teachers and staff affected by the plan should retain their jobs, and that principals in “good standing” would also be retained.

The district’s recommendations will be presented to the Philadelphia Board of Education on Feb. 26.

“Any changes in information that we have shared will be provided at that time,” said district spokesperson Monique Braxton in response to a request for comment.

The school board must approve the final plan and may make changes.

Philadelphia will have another remote learning day Wednesday

2026-01-27T22:07:07+00:00

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Philadelphia district students will have another remote learning day Wednesday, district officials announced Tuesday afternoon.

The district’s early childhood centers and central office will also operate remotely. All after-school programs and professional development sessions scheduled for Wednesday are also canceled.

Wednesday will be the third school day where students don’t attend class in their school buildings following a severe snowstorm over the weekend. Students had a full snow day Monday and a remote learning day Tuesday due to the storm.

Philly students are scheduled to be dismissed three hours early on Thursday and Friday this week for report card conferences.

Some other cities pummeled by the storm have already re-opened schools. New York City’s schools were open Tuesday following a remote learning day Monday.

But other districts are opting to keep class remote. Pittsburgh will also have a remote learning day Wednesday, as will Baltimore.

City officials said Tuesday that they are working to plow streets and clean up from the storm, which dropped more than nine inches of snow on the city. The city lifted its snow emergency status on Tuesday morning.

Philadelphia district schools will have a snow day Monday

2026-01-23T20:54:18+00:00

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Philadelphia’s district schools and many charter schools will have a snow day Monday in anticipation of a major snowstorm hitting the city, school officials announced Friday.

If weather requires schools to remain closed after Monday, district students will participate in remote learning and employees will work remotely, officials said in a statement.

The district’s early childhood centers and central office will also be closed Monday. Some charter schools have also announced they will close, including all Mastery network schools and YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School.

All parochial schools under the Archdiocese of Philadelphia will be closed and will use “flexible instruction” on Monday.

The district allotted one extra day in the 2025-26 school year calendar beyond the state’s requirement for 180 instructional days, which is why the district is able to give students the day off, district officials said.

“While we work to the greatest extent possible to keep schools open for in-person learning to accelerate student achievement, we also consider the staff members who are commuting from across the region and keep the safety of students and staff as our top priority,” Superintendent Tony Watlington said in a statement. “We encourage our families and staff members to safely enjoy this day off.”

The National Weather Service is predicting the area will get eight to 12 inches of snow from Saturday night through Monday morning.

Find updates about snow-related closures at the district’s website and on the district’s Facebook page.

Philadelphia opens new Thomas Holme School, adding seats in the overcrowded Northeast

2025-12-16T22:19:07+00:00

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Philadelphia school officials unveiled a new building for Thomas Holme School Tuesday, creating more space for Northeast Philly’s growing student population as the district plans for school closures and other big facilities changes.

The new building has one of the largest capacities of all district elementary and middle schools, with space for more than 1,000 students from pre-K to eighth grade. It replaces the previous Holme school, which was built in the 1950s and had a capacity of 795 students, according to district data.

Holme’s enrollment, which is now at just over 800 students, has crept up steadily over the past several years as the population in the city’s Northeast neighborhoods has ballooned. Elsewhere in the city, enrollment has fallen over the past decade.

The nearly $90 million project, built on the previous building’s footprint, is meant to provide more space and better facilities to Holme students, who have spent the past two and a half years learning in a temporary swing space at Austin Meehan School, a 10-minute drive away. Along with updated classrooms and learning spaces, the 130,000-square-foot building includes music rooms, a dance studio, a new gym, and a cafeteria.

“This building represents our commitment to delivering the learning environments our students deserve: safe, modern, healthy, and inspiring,” said Board of Education President Reginald Streater at the Tuesday ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The building — one of several new or updated schools unveiled this year — will open as the district pursues a facilities planning process that officials say will lead to closing and colocating some schools, along with modernizing and repurposing others.

The new Thomas Holme School includes a dance studio and several music rooms.

But district officials have not yet shared which schools will be closed, colocated, or otherwise affected, and they have delayed the timeline for the process.

Dozens of Philadelphia schools have hundreds of empty seats, while others, especially in the Northeast, are overcrowded. Families and teachers in the Northeast have complained that overcrowding has stretched educators thin and left students without support. The new building may help alleviate some of those concerns.

“They definitely took into consideration the fact that this is a growing community,” said April Tomarelli, an educational facilities planner for the district. “Right now, this will definitely meet the needs of the community.”

Though Holme students gave feedback on the building’s design plans, they have yet to see inside the new building. The school expects to move into the new space in January.

Holme Principal Micah Winterstein said he looks forward to seeing students’ faces when they experience their first day at the new school.

“The space they walk into will say how much we value them,” said Winterstein. “I think every kid deserves a space like this, but I’m so excited for our kids to walk in and know that this is theirs.”

Philadelphia eyes providing more help for 10th graders to boost graduation rates

2025-12-12T20:55:32+00:00

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To boost graduation rates, Philadelphia school leaders say they are looking to expand a key early high school support program to include 10th graders.

This comes after a district analysis released last month found that 97% of students considered “firmly on track” at the end of 10th grade graduated within four years. Students are considered on track based on the number of credits they earn.

The district first began monitoring whether ninth graders were on track to graduation in 2017. It partnered with longtime dropout prevention group Philadelphia Academies Inc. to launch initiatives meant to reduce ninth grade dropout rates and support freshmen in more than two dozen district high schools. The moves are backed by research that shows a strong relationship between the number of credits students have by the end of ninth grade and whether they’ll graduate within four years.

But the intense level of support, attention, and resources that comes with the ninth grade on track program doesn’t follow students to their sophomore year, said Aja Holden, the district’s executive director of the Office of Postsecondary Readiness. Holden said her team was hearing from young people that when they left ninth grade, they were asking “what about us?’”

The work to help more students stay on track to graduate dovetails with the Philadelphia district’s aim to improve the district’s four-year graduation rate and reduce the number of students dropping out. During the 2023-24 school year, the most recent year of available data, nearly 16% of students did not graduate within four years — an improvement from previous years, but still higher than the statewide rate. The number of students in grades 7-12 who dropped out of the district was nearing 4,000 in 2021-22 but has since fallen to 1,680 in 2024-25, according to district data.

Holden said the district is still exploring the possibility of an expansion to 10th grade, including what it would require in terms of resources and staff. The ninth grade on track program is funded through 2027 with $2.6 million of district money and $8 million from the Neubauer Family Foundation. (Chalkbeat receives funding from the Neubauer Family Foundation.)

“Do I believe it will happen? Yes.” Holden said. “Do I have an answer about quite when? No, not yet.”

The new analysis indicates some young people were falling back off track after ninth grade, and that recovery was rare for those who were behind when they started 10th grade. Around 91% of students who were off track at the end of 9th grade remained off track at the end of 10th grade.

Even among 10th graders with excellent attendance, only 14% who were off track regained on-track status, showing how difficult it is for students to recover from being behind.

Students considered off track include those who may be missing a single requirement or several requirements. The more credits a student has missed by the end of 10th grade, the less likely they were to graduate within four years, the district’s analysis found.

The new analysis also underscores how influential ninth grade is for students. Around 80% of students who completed enough credits by the end of ninth grade to be considered on track to graduate stayed on track at the end of 10th grade.

But Holden said it also created a sense of urgency for her and her team to think about how to better support 10th graders too.

For Holden, high school success is more than just credits and grades. She said having a meaningful high school experience, full of good memories, strong relationships, and connections that can help students succeed after they leave the district is paramount.

“I need all of the students of Philadelphia, all the students in the district, all of our tens of thousands of high schoolers, to make it from start to finish,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to be left behind.”

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia district will consider transferring vacant school buildings to the city

2025-12-11T23:10:22+00:00

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Some long-vacant Philadelphia school buildings might be transferred to the city for redevelopment as potential housing units in the near future.

The Board of Education approved a resolution Thursday granting the district the ability to negotiate with the city to sell or otherwise transfer some vacant buildings for housing or other purposes that benefit the community

The resolution passed 6-2, but several board members said they felt strongly that the district should not grant the city any sort of exclusivity or claim on vacant properties without exploring other development opportunities.

Board President Reginald Streater stressed at the meeting that the resolution does not immediately transfer any school buildings to the city but is the first step in a process.

“I would be derelict in my duty if I didn’t explore this as a mechanism,” Streater said.

The approval also is a political move signaling that the board — which is mayorally appointed — is aligned with Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration.

Parker has made building and restoring some 30,000 housing units a core part of her agenda and has publicly expressed her interest in using empty school buildings for that purpose.

Philadelphians, elected leaders, and even a charter school have renewed their focus on the district’s empty buildings after police found 23-year-old Mount Airy woman Kada Scott’s body buried in the woods behind the Ada H. H. Lewis Middle School building, which has sat empty and blighted since 2008.

The district has 20 vacant buildings valued at an estimated $80 million, according to the city’s office of property assessment, that would be considered for transfer under Thursday’s resolution. According to the resolution text, the district would still need to consider outstanding bond obligations, legal processes, or potential revenue impact before making any formal agreement with the city.

Thursday’s resolution kicks off the process of exploring the possibility of a transfer, but any agreements to exchange a school building would need to go before the board for a vote, according to the resolution.

Board member ChauWing Lam, who voted against the resolution, said Thursday she wasn’t sure the document was necessary to have those exploratory conversations with the city. She said she was concerned that the district and board would be foregoing and limiting the board’s ability to consider other offers outside of Parker’s administration by adopting the resolution.

The resolution frames any potential transfers as a cost-saving measure for the district, which is facing a budget deficit and spends money and staff hours on the upkeep of vacant school buildings. The resolution says those buildings are unused and not needed for education and the resources they require could be better spent on classroom needs.

Board member Wanda Novalés said Thursday any proposal brought to the board regarding the sale or transfer of any district-owned buildings should be financially beneficial for the district because the properties “belong to our students.”

Streater said the resolution only covers currently vacant buildings and would not apply to any future schools closed through the district’s ongoing facilities planning process.

A list of schools targeted for closure, co-location, renovation, or reuse is expected in the next few months.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org

Philadelphia’s tutoring program shows promise but faces familiar obstacle: expanding it effectively

2025-12-09T22:02:16+00:00

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In a third floor classroom at Russell Conwell Middle School in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, brightly colored math posters hang from the walls and a lengthy description of equivalent ratios covers the white board.

This is what Principal Erica Green calls the HIT classroom — short for high-impact tutoring — where students go for extra help multiple times a week. Around a quarter of the school’s sixth, seventh, and eighth graders participate, Green said.

“They’re getting what they need right here at school to boost their learning and math confidence,” said Green. “We’re seeing more student discourse in the classroom, conversations, them challenging and debating with one another.”

Building students’ math comfort and skills is a major aim of the district’s high-impact tutoring program, which provides support to select students integrated into the school day. The district has hired 65 part-time tutors and plans to spend $6.4 million on tutoring programs from two providers, Saga and Littera, over three years to make a real difference for Philadelphia students, who for decades have lagged far behind average statewide scores on annual tests.

At one point, high-impact tutoring, also known as high-dosage tutoring, looked like one of the most effective academic interventions. One analysis of nearly 100 studies on tutoring programs from 2020 found tutoring programs had “consistent and substantial positive impacts.” The Biden administration subsequently urged schools to invest in high-dosage tutoring, and many did.

But in recent months, confidence in tutoring’s promise has deflated somewhat. A recent University of Chicago study of large-scale tutoring programs found that on average, tutoring programs during the 2023-24 school year only resulted in one or two months of extra learning for students. The researchers found that at many schools, logistical hurdles led to students receiving far less tutoring than what they would need to reap the full benefits.

“We see actually in the data that tutoring is effective,” said John Wolf, associate director for the University of Chicago Education Lab, which conducted the recent study. “It’s just that you need enough time to get at it.”

These are the lessons Philadelphia is trying to heed as it invests more in tutoring and tries to overcome the barriers that other districts have confronted: scheduling, tutoring training, and aligning tutoring content with curriculum.

Philadelphia officials say they’re following the research, scheduling at least 90 minutes of tutoring per week, and tracking participation through its tutoring providers.

“We’re looking for results,” said Nyshawana Francis-Thompson, the district’s chief of curriculum and instruction. “We are really looking for this to make a significant impact on student achievement.”

Posters decorate the tutoring classroom at Russell Conwell Middle School.

So far, the district has seen some promising outcomes. Last school year, nearly half of students that received high-impact tutoring showed a faster rate of progress on district benchmark tests compared with the previous year. That aligns with Superintendent Tony Watlington’s goal of making the district the “fastest-improving large, urban school district in the country.”

But still, only around 600 students at 20 schools get high-impact tutoring — a drop in the bucket for the 120,000-student district. And at some schools with tutoring programs, like Conwell, state test scores continue to decline even though teachers and students say the program is useful.

Francis-Thompson said she wants the district to expand high-impact tutoring to more schools and students. But to do so, it’ll have to train up enough tutors, pay for larger contracts with tutoring program providers, and overcome other challenges.

“There’s a need for additional funding to support this type of work and any type of expansion,” said Francis-Thompson.

Teachers say tutoring boosts learning, but test scores lag

Conwell Middle School selects students for tutoring based largely on their teachers’ recommendations and test scores. It also considers whether a parent or a student displays interest in the program, said Green, the principal.

The school’s tutoring setup largely follows the research, scheduling kids for a total of around 120 minutes of math tutoring each week. Most days except Fridays, students go to tutoring for the last 30 minutes of their daily math block, after instructional time is over.

Tutors aren’t solely focused on helping kids with homework or redoing class assignments. Instead, in small groups of three or four students, they teach content that builds on what the students have already learned in class. They’re also in touch with the school’s math teachers to make sure the tutoring curriculum follows what’s happening in class.

Tutor Rebecca Resch said she has heard from tutors at other schools that communication between tutors, teachers, and administrators within some buildings can be tricky. But at Conwell, Resch said, “they want us here, they want us to help out.”

Conwell math teacher Audrey Golub has seen the positive impact in class. At times, students have told her they’re familiar with a concept she’s teaching because they’ve learned about it already in tutoring.

“That’s the most amazing thing,” she said. “Because if they’re recognizing the work we do in [class], because they’re being supported by tutoring, then we are working together, hand in hand, to make and reach that achievement.”

Teachers at Conwell Middle School say the school's high-impact tutoring program has made students more confident in math class.

Still, tutoring is no magic bullet. Data that Green shared from the school’s progress screeners that take place during the year, called Star Assessments, show that over the course of last school year, the first full year of the tutoring program, Conwell students’ math scores improved.

But over the last two years, the percentage of Conwell students scoring proficient on state tests has declined. Last year, only 8% of students achieved proficient scores on the state math test. Around a quarter of the district’s students in grades K-8 achieved proficient scores.

Beyond test scores, Conwell teachers said they’ve witnessed other benefits of the program.

“I’m seeing that they seem more enthusiastic, especially some of them that I could tell already had fears about math,” said math teacher Hytolia Branch. “They’re starting to become more comfortable.”

How should Philadelphia handle school closures? Here’s what parents, educators, and others say.

2025-11-05T21:43:45+00:00

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Philadelphia school officials say they want more feedback before they announce which schools will close in the coming years — and educators, families, and other city residents hope they plan to listen.

At an event Chalkbeat hosted in partnership with Germantown Info Hub on Saturday, people reflected on the last mass school closures in 2013, when the district shuttered 23 schools despite community protests. Many said those closures left deep scars across neighborhoods, fractured trust between residents and the district, and left neighborhoods without key community spaces.

In Germantown specifically, the district closed the nearly 100-year-old Germantown High School. That experience shows what could go wrong — and what could be improved — this time around, residents said.

School officials have promised this upcoming round of closures will be different from what happened in 2013 — in large part, they say, because robust community engagement will inform the process.

Already, the district has assembled advisory groups and hosted community engagement sessions that school leaders say will inform the facilities planning process. On Tuesday, district officials said they were delaying a long-awaited facilities plan announcement to conduct a districtwide survey to gather more feedback.

Still, some residents of Germantown and other Philly neighborhoods said on Saturday they remain skeptical about how the district will factor community feedback into its ultimate recommendations.

But, they said, if the district genuinely intends to listen, they have lots of feedback to share. Here’s what some of the more than 20 people who attended Chalkbeat and Germantown Info Hub’s event said the district should keep in mind.

Philadelphians urge district to continue meaningful community engagement

Several Germantown residents said that even though the district has made efforts to solicit feedback, it must do much more to ensure families feel like their perspectives are considered in the process.

Janice Tosto, who moved to Germantown seven years ago, said families at the schools the district wants to close “have to be front and center in all of this.” That’s why, she said, it’s essential that the district stay in touch with families at schools affected by closures.

“They need to be prepared to have conversations with people,” said Tosto. “And to check in with people to see how they can be supportive of people who are really dealing with that trauma.”

Some people said it seems like many Philadelphians still don’t know closures are coming — or if their schools will be affected.

“People need to ask, ‘Which schools are you closing in my neighborhood?” said Cecelia Thompson, a former member of the Board of Education. “Stop being sketchy with it.”

Philadelphia residents said they want district leaders to give serious weight to community feedback in their school closure plan.

Advocates worry that even language the district is using to describe what’s happening, like the term “facilities planning process,” does not make it clear that school closures are coming.

“Nobody knows what it is,” said Ilene Poses, a member of the advocacy group Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, which opposes the closures. “They all think it’s going to be about making the schools environmentally better, less toxic.”

Fate of closed schools concerns many Philadelphia residents

District officials have said the aim of the process is to create better educational environments for students, with more access to programming like AP classes and extracurriculars. Superintendent Tony Watlington has said that to do so, the district needs to reduce the number of empty seats and close some schools.

But Watlington and other school officials have shared very little information about what would happen to schools after they close.

Longtime Germantown resident Jill Saull was involved in community pushback against the closure of Germantown High School in 2013. As part of the Philadelphia School Closings Photo Collective, she documented that school and Fulton Elementary to capture what the schools looked like before they shut down.

She said after the school board voted to shutter Germantown High School, she and other neighborhood residents organized to propose alternatives for what the building could become.

One idea, she said, was to turn part of the building into a small career and technical education program for hospitality and restaurant management. Another part of the building would be turned into a boutique hotel that students would help run and attract more visitors to Germantown.

At first, Saull said she remembers the school board and the developers who ultimately bought the building seemed interested in the community’s feedback and ideas. At one community meeting about the future of the school property, she said, more than 400 people showed up.

But ultimately, the developers nixed each idea from local residents. The building is now largely market-rate apartments.

“There was a moment where we did feel we came together … we were able to communicate,” said Saull. “But as the process went on, things kind of fell apart.”

At community engagement meetings over the summer, district officials said all options remain on the table for closed school buildings. But some worry the district will prioritize selling the facilities for top dollar instead of what local neighborhoods want.

Facilities planning process seems rushed, some say

Some advocates have welcomed the district’s delay for announcing the facilities plan. To them, it indicates the district is taking more time to consider what Philadelphians want from schools.

But others want the district to release a draft list of schools to close, so that Philadelphians can know what’s at stake and provide feedback that could make a difference before it’s finalized.

In 2013, the district held hearings about schools initially slated for closures and had time to come up with alternative plans. Officials ended up closing many fewer schools than the district initially proposed.

But this time around, officials appear to be front-loading community engagement, said Adam Blyweiss, a district parent and teacher who has been involved with the Stand Up for Philly Schools group, which opposes school closures. He worries the district may rush the process after it eventually releases the list of recommended schools to close.

Separately, the district needs better partnerships with external groups to make sure students who must change schools are supported, said Justin Ennis, executive director of Philadelphia Outward Bound School.

Ultimately, Ennis said the lessons from what happened in 2013 could help shape a much better process this time around — just as long as the district makes genuine progress building trust with communities and partner organizations.

“There is an opportunity to harness all of the folks in a community,” said Ennis. “So it’s not like 2013, which felt like a cold and sterile financial decision.”

Germantown Info Hub’s Rasheed Ajamu and Pryce Jamison contributed to this story, along with Sara Shahriari from Resolve Philly.

Sign up for Germantown Info Hub’s community texting project here.

Philadelphia school closure plan delayed, won’t be announced in November, district says

2025-11-04T21:07:12+00:00

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The Philadelphia school district will not announce its recommendations this month for which schools will close, pushing back a long-awaited deadline, the district said Tuesday.

Instead, the district will launch a survey to get further community feedback about its facilities planning process and shape its recommendations. The district will share results from its survey in December, and “will go through a comprehensive public feedback period before [submitting] final recommendations to the Board of Education” according to a statement from district spokesperson Monique Braxton.

District officials have said the final facilities plan will include a list of schools to close, as well as ones to modernize, repurpose, and colocate.

Superintendent Tony Watlington has said repeatedly in recent months that the district’s goal for that plan is to increase access to high-quality academic and extracurricular programming across the city.

To accomplish that, he and other school leaders have also said they aim to “rightsize” the district by addressing underenrollment in some schools and overcrowding in others. It is unclear when school closures would begin, but officials have said the process will likely play out over a number of years.

The looming school closures have drawn scrutiny and concern from Philadelphia families, educators, and education advocates. Many have called for more details about which schools could be slated for closure, as well as more information about how the district is weighing different factors in its decision-making process.

The district has missed other deadlines it set for itself throughout the process that will lead to school closures. School leaders initially said they would share data about school facilities in April, but did not publicize a data repository until September.

When the district finally released that data, including scores for schools on their building condition and utilization, officials said the ratings themselves did not dictate whether individual schools would close.

At a protest last month organized by Stand Up For Philly Schools, community members, educators, and city leaders urged the district not to close schools.

“When schools close, communities pay the price,” said Councilmember Kendra Brooks. “The communities who paid a price are communities like mine, Black and brown communities that have already suffered decades of disinvestment.”

Melanie Silva, a parent of a student at Rhawnhurst Elementary, said at the rally that the district has lost the trust of families as it misses its own deadlines and fails to share information that people are desperate to see.

“After months of delays and missing data, it’s clear why so many families don’t trust this process,” Silva said.

On Philly’s first day of school, students and educators feel the strain of SEPTA cuts

2025-08-25T18:06:33+00:00

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Philadelphia high school seniors Aster Chau and Joey Zhou stuck to a routine for the last year to make their more than an hour-long commute to school on SEPTA more bearable.

Each morning, they would find each other on board the train that goes from near their homes far northeast from the city center to Academy at Palumbo nearly 17 miles away in South Philly. “That’s how our friendship bloomed and blossomed,” Chau said.

But in the early morning hours of the first day of school this year, they each braced for a commute that had, overnight, gotten trickier. Their train was about to come less frequently. Their bus would be overcrowded. And the whole commute was about to be less reliable.

“If you’re going to be late, you’re like two hours late, and then there’s just nothing you can do about it,” Zhou said Monday.

Aster Chau walks through a regional rail train on the first day of school in Philadelphia. It usually takes her a little more than an hour to get to school.

This year’s first day of school for Chau, Zhou, and Philadelphia’s nearly 118,000 district students came one day after the region’s public transit system began implementing 20% service cuts due to a funding crisis that state lawmakers have not addressed.

Transit officials have said for weeks that they expected the cuts to leave students and educators who rely on SEPTA with longer and more crowded commutes.

But the school district has not stepped in with an alternative or a plan. Though the district provides bus transportation to elementary school students and students with disabilities, most middle and high school students are expected to take SEPTA if they need to commute to school.

By the end of the school day Monday, Superintendent Tony Watlington said he had already heard from at least one principal that attendance was lower than expected on the first day of school.

At a school board meeting last week, Watlington told parents and students to “Google SEPTA cuts” to find information about routes and to call their principal with any concerns. He also recommended parents apply for the district’s program that could reimburse them for driving eligible children to and from school, although that is mostly reserved for elementary school students.

Deputy Superintendent Oz Hill later sent a message to parents saying that the district understands that the service cuts could present a hardship to staff and families.

“Thousands of students and hundreds of employees ride SEPTA to school and work every day,” Hill said. “As a District, we are hoping that SEPTA receives adequate funding to restore full service.”

A student stands on the platform of the Philmont rail station on the first day of school. Thousands of Philadelphia students rely on SEPTA to get to school.

But for Philly students and educators, that hope provides little relief. Chau and Zhou said along with college applications and getting through AP classes, they’re preparing to shoulder more transit stress this year too.

“It’s just very frustrating at times,” said Chau. “There’s already a lot going on in our lives, and to have to worry about getting to school on top of that is, like, pushing it.”

Families fear transit cuts will make students late

Chalkbeat asked students and educators across the city about how the SEPTA cuts were affecting them, and heard from dozens of students and parents who shared concerns about missing class, losing extracurricular opportunities, and disincentivizing kids from going to school in the first place.

“I’m honestly worried about how I’m going to be able to get to school,” said Nevaeh Martin, 17, a senior at Central High School.

Usually, Martin’s commute from North Philadelphia takes around 45 minutes — as long as the 54 bus that comes near her house arrives on time. But even before the cuts, the bus was unpredictable. Sometimes, she would have to walk for 30 minutes to get to the train station.

Now, like most bus routes in the city, the 54’s service has been reduced by 20%. Martin said that makes her worried that the 6:50 a.m. bus she usually catches might not show up at all.

“If that bus doesn’t come, or a bus earlier doesn’t come, then basically I’ll be late to school,” she said.

Aster Chau and Joey Zhou walk past a school bus during their commute.

Northeast Philadelphia, where there is limited public transportation to begin with, has been hit hardest by the transit cuts. Many students in those neighborhoods who take SEPTA to school will have to walk further, wait longer, or find an alternative way to get to school.

Ella Nguyen, 17, who attends Northeast High School, said she usually takes the bus that goes near her house to school. But now, she’s working on getting her driver’s license so she can borrow one of her family member’s cars to get to school.

“I really didn’t want to drive, because I didn’t see a purpose to it since I relied on SEPTA,” Nguyen said. “But now it’s like, I really hate taking crowded buses. I’m like, wow, I should really learn how to drive for this.”

Still, for many students, there’s no alternative available.

Standing on the platform at Philmont regional rail stop on Monday morning, Chau waved hello to other students readying for their commute to the first day of school. Though many, including Chau, get a ride to the station, they must make their own way into the city for school.

Philadelphia high school senior Aster Chau relies on SEPTA to get to school each day. She says she worries delays will make her late this year.

When the train pulled into the station just before 7 a.m., it was already packed with commuters. Students found empty seats in the quiet car, where their chatter was quickly shushed by adults riding the train to work.

Zhou got on at the next stop and slid in next to Chau. They whispered and used their phones for the rest of the 30-minute ride to the Jefferson train station. There, they tried to catch the 45 bus, but it pulled away right as they got out onto the street. That meant they had to walk the final mile to school.

“We dread it,” said Zhou, adding that she got dinged for being late countless times last year because the bus would pass them.

But Chau said she doesn’t mind the walk, especially compared with trying to squeeze onto a crowded bus. And this way, the teenagers get to hang out a bit longer before the school day begins.

Joey Zhou stops to tie her shoe during her commute to school.

Teachers say the district has not provided guidance

Though the SEPTA cuts have loomed for weeks, several teachers Chalkbeat spoke with said they worried the district had no thorough plan in place to support students and educators navigate transportation delays on the first day of school.

“I received no communication as a teacher from the district about the potential of SEPTA cuts and how that can affect attendance and tardiness,” said Cady Zuvich, a second grade teacher at Ziegler Elementary School.

Zuvich said she worried for students she knew who had graduated and were starting middle school this year, many of whom would have to consistently take SEPTA to school for the first time. Some of those students may expect a bus to show up that was part of the cuts, leaving them waiting and confused, she said.

Zuvich said she had concerns about her own commute too. Like many Philadelphia teachers, she takes SEPTA to get to work. But delays have already made her late in the past. She said the further cuts would likely make those problems even more frequent.

Commuters wait on a platform at Jefferson Station, while a regional rail train runs 39 minutes behind schedule.

Thomas Quinn, who teaches civics at Central High School, said he worries the transit cuts will exacerbate inequities in the city, and make it even more difficult for families who live in underserved neighborhoods to get to school.

He said he plans to use SEPTA’s transit funding crisis as a teaching moment, to explain to students how government action — and inaction — affects their everyday lives.

“It’s something we just need to make sure we’re speaking up about, helping students understand the stakes and how this came to be,” said Quinn. “And then make sure they vote in November.”

Christina Puntel, a Spanish teacher at Walter B. Saul High School, said she wished school officials had been more proactive in providing resources and alternatives to families who rely on SEPTA.

“I think if the district spent a minute listening to parents and children, then we would have at least some tenable way through this,” Puntel said.

As for Chau and Zhou, the students hope their teachers will be understanding this year when SEPTA makes them late. But more than that, they hope the transit system will improve and get the funding it needs to reverse the cuts.

Joey Zhou and Aster Chau walk the final mile to school from the regional rail station in Center City Philadelphia.

Next week, when the full extent of the first round of SEPTA cuts kick in and regional rail schedules change, the only train that will get them to school on time will leave at 6:24 a.m. — half an hour earlier than their already-early morning commute.

“I just feel like SEPTA is so important to everybody in Philly, but especially for students,” said Zhou. “It’s just going to make everything harder.”

This story has been updated with additional information from Superintendent Tony Watlington.

Rebecca Redelmeier is a reporter at Chalkbeat Philadelphia. She writes about public schools, early childhood education, and issues that impact students, families, and educators across Philadelphia. Contact Rebecca at rredelmeier@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia’s Frankford High School reopens after $30 million asbestos remediation project

2025-08-18T22:08:17+00:00

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The Philadelphia school district reopened Frankford High School on Monday after completing a nearly $30 million renovation to remediate asbestos that had posed a health risk to staff and students.

The renovations, which included adding air conditioning and new lighting, kept the school closed for more than two years. The building’s reopening marks a big step for the district’s aim to modernize its aging infrastructure — and shows the great cost of maintaining buildings built more than a century ago.

The district has closed several schools in recent years due to concerns over exposure to asbestos. In June, the U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges against the district for failing to follow laws that require timely asbestos inspections between 2015 and 2023. The district reached an agreement with the Justice Department to avoid prosecution.

“We are reopening possibilities and opportunities for our students and our educators,” Board of Education President Reginald Streater told an audience of Frankford educators in the school’s refurbished auditorium on Monday. “When we open the doors this fall, our students return to a school that is safe, welcoming and healthy.”

In April 2023, inspectors found that asbestos had been flaking from the walls and ceiling of the 115-year-old Frankford High School building, posing a health risk to staff and students. Exposure to asbestos is associated with many health concerns, including lung cancer.

After the discovery, students attended class virtually through the end of the school year. For the following two school years, ninth graders attended class at nearby Roberto Clemente Middle School. Older students were restricted to part of the school called the “annex,” which was built in the 1950s.

“It was very stressful, and it was a little sad, just to see that we were closed because of the asbestos,” said physical education teacher Terry Ward. “But now to see it opening is amazing.”

Ward, who graduated from Frankford in the 1980s, said the school feels transformed from when she was a student. The building has freshly painted walls, new windows, refurbished floors, and new LED lighting. The district also installed more than 80 new air conditioning units and dozens of new Smartboards. Some rooms, like the cafeteria, have gotten new furniture as well.

Still, pieces of the school’s history remain. Stained glass windows circle the school’s auditorium, and old paintings line part of the first floor hallway.

When classes start next week, Ward will be teaching in the school’s third-floor gym. She said she remembers how hot the room would get during basketball practice when she was a student, with no cooling and windows that wouldn’t open. But with the new air conditioning, she said she looks forward to spending the school year teaching in the space.

“The kids’ eyes are going to be bright,” said Ward. “It brightens the community.”

District agrees to asbestos inspections every 6 months

The reopening of Frankford High School required the installation of wall and ceiling paneling throughout the building to protect the plaster beneath. In some areas, that plaster contains asbestos, which is only safe when it’s contained.

The district’s agreement with the Justice Department includes the district’s commitment to inspect buildings every six months and regularly repair any damage.

Adam Anderson, who teaches media and television classes at Frankford, has worked for the school since 2009. He said he’s aware that means he may have been exposed to asbestos particles during the years before the school closed, and has even talked to his doctor about it. But for now, he said, he’s not scared.

“Is it something that I’m gonna monitor for the rest of my life? Sure,” said Anderson. “Is it something that I’m thinking about at this moment? No, because I’m kind of just excited to be back in the building.”

To Anderson, the asbestos remediation has brought other benefits too. He used to worry about the creaky floorboards in his classroom, which would often disrupt students during recording sessions. But with refurbished floors, the classroom stays quiet.

The new space, he said, “actually represents what our students can do.”

After school officials cut a ribbon in front of the school’s main doors Monday, Frankford staff returned to their work of readying the school to welcome students on the first day of class Aug. 25. In an office upstairs, Yanelle Boyd, a student climate support staffer at the school, said one of her aims for the school year is to help infuse the school’s spirit into the renovated building.

Boyd graduated from Frankford in 2017, and remembers the hallways covered in student murals and trophies. Though the district says those items have mostly been preserved, they are no longer on prominent display.

“We have to make new memories — and I’m excited to make those new memories,” Boyd said.

Judge orders Philadelphia’s Memphis Street Academy charter school to close

2025-07-14T23:10:10+00:00

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A federal judge ruled Monday that a Philadelphia charter school that sued the school district to allow it to stay open despite poor academic performance must shut down.

However, officials representing Memphis Street Academy Charter School at J.P. Jones, operated by the American Paradigm Schools charter network, say the school plans to continue to operate in the coming school year.

The school has operated on an expired charter agreement since 2022, when the Philadelphia school board first moved not to renew the school after years of low standardized test scores and climbing absenteeism rates.

In June 2022, the school board found the school did not meet academic standards and invoked its charter’s surrender clause, which requires the school to surrender its charter if certain conditions are not met.

Less than a month later, Memphis Street Academy sued the district to prevent it from revoking the school’s charter.

“The conditions MSA agreed to be held to—and failed to meet—were guardrails to provide adequate education for its students,” Judge Chad Kenney of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania wrote in his Monday decision. “MSA must surrender its charter and close.”

However, American Paradigm Schools CEO Ashley Redfearn told Chalkbeat Monday the school plans to continue to operate.

“I do believe that we will be in operation in the fall, and if there is transition, that it will be done responsibly and ethically in the best interest of the kids and the students and the teachers of Memphis street Academy,” said Redfearn.

Redfearn said the judge’s decision deemed the surrender clause enforceable, but does not mean that the school has to immediately surrender its charter.

“Today is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an order that the school close,” said Redfearn.

Redfearn said she and other American Paradigm Schools officials are reviewing the judge’s decision.

Philadelphia school district officials did not respond to questions about what will happen to students enrolled at Memphis Street Academy in the upcoming school year. Last school year, nearly 500 students in grades 5-8 attended the school.

In its lawsuit, Memphis Street Academy charged the district with subjecting the school to “unfair and unrealistic” charter conditions. The school also alleged that the district’s framework of measuring charter schools was racially discriminatory because it disproportionately harmed schools that served higher than average rates of Black and Hispanic students.

In his decision, Kenney wrote that the school board had held the school accountable by revoking its charter.

He pointed out that for a school that began as part of the city’s “Renaissance” initiative, which was meant to turn around failing schools and improve student achievement, its performance had been “bleak.”

During the 2018-2019 school year, the last one with standardized testing before the non-renewal order, only 5% of Memphis Street Academy students achieved proficient scores in math, well below the district average.

For several years before the non-renewal, more than a third of the school’s students were chronically absent, meaning they missed more than 10 days of school.

“Instead of uplifting its students, MSA blames their demographic backgrounds for its own shortcomings,” wrote Kenney in the decision. “These excuses deprive MSA’s students of the education they deserve.”

Planned SEPTA service cuts will mean slower, less reliable commutes for Philly students

2025-07-10T22:33:44+00:00

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More than 55,000 students across Philadelphia could have a harder time getting to class when the school year begins next month because of planned cuts to the region’s public transit system.

Students in Northeast Philadelphia could be particularly hard hit by the proposed 20% reduction in SEPTA service, scheduled to begin on August 24, the day before school starts.

The expected cuts will impact bus and rail lines that directly serve more than 25 district schools, according to a SEPTA analysis. Several bus lines that specifically serve schools at the beginning and end of school days, called the 400 series, are part of the planned cuts.

SEPTA officials have said the reductions are necessary to address a severe funding shortfall and reduce its deficit.

For a school district that relies on SEPTA to transport middle and high school students, those changes could mean major challenges.

Teachers, school staff, and parents who use SEPTA to get to school will also likely experience longer commutes, according to Jody Holton, chief planning and strategy officer at SEPTA.

“Across the whole system, there is going to be crowding, there’s going to be reliability issues,” Holton said. “Even if your service isn’t being eliminated, there will be ramifications.”

As lawmakers continue to negotiate the state budget, which was due on June 30, there is a chance more funding could forestall the cuts. But SEPTA officials say they’re planning for the worst.

For the first time, the transportation authority is creating two different schedules to release next month. One will reflect the planned cuts, while the other will show what’s possible if SEPTA gets more money from the state.

A school district spokesperson said it is too early to comment on the potential impacts of route eliminations.

Philadelphia middle and high school students rely on SEPTA for school transportation

In Philadelphia, students in grades 7 through 12 who live at least 1.5 miles from their school are eligible for free SEPTA cards through the school district. The district generally expects those students to use SEPTA to get to school, and does not permit them to ride on yellow school buses, which are mostly reserved for elementary school students. Students with disabilities may get access to buses or other transportation services as well.

At last month’s board meeting, the school board approved a $34 million contract with SEPTA covering 63,000 fare cards for students from public, charter, and non-public schools for the coming school year. The state reimburses the district for the cost of the passes through a transportation subsidy program.

From 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., 1 in 3 SEPTA riders are students, according to Stephen Bronskill, the coalition manager of Transit Forward Philadelphia, a coalition advocating for better public transportation. The proposed cuts will make those students’ commutes much less efficient, he said.

“Tons of students won’t have access to reliable transit on a daily basis,” said Bronskill in an email. “Others will have to deal with serious delays.”

The changes include eliminating 10 of SEPTA’s 400 series bus lines, which act as a kind of extension to other lines to reduce crowding and make students’ commutes more efficient at the beginning and end of the school day.

Without those lines, students will have to either walk to a different bus stop or make more transfers, according to Melissa Silverman, SEPTA’s director of schedules and support services.

Students in the Northeast will be hit particularly hard

Though the planned SEPTA service cuts will be felt across the Philadelphia region, the worst effects are expected to hit Philadelphia’s Northeast neighborhoods, according to Holton, SEPTA’s chief planning strategy officer.

The area, Holton said, is lower density and therefore more difficult to serve with public transit. But Northeast Philadelphia is also where SEPTA has a high proportion of school ridership on buses, meaning that students will weather the impact of the cuts.

Already, students in the Northeast generally experience longer school commutes, according to research from 2020. That study, which analysed data from the 2017-2018 school year, found that the average high school student in the Philadelphia school district had a public transit commute of just under 30 minutes.

But students in the Northeast and Northwest spent longer getting to and from school, the researchers found, which likely reflected the more limited transit options in those regions of the city. Students attending citywide schools also had longer commutes than those at neighborhood schools.

“Based on the extent of the proposed service reductions, the time and complexity of high school students’ commutes are sure to increase,” Molly Pileggi, one of the study’s researchers, told Chalkbeat in an email. She added that students who traverse farther across the city will likely need to find different connection options and wait longer.

In the meantime, several Philadelphia lawmakers continue to advocate for more state funding for SEPTA to avert the cuts.

“For many families in Philadelphia, SEPTA isn’t optional, it’s how kids get to school and parents get to work,” said state Sen. Christine Tartaglione, who represents part of Northeast Philadelphia, in a statement. “Cutting service or raising fares would hurt families who are already doing everything they can to stay afloat.”

Justice Department brings criminal charges against Philadelphia school district over asbestos

2025-06-26T23:33:50+00:00

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The Department of Justice filed criminal charges Thursday against the Philadelphia school district for not meeting requirements to keep students and staff safe from asbestos exposure.

The Justice Department found that the district failed to conduct timely asbestos inspections, as mandated by federal law, and that district officials “purposely” delayed inspections and “knowingly and regularly failed to make necessary repairs,” according to the agreement.

However, the school board voted unanimously Thursday to enter into an agreement with the Justice Department to resolve the investigation and avoid being prosecuted at least for now, in what the federal government called a “conditional release of liability.”

The details of the yearslong investigation were made public Thursday. Philadelphia became the first district in the country to face criminal charges over this type of environmental violation, the Justice Department said.

Nearly 300 schools the Philadelphia district owns contain asbestos, a common building material that can cause breathing problems and lung disease when it deteriorates and is breathed in. Federal law requires school districts nationwide to regularly monitor for asbestos and to ensure they repair any damage quickly to reduce exposure risk.

Many Philadelphia school buildings are aging and in desperate need of repairs. In recent years, the district has closed several schools due to asbestos, forcing students to relocate partway through the school year.

The Justice Department’s investigation, which began in 2020 and examined the district’s asbestos monitoring program between 2015 and 2023, revealed “a longstanding and widespread problem of asbestos contamination in Philadelphia schools,” according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

The district’s approach “endangered students and teachers, and, in some cases, foreclosed any education at all by requiring the closure of the school,” the statement said.

Failure to abide by the Justice Department agreement may result in criminal sanctions against the district.

In exchange, the district has committed to complying with asbestos-related laws, including inspecting buildings every six months and regularly repairing damage. The agreement also requires the district to report updates about its asbestos program to the court twice a year.

Superintendent Tony Watlington, who has led the district since 2022, said in a statement that since the investigation began, the district has “rebuilt” its asbestos management program. All district-owned school buildings are now inspected twice per year, and the school district has increased its investment in environmental management, according to Watlington.

DOJ finds major problems with Philadelphia’s asbestos monitoring

The Justice Department’s agreement details a long list of problems with how the district ran its asbestos monitoring program, including failing to supervise the team in charge of handling asbestos and inconsistently inspecting schools with major asbestos problems.

In 2019, for example, staff at Laura Carnell Elementary School found several areas where asbestos that should have been encapsulated to prevent it from breaking down into the air had been left exposed. In one area, the crumbling asbestos had been merely wrapped in duct tape, according to the agreement.

Separately, in 2020, a teacher was diagnosed with mesothelioma, an incurable form of cancer frequently caused by exposure to asbestos.

According to the agreement, there were 31 schools affected by the district’s inadequate approach. Several had widely known asbestos issues, including Building 21 Alternative High School, Southwark Elementary, Universal Vare Charter School, Frankford High School, and Franklin Learning Center.

Special Agent in Charge Allison Landsman of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal Investigation Division said in a statement the agency is committed to prosecuting environmental law violators, especially when students and teachers are at risk.

“This resolution requires additional accountability on the School District of Philadelphia to ensure protections are in place to prevent future asbestos exposure,” she said.

School district promises to improve asbestos monitoring

In the agreement, which the board had initially planned to vote on at its previous meeting in May, the district committed to following federal asbestos monitoring laws and agreed to increased oversight.

The school district will now report to a court about its asbestos remediation process for up to five years. After three years, the district can request early termination of the agreement if it has complied with the law for at least six months.

In the agreement, the Justice Department recognized the district had improved some of its asbestos monitoring practices since the investigation began, including hiring more staff in its Office of Environmental Management and Services and tripling its budget for environmental work from $21 million to $61 million.

The agreement also states that the district has updated its software to track asbestos data and is regularly sharing related information with the public. A list of the district’s annual asbestos inspection reports for each school is available on its website.

The district’s current facilities planning process, which board members have said will likely result in some school closures, is also partially meant to address buildings’ environmental problems.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia charter school announces it will stop operating next year

2025-06-18T22:28:27+00:00

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The Universal Vare Promise Neighborhood Partnership Charter School, which enrolled more than 120 students in grades 5-8 this year, will not pursue renewing its charter after next school year, effectively ending its operations.

The announcement marks the third school that the Universal Charter Schools network plans to cease operating, leaving the campus’s future uncertain. It’s unclear whether the district will step in and take over the school — as it did with one previous Universal charter — or if it will close entirely after the 2025-26 school year.

School board and district officials did not respond to questions about whether the district plans to take over the school after the charter ends.

The school’s CEO, Penny Nixon, said in a statement Wednesday that the decision was the result of declining enrollment. The school is authorized to enroll 425 students but has enrolled fewer than half that number for the past three years.

“The challenges we face at Universal Vare reflect broader citywide experiences,” said Nixon. “Gentrification and declining birth rates have significantly impacted school enrollment.”

The announcement comes as the school district pursues its own facilities planning process that’s partially meant to address declining enrollment in several district-operated schools. School board officials said the process will likely result in school closures, as well as co-locations and the repurposing of some school buildings.

The district’s process to determine whether and how to close schools has been nearly a year in the making and includes regular community engagement sessions. District officials have stressed the process will be transparent and informed by community feedback.

Like other charter schools that have recently closed, Universal Vare’s decision to stop operating the school came unexpectedly.

Soon after the announcement, the board of education issued its own statement supporting the decision.

“While change can be challenging, the Board respects and supports the school’s decision, which we believe is grounded in what is best for children,” said school board President Reginald Streater. “We commend the school leadership for taking a proactive and student-first approach, even when the path forward is hard.”

Universal Vare’s history riddled with challenges

Universal Vare launched in 2011 as part of the city’s Renaissance Initiative, which gave 22 district-operated schools over to charter networks.

Renaissance schools were meant to “transform historically failing schools,” then-Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said at the time. But more than a decade later, many of its promises haven’t materialized.

The school board has documented ongoing problems at Universal Vare for years.

In 2016, the Charter Schools Office recommended the school for non-renewal because it had failed to meet certain standards, including academic performance and financial sustainability. Under Universal’s management, the school’s math proficiency scores severely declined, and its reading proficiency scores only slightly increased. The school also struggled with persistent low attendance rates and insufficient funding.

The non-renewal would have meant the school would be forced to close. But it campaigned to continue operating, and in 2018 the School Reform Commission, which oversaw the district at the time, voted to allow it to renew its charter with certain conditions.

At its next renewal in 2020, Universal Vare’s test scores showed that students were doing worse than the district average across all subjects. But its scores reflected academic growth across the board.

Financially, the school still was struggling, with less than a month of cash on hand.

In 2023, the school suddenly shut its building’s doors partway through the school year after asbestos was discovered inside. Students ended the year learning virtually. The following school year, the school relocated to a nearby building.

Academically, the school continued to have problems. Last year, only 2% of students received proficient scores on the state math test. Though students did better on language arts and science tests, they still scored below the district average.

Peng Chao, the chief of the city’s Charter Schools Office, said the office supports the school’s decision not to renew its charter.

“This decision reflects a deep commitment to ensuring that all students have access to robust, high-quality educational experiences,” said Chao. “We appreciate the school’s thoughtful approach and continued focus on doing what is best for students.”

Broken sinks, rodents, mysterious dripping liquid: Philly students want their schools fixed

2025-04-24T19:02:57+00:00

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A group of seniors at the Academy at Palumbo High School in South Philly was so fed up with their deteriorating building that they decided to investigate.

They started documenting their “grimy” unusable bathrooms, the stifling heat and humidity in the gym and lunchroom, the peeling paint, rodent sightings, and mysterious liquid dripping from classroom ceilings.

They also documented what their peers around the city thought. As part of advocacy group Generation Citizen’s civics day earlier this month, the Palumbo students surveyed their classmates and students across the district asking for their experience with school conditions. What they found disappointed them: More than 77% of the 200 respondents said they noticed maintenance issues at their schools, and nearly 68% rated the conditions of their bathrooms a two out of five — or worse.

Such responses were consistent across schools, they said, including at coveted magnets like Central High School. The students said they intend to bring these concerns to the district and school board at their action meeting on Thursday.

Palumbo students say their bathroom conditions are "grimy."

The district is undergoing a facilities planning process to overhaul its buildings with the hope of improving some of these conditions for students in the years to come. But that process isn’t moving fast enough for the thousands of Philly students who say their learning conditions now aren’t setting them up for academic success.

Palumbo’s building was constructed in 1930, and the students there now said they can tell.

Student Kimora Kelly said it makes her “miserable” to feel like their building isn’t receiving appropriate funding, resources, and care.

“We see our school, and then compare [it to] other suburban schools. Their schools are so much cleaner, look more fresh. It looks like a better environment to actually learn,” Palumbo senior Kian Lieu told Chalkbeat.

Lieu’s cousin attends one of those suburban schools where “the paint is white instead of yellow,” he said.

“This environment doesn’t make you want to come to school,” Lieu said. “We are grateful for what we have, but you know, things can always be better.”

Philly students, educators, and school staff have been telling the district about their poor bathroom conditions and insufficient ventilation, heating, and cooling for years. The average age of a Philly public school building is around 73 years old. But some, like Palumbo, have been around for nearly a century or longer.

At several student-focused community meetings this past winter, young people told district officials about dirty bathrooms, rats, overcrowding, and a general feeling of neglect.

“A lot of the people who are responsible for our buildings haven’t been in one,” or spent sufficient time in them like the students and staff have, said Palumbo student Gretta Rogan. “We joke about inviting [elected officials] here and giving them lots of water and then letting them see the bathrooms for themselves.”

While there was toilet paper in these bathroom stalls, Palumbo students say often by the end of the month, there isn't enough.

As of 2023, there were some 2,000 bathrooms spread across Philadelphia’s 218 district school buildings, yet the district only employed eight plumbers, according to district data. In the 2022-23 school year, district officials told school board members that it takes some 50 days for bathroom repairs to be completed.

According to district spokesperson Christina Clark, the district now employs 10 plumbers in addition to outside contractors.

Clark said in an email that the district launched a “restroom task force” in January and will report data from that task force in July. She also said officials have “streamlined the work order process” and improved internal forms and systems to “ensure faster response times.”

“Preliminary data from the current school year shows that repair timelines have improved, with average turnaround times decreasing in many schools,” Clark said. “We continue to monitor progress closely and are committed to both improving infrastructure and communicating more clearly with our school communities about timelines and expectations. We are determined to provide our students with clean, safe, and functional spaces.”

Student waits to leave school before using bathroom

On the day Chalkbeat visited Palumbo in April, several bathroom sinks were out of order, and while most stalls had some toilet paper, “most of the time they don’t,” Kelly said. The doors don’t consistently close or lock and long waiting lines between classes can make students late.

“I just wait until I go home to use the bathroom” Kelly said.

When sinks don't work, Palumbo students say they have to wait in long lines to wash their hands, delaying their return to class.

The second floor gym has a different problem. “You have no air, the windows don’t open, so you’re just sitting there sweating in this hot room” Kelly said. “With no air, what am I supposed to do? Just pass out?”

For their investigation, the Palumbo seniors also spoke with a member of their custodial staff who told them cleaning supplies and toilet paper are often in short supply. While they try their best to keep the school clean, janitorial workers told the students there’s only so much they can do without closing the school entirely to upgrade bathrooms and fix electrical issues.

What their schools and the district need is more funding and better systems to allocate it, the students said. A Commonwealth Court Judge ruled in 2023 that Pennsylvania’s school funding process was unconstitutional, shortchanging districts like Philly and exacerbating many of these building challenges.

As the city and state continue to shape their budgets this summer, Palumbo students said adding funding for school facilities is nonnegotiable.

Without repairs, the decrepit building conditions will continue to affect the way students feel about their schools, their ability to learn, and could even drive enrollment down, the Palumbo students said.

A few months ago, student Kayla Howard said Palumbo — which is a selective admissions magnet school — hosted an open house to court prospective families.

Seeing their faces as they took in the “dirty, dull” floors and walls, Howard said, was “sort of embarrassing for our image, and also just our reputation as a whole.”

The Palumbo students said as part of their project, they wanted to think about possible solutions. They highlighted the city’s Whole Home Repair program which provides funding to low-income homeowners to fix roofs, electrical systems, heating and cooling issues, and more.

Could something like that work for schools? The students think it could be worth a shot.

“We have the bare essentials to be in a school,” student Emily Alava said, “but the effort isn’t put there to make us enjoy being in school.”

This story has been updated to include a response from the School District of Philadelphia.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Effort to adapt Philly schools to rising temperatures threatened by Trump

2025-04-07T18:59:46+00:00

This is the first story in a two-part series examining climate change and Philadelphia schools. It was originally published by Green Philly, a media outlet that connects readers with sustainable solutions, and Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group. Read part two here.

On hot days, Jaimie Fortin’s first grade daughter comes home from school at Henry H. Houston Elementary in Mount Airy, frustrated and uncomfortable.

“Her sensitivity is incredibly high,” Fortin said of her daughter, whose autism makes her vulnerable to sensory overload and other impacts from physical discomfort. “She’s already inattentive and hyperactive, but the heat makes it worse. She’ll say things like, ‘My skin feels bad. I can’t read.’ She’ll cry.”

As pollution traps heat and temperatures rise, public schools across Philadelphia and the nation are facing more extreme weather and growing needs for air conditioning. The funding needs are so dire that even Eagles Quarterback Jalen Hurts has stepped in to donate $200,000 to air conditioning units. Yet many Philadelphia schools face enormous maintenance backlogs, making it harder to adapt to the changing climate.

Federal programs created under the Inflation Reduction Act were starting to help area schools meet steep costs of installing renewable energy systems and other building improvements to address health concerns exacerbated by climate change. The Trump administration has put those funds in jeopardy after just a few schools were able to move quickly enough to access their benefits.

When it gets hot enough that Philadelphia’s schools close early and send kids home, Fortin, who owns a hair salon, faces a tough decision. She can call six to eight clients to reschedule the rest of her day, potentially losing that business, or keep her child with her in the salon, which is challenging for her daughter, her customers, and herself.

“I have to weigh what will hurt the business less,” Fortin said. “We need the money.”

Tax credit-like rebates available through the federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden, were helping schools plan for and transition to cleaner energy with cash reimbursements of at least 30%. Those upgrades could include electric school buses and charging infrastructure, which produce no tailpipe emissions, solar panels, industrial batteries and geothermal systems to provide electricity and heat without releasing pollution that harms the climate and damages children’s health.

When the Trump administration ordered a freeze on federal grants in late January, that freeze affected energy tax credits for schools. While the freeze was rescinded a day later, the future of the entire IRA remains unclear. The program was enacted by Congress and can technically only be rescinded by Congress, which is currently controlled by Republicans. Some Republicans have voiced support for the investment and job-creation some IRA components spurred in their districts, but benefits to schools haven’t been mentioned among the policies they might be hesitant to reverse.

Fighting off the heat

Looking after kids when it’s too hot for school can put severe pressures on their families, particularly for working-class and lower-income families. After-school programs occasionally offer a place for Philadelphia’s kids to stay after an unexpected early dismissal, but only for certain programs on certain days, said Lauren Wiley, a parent of a fifth grader at Henry H. Houston Elementary.

Families often coordinate to provide child care for multiple families when cancellations or early dismissals are called on hot days.

“If school starts before Labor Day, we hold our breath, and just figure that there will be a few days that are early release or it’s going to be canceled,” Wiley said.

At the end of 2024, Philadelphia had 57 schools without adequate air conditioning, according to the school district. Kids at those schools were sent home early when average temperatures on Aug. 27 exceeded historic averages by more than 7 degrees, reaching temperatures made three times more likely by climate change, analysis using Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index shows.

Last year, excessive heat prompted early dismissal at dozens of schools in the School District of Philadelphia, sending kids home before noon. Again this August, kids in schools without adequate air conditioning were sent home hours early.

Hot classrooms aren’t just uncomfortable. As Fortin’s daughter has noted, high temperatures make it harder to learn.

A study of 10 million students linked a one-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperatures with a 1% decline in that year’s learning. Warmer classrooms disproportionately impact minority students. Black and Hispanic students are less likely to attend schools with adequate air conditioning, and research has linked those hot classrooms with achievement gaps that see those students often left behind.

Children are also among the most vulnerable to heat-related illnesses.

Philadelphia schools aren’t alone. Half of schools in the United States need to upgrade or repair at least two major systems, such as heating, ventilation, air conditioning, or plumbing, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“Kids spend more time on school campuses than any other place—awake—and many campuses are not prepared for extreme heat and wildfire smoke and other forms of extreme weather,” said Jonathan Klein, a co-founder of UndauntedK12, a nonprofit that advocates for climate-adapted and clean-powered schools.

Now, he said, climate change could widen the infrastructure gaps that often leave minority students behind.

“In our most historically marginalized communities, kids are in the buildings least prepared to keep them safe and learning,” he said.

These uncapped and noncompetitive IRA funds were expected to be available until the early to mid-2030s if the program continued to see federal support. Some school districts are expecting sizable checks: A district in Manchester, Connecticut, is slated to see $2.5 million. Seattle Public Schools received $7.9 million.

Uncertainty for money-saving eco-upgrades

Fort Washington Elementary, in Upper Dublin Township, could rank among the first schools in Pennsylvania to see one of these checks — provided the Internal Revenue Service continues to reimburse them. A tornado tore through the township in the fall of 2021, damaging more than 100 homes and ripping the roof off several classrooms at the elementary school.

As the school moved to rebuild and renovate after the storm, which spun off from the remnants of Hurricane Ida, Upper Dublin School District leadership decided to use the opportunity to add a geothermal well field at Fort Washington. They looked to the success of a geothermal system in place at a nearby high school since 2012.

Geothermal systems transfer energy from deep within the ground, which hold a consistent temperature of 55 degrees year-round. At Fort Washington Elementary, construction involved boring 60 wells as deep as 500 to 600 feet, according to Ed Doll, project manager with CMTA, Inc., the energy and engineering firm working with Upper Dublin School District on its renewable energy upgrades.

Up-front costs are particularly high for installing geothermal systems due to the extensive construction of the wellfield. But some of those costs would be mitigated by the forthcoming rebate made available through the IRA.

Governor Josh Shapiro’s office reached out to tell district staff they were eligible for IRA funding in the summer of 2023. The school board agreed to apply for the rebate, but doing so has meant seeking additional support during the process by hiring a tax professional to complete their rebate application. The benefits are expected to outweigh the costs of hiring help, said Andrew Lechman, Upper Dublin School District’s chief financial officer.

“The process is more detailed and complex than other grant programs we’ve dealt with before,” Lechman said. “We could not have done this on our own.”

Since public schools do not pay taxes, they could not file for the kinds of credits long provided to other kinds of organizations to encourage renewable energy projects.

“That funding was available before, but it wasn’t available for tax-exempt entities,” Doll said. The Fort Washington Elementary geothermal wellfield is part of a larger contract for energy efficiency projects in the school district.

Despite the up-front costs, Doll said he will continue to vouch for geothermal energy for school districts that can afford it.

“It just makes too much sense,” he said, pointing to the low maintenance costs and high energy efficiency of systems. “Nothing outperforms geothermal.”

The transition to cleaner power has some parents excited.

“Renewable energy is super important to me,” said Katie Reilly, former president of the Fort Washington Elementary PTA, and with a fifth grader still in school there. She called the school’s move to install a geothermal wellfield “very forward-thinking.”

Because schools cover installation costs, then wait to receive reimbursement, there’s concern among clean energy advocates nationwide that these projects will amplify longstanding inequities.

“It would make perfect sense to me that the deployment of IRA tax credits would reflect the broader inequities in school funding,” said Sara Ross, co-founder of UndauntedK12, which is tracking schools taking advantage of these incentives across the country.

Upper Dublin fits that model, with a median household income of $158,000 in 2022 for the township, compared to $58,000 in neighboring Philadelphia. Other school districts in Pennsylvania that UndauntedK12 has seen pursuing IRA benefits include Phoenixville, where a new STEM-focused school will be built with a rooftop solar array and an additional panel in the courtyard for teaching purposes, and Huntingdon, where solar panels and energy efficiency upgrades could save the district $5.8 million in operating costs over the next 20 years.

The Octorara Area School District school board voted in September to pursue transitioning the district’s energy to solar power, but expected that move to begin late this year or in early 2026. With the energy credits, the district expected to receive $2.7 million in additional revenue and pay off the installation costs in about seven years.

At least 300 schools across 38 states have moved to take advantage of this program, according to UndauntedK12. But the Trump Administration has already created uncertainty around whether the promised reimbursements will really appear and what fate projects constructed this year might see when it comes time to file for rebates next year.

Q&A: Lessons learned from Philly’s school closures

2024-12-11T19:49:15+00:00

Next year, Philadelphia school leaders have warned their “rightsizing” process will likely result in more school shutdowns for a city that’s still recovering from the last painful spate of closures.

School buildings in Philly are on average 73 years old and are ridden with asbestos, lead, aging electrical systems, nonoperating bathrooms, and a host of other major issues. Demographic shifts have also meant several schools in the Northeast region of the city are bursting at the seams, while others stand nearly empty.

Superintendent Tony Watlington has said reorganizing the district — and closing some buildings that are too costly to renovate — will allow resources to be spread more equally. But Watlington and city residents are haunted by the last school closure process in 2013, which negatively impacted students’ academic performance and mental health.

This time, district leaders have sworn, things will be different.

In light of the district’s promises, our partners over at Shelterforce spoke with Akira Drake Rodriguez, an assistant professor of city planning at the University of Pennsylvania, about how school closures in Philadelphia affect neighborhoods, what alternative visions could be for those schools, and how communities are starting to organize to change the way school facilities planning is done.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Read the full interview here.

Shelterforce Editor-in-Chief Miriam Axel-Lute: Thank you for joining me, Akira, to talk about school closures and equity. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into studying this topic.

I started looking at public schools as infrastructure, whether it’s physical infrastructure or social infrastructure, in Philadelphia. We had this earlier experience in Philadelphia in 2013, where about 30 schools were closed. [I looked at] what changes to the neighborhood and the community and the built environment followed after the closures, and how to incorporate those lessons into future school facility planning processes.

You’ve said, “A good school is an open school.” Let’s look at a neighborhood and talk about what can happen when a school closes. I know you have some examples of some different ways that it happened in Philadelphia in the 2013 closures.

The 2013 closures were initiated through a private process. It could be framed as a planning process, but there was no community engagement or even a broad awareness that this was happening. The school district of Philadelphia engaged Boston Consulting Group to write a report on school facilities in the city. This looked at very technical data, such as what we call Facilities Conditions Index or FCI, which analyzes the systems of a school — plumbing, roof, electricity, etc. — estimates the condition of them, and then estimates the cost to get it into good condition.

If the cost of the repair is higher than its replacement, usually you’re going to remove that system. If enough systems need to be removed, then that translates into the closure of the school.

Another data point that they used was this idea of utilization. Philadelphia is a very old city. We had massive school construction at the turn of the 20th century and mid-century as the city is growing. It reached its peak of about 2 million residents in 1950.

We had high schools that were constructed for 2,000, 3,000 students that, by the time this planning process is happening, are serving literally 200 students. In addition to closures, a lot of the recommendations in the Boston Consulting Group report [were for] consolidation.

There were about 250 schools, and about 60 schools were [recommended] in this report for a closure or consolidation. The board, at the time, was a state-run board. The school district’s local control had been taken away by the state in 2001.

At that point, people are organizing to counteract these closures and consolidations. Some schools are saved, but are still what I consider to be vulnerable in future processes; others are closed or consolidated.

This caused some destabilization. One of the areas that was hardest hit was an area that’s on the border of one of our more affluent suburbs, the western part of our city, an area known as Overbrook, which borders Montgomery County, a very affluent county. Residents and organizers have actually done a school funding walk where they walk from Gompers Elementary in Philadelphia over to Lower Merion School. In that 1-mile walk, there is a disparity of basically 100 percent in additional funding for the suburban school student versus the one in Philadelphia.

That particular area saw a great deal of school closures and populations have continued to decline in those areas. North Philadelphia was also an area that was hard hit. Within a few years, you see the rise of school choice in these neighborhoods. A great deal of charters reappear in the wake of these closed schools.

I recall you telling me that in some of the different neighborhoods there were different effects on the housing market when their schools closed, some of them really deteriorating, some of them actually seeing some gentrification. Can you talk about the different kinds of things that might happen?

It’s funny, I’m at home right now. I live right across the street from a school that is closed. The house that I live in is my grandmother’s house that we moved into. I was actually supposed to go to this elementary school before my family moved out of Philadelphia. During 2013, this elementary, Smith Elementary, closed. The building has been converted into rental units, market rate. The playground and parking lot are about 12 single-family townhomes that average about $650,000. The house that was my grandmother’s house, [is] worth about $150,000, to give you some comparison.

There has been a lot of development in this area, which brings a lot of young couples that eventually become young families. There’s no school. This is happening further east in South Philadelphia with a school known as Southwark, which is a K-8 school.

Right across the street is a school known as Bok, which was a technical high school. It closed in 2013 and was repurposed into a bunch of different things — a maker space, a kiddie care center and gathering spot, a place that sells soccer equipment, a cafe, and at the top, a beautiful restaurant and bar.

This space has attracted a lot of families into the neighborhood. Southwark, which was never fully utilized, especially during the closures, but was not up for closure, is now overcrowded. Ironically, they lease the gym space from Bok because they don’t have room for all their activities.

In Overbrook, we see population decline and growth of school choice. In South Philly, we see a gentrification that’s happening as a result of the closure of this inefficient state good, the redevelopment of it into housing or to new uses, the attraction of a new type of resident and homeowner, and then the slow depopulation as families move away because they don’t have school options in this neighborhood.

Are there alternatives to closing underutilized schools that would preserve the public infrastructure for public good in a different way?

Sure. We had a public housing development in North Philadelphia that was demolished and redeveloped in a HOPE VI Choice Neighborhoods initiative approach. Part of that demolition included the closure of a local school. Then this school was actually purchased by the housing authority. They put a new school in. They hired teachers from the union. It’s effectively operating as a public school, drawing students from the neighborhood. Because the space was still so large, and the population was not utilizing that full space, they started leasing to other nonprofits that had connections to [the] school — after-school program for writers, different job training [programs], different public goods and services and advocacy groups. The results have been successful; they’ve been retaining teachers and students. You’re seeing above-average graduation rates and completion rates. This is how to adapt a public school and still keep it a public good.

Communities are going to change over time. We know that. It makes sense to adapt the public good in the public space to fit the community needs. That way you’re not having to lease auditorium and gymnasium space from private developers because you’ve sold your public good.

In contrast to the planning process in 2013 that led to all those school closures, Philadelphia has been working to embark on a different kind of school facilities planning process recently. Can you tell us about how that is going and how it’s different from what happened before?

Philadelphia schools were returned to local control in 2017. The school reform commission dissolved itself, and now we have a school board that is appointed by our mayor. This school board rightly understood that populations were still continuing to decline, and traditional public schools were underutilized and also in poor condition.

The planning process that began in 2019, when it was announced, said, “You can expect some closures and you can also expect some changes in our catchment areas, which determine, based on your address, where your local school is.”

Surprisingly, in 2019, the first reaction to this announcement was not from school organizers or teachers, but from real estate developers. The one or two really good K-8 schools in the city are highly advertised and signaled in real estate ads. The idea that some catchments would be redrawn was a little frightening for the real estate industry.

With this announcement, there was also the idea that there would be a public process. The consultants from the school district would form stakeholder groups by study areas, which were geographic areas containing about six or seven K-8 schools. They would produce some recommendations that would be presented to the public, adopted by the school board, and implemented in the following year. It was a pretty traditional planning process.

The study areas were very different from each other. For instance, that Overbrook area that I mentioned, where there were very few schools, and many were in bad shape and underutilized as a result of the previous closures. An area in North Philly that also had a lot of school closures, a rise in charter school options, but also a growing immigrant population, and new schools actually being constructed. And a third area in South Philadelphia, pretty close to our downtown, where populations were growing to the point where a new middle school was under discussion.

So we have one area where school closures are pretty imminent because we have a history of declining population; one area that’s growing, but is pretty marginalized within the city; and another area that is gentrified and growing, and needs new school options.

From the start, there was a lot of suspicion, obviously because of the legacy of school closures, which had really just happened six years before. If you’re a child whose school was closed in second grade, you’re in eighth grade now and facing possibly another closure. This isn’t a long time at all. People were a little upset about how the stakeholder groups were handpicked by principals. Elected officials and community planners dominated within these stakeholder groups.

Parents, teachers, and school advocates who were left out of the stakeholder groups took a few different approaches to improving the process. First, they pushed for stakeholders to hold community and public meetings to provide what they were learning to the public before the mass public meeting.

Second, communities that were not included in the first round of study areas were beginning to hold their own meetings and discuss the alternatives so they could prepare a counter-narrative when it was their turn in the facilities planning process.

Then a third group formed, drawing in a councilmember and three parent and neighborhood groups, which was focused on the idea of working across these study areas, instead of fighting about closures within a constrained geography — thinking about the resources we have across the city and how we can start to reallocate them more effectively.

Through this disruption of the school district’s planning process, we were able to insert some more participatory opportunities, such as expanding the number of meetings, and removing the idea of closures from the list of recommendations that were provided to stakeholder groups to start with.

This all sounds fairly similar to a lot of things that housing and community development groups get involved in, wanting to have more neighborhood input in a planning process.

Community quality of life was really centered in these discussions. I’m thinking about a group in the North Philadelphia, the high immigrant population area that I mentioned earlier. They were really concerned about school closures translating into gentrification. I felt that one of the most striking takeaways during these different meetings across the city was that people could draw a really straight line between a school closure and the construction of $400,000 townhomes in areas where that was not the median home value.

They saw this [process] as just a further coalition or growth machine that’s emerging between downtown and the school district. That was really a primary concern.

You also have concerns about segregation. There were parents — particularly in the growing neighborhood near the downtown, who didn’t like that there was a big racial divide across one street in Philadelphia — who said, “We’re going to build a middle school. Can we draw that catchment for the middle school across this racial divide so that we can have an integrated school and set that tone?”

These were discussions that were really thinking about “We have a lot of power in this conversation. How can we set a model for something that reflects the community’s needs?”

That makes a lot of sense. It also strikes me that they could maybe step into a conversation about school closure with some of those ideas you were talking about earlier, about other ways to use underutilized space.

Yes, the co-location is, I think, so critical. Key to why [the housing authority school is] so successful now was that thoughtfulness of “this is not just an asset to monetize and sell off to fulfill our bottom line . . . this is a key public good.”

One of the hardest things is breaking through to people who have no skin in the game of the public school. You really have to sell it as, like, “These are your tax dollars, this is what your tax dollars is going to support. You shouldn’t see a school closure as something that improves your property value. You should think about how can you improve the school and your property value at the same time.”

People don’t get upset when you close a public school, but they would get upset if you closed a public park. You have to think about them in the same way: you may not directly engage with it, but it serves a broader good and anchors your community.

This story was originally published by Shelterforce as part of their Under the Lens series, exploring the ways the educational justice and housing justice movements overlap. Sign up for their newsletter here. And if you prefer listening to the series, you can do so here.

Philadelphia Mayor announces new committee to guide school closure plans

2024-12-09T21:21:45+00:00

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Philadelphia’s city leaders want to weigh in on the district’s school facilities planning process that will likely result in school closures, co-locations, and building repurposing.

Mayor Cherelle Parker announced Monday that in the next two weeks, her administration will be formally introducing a new “interdisciplinary facility planning committee” to review the school district’s facilities plan and give guidance and feedback.

Representatives from Parker’s office, City Council President Kenyatta Johnson’s office, as well as real estate developers, labor union leaders, and members of the “finance industry” will sit on the committee, in addition to Superintendent Tony Watlington, Parker said.

Parker told City Council members that the committee will give the district advice on how best to rebuild schools and raise funds.

“We are boldly moving ahead with our plans to improve public education in Philadelphia, even as our school district continues to be underfunded,” Parker said.

The district’s school closure and “rightsizing” process has gripped Philadelphia’s education community and surfaced wrenching memories of closure meetings in 2013. Families, teachers, and advocates have been sharing their concerns and pleas for improved facilities at public meetings across the city this month and last month.

Oz Hill, the district’s interim deputy superintendent of operations, said the district is facing a growing building maintenance backlog: His office receives some 650 new work orders for building issues every week, he said.

Watlington told Chalkbeat last week that he recognizes how painful school closures can be and the persistent negative impact closures can have on students’ academic performance and mental health. He said it’s his intention to minimize the harm to students even as they consider closing and combining schools.

School board members also teased a new initiative at the city council meeting they’re calling Project RISE (reimagining school excellence) to revise the district’s performance framework for charter schools.

School officials have been talking about reimagining the charter school authorizing process for nearly a decade. Pennsylvania’s charter school law has remained mostly unchanged since 1997. Some charter leaders and representatives have come before the school board arguing that the current process is confusing, burdensome, inefficient, and rife with systemic inequities. Pennsylvania’s Auditor General meanwhile has concluded that Philadelphia’s process complies with all relevant state laws.

The board has not approved a new charter school since the city regained local control of its schools from the state in 2018, but it has renewed several existing schools’ charters.

“The board knows that strong accountability systems must evolve over time,” Board member Whitney Jones (who used to work for the KIPP charter school network) told City Council members. Project RISE, he said, will “determine how the charter school performance framework should evolve to best support the needs of our students.”

The three-phase process will involve gathering feedback, putting out a request for proposals for an outside group to review the existing charter school performance framework, and eventually developing updated administrative procedures.

Board members said they’re in the process of considering four applications for new charter schools. Hearings on these applications will be held Dec. 19 and sometime in January.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philly school closures to be shaped by community voices, district says

2024-11-14T20:02:45+00:00

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At community meetings across the city, the School District of Philadelphia is warning families that school closures are coming, but unlike the last time the district closed schools, officials say this time, they want parents, students, and neighbors to help shape the decision-making from the beginning.

“We first and foremost have learned that there has to be increased community engagement,” said Oz Hill, the district’s deputy superintendent of operations, at the first facilities planning meeting on Nov. 4 in Northeast Philly. “We didn’t do that well the last time, and we’re not going to make that same mistake going forward.”

Philadelphia, along with other public school districts across the country, is confronting declining enrollments, a persistent teacher shortage, the rise of cyber charter schools, and a shrinking birth rate. As a result, Philly has many underutilized or half-empty school buildings that are costly to upkeep and renovate. And those buildings are on average 73 years old — riddled with environmental hazards like asbestos and lead, and many lack adequate heating and cooling.

The district says consolidation, colocation, and a reimagining of the school system is necessary to improve student academic achievement and keep the district’s fiscal and infrastructural house in order.

Philadelphia’s public schools have classroom space for 180,000 students and currently serve 116,000 students, according to district data. Charter-operated schools in district-owned buildings have classroom space for 19,801 students and currently serve 14,387 students, the district said.

But closing schools is nasty business. Recent studies have found persistent negative effects from school closures, something district officials readily acknowledge happened in Philly in 2013 when the district closed 23 schools.

“It was not worth the cost,” Hill told families at a meeting Nov. 13 at Finley Recreation Center in East Germantown. “The students that were displaced … their performance declined. The students who were in schools where those displaced students were reassigned, their performance declined. Absences increased.”

This time, Hill said, “rightsizing” the district is less about saving money and more about ensuring students are in environmentally safe and comfortable classrooms with credentialed teachers.

The district has held nine sessions already and plans to hold 30 in total. For a list of the upcoming meetings and how you can participate, check out the district’s website. You can see the district’s full presentation here.

The meetings are being organized and hosted by representatives from the consulting group Brownstone PR, which the district has contracted with for $179,500.

Here are some takeaways:

There’s no list of targeted schools yet. The district says these community meetings are the first step to determine the criteria by which schools will be identified for possible closure, colocation, or reuse. Hill said the district will be looking at the condition of school buildings, their enrollment trends, and other factors. He said he wants Philadelphia parents, students, and community members to help shape what those final criteria will be.
A draft plan will be released next year. When the district releases a draft facilities plan with a list of schools identified for closure — likely in August or September of 2025 — there will be a window for community response before the next phase. Public feedback on the list will happen in October and November of 2025 and the district intends to finalize the plan by November or early December 2025.
The district is haunted by the school closure process in 2012-13. District officials have sworn not to repeat the meetings of the past, which saw thousands of angry students, parents, and community members railing against district representatives for closing their schools in pursuit of financial savings. In the decade since, Hill says the district has saved $24 million annually from those closures but this time, the motivation is not to save money — it’s to improve conditions for student learning.
People are not packing the rooms. The quantity of meetings (both in-person and virtual) means more opportunities to attend, but at several of the meetings Chalkbeat has observed, there have been fewer than five parents in attendance. At least one meeting was very well-attended, when several principals from Northeast Philly spoke passionately about overcrowding issues at their schools. According to Megan Smith, founder of Brownstone PR, there have been 134 participants at the nine meetings so far.
Closed schools will be used for community purposes. Hill said any schools closed as a result of this process won’t be sold off “for mere pennies on the dollar.” Hill said the district will “repurpose our schools for the benefit of our communities.” The buildings might be put to use as community centers, recreation centers, or other public gathering spaces.

The parents and teachers that have attended these meetings have raised several issues they want the district to consider. Rhawnhurst parent Melanie Silva wanted to know what’s going to happen to current renovation or construction projects. Hill said those will continue as planned. Martin Luther King High School educator Cheryl Jones said she believes it’s important to keep students in their local neighborhoods and asked that the district consider the role schools like King play as a community hub. Hill said he understands that perspective and reassured Jones that he sees King as a viable long-term option.

Other parents raised issues with violence in schools and asked for consideration about more school safety measures, improved athletics facilities and programs, funding for extracurriculars, places for young students to play, and more.

Parent Saterria Kersey said the district should also improve its communication efforts.

Hill told Chalkbeat that after speaking with families at these meetings, he’s learned a lot. Above all, he said, the one thing he would like to see at future meetings “is mass participation. I would want every parent in the district, every parent that has a student in the district, to be part of a forum.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to include the number of meetings held so far and to clarify the amount contracted for community engagement.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

With closures on the table, principals defend their schools before Philly board of ed

2024-09-20T15:52:25+00:00

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A parade of principals extolled the virtues of their schools Thursday to the Board of Education, moments before it took action to ramp up a comprehensive facilities study that is likely to result in at least several school closures across the city.

“We need you to … champion how great our public school system is [and] what active support can be provided to build student enrollment,” said Robin Cooper, the president of the principals’ union, the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators. “We need you to properly promote and cheer us on.”

Principals made up nearly half the 30 speakers who addressed the board, and several others were on the waiting list.

They outlined how their schools had robotics clubs, dance and drama programs, bands and choirs, even with small student populations. One rushed out of breath from a back-to-school meeting to address the board. Another pointed out that the district once deliberately invested in small middle and high schools as a learning strategy.

Despite the pleas, board members voted unanimously on two contracts totaling nearly $5 million and a resolution that will set the facilities process in motion.

“School systems, educational and community needs shift over time,” said Board President Reginald Streater, who noted that Germantown High School, his alma mater, closed in 2013, 100 years after it was founded, along with more than 20 other schools in a wrenching process. “We are clear that in order to be successful in achieving our goals, we must provide our students and schools the conditions they need to be successful. The facilities planning process is the next step in working towards these goals.”

Superintendent Tony Watlington said the new comprehensive facilities review – phase 8 of an initiative that started a decade ago – will optimize building utilization in a way that would offer more pre-kindergarten sites, allow the expansion of arts and physical education programs, bolster career and technical education programs, and generally improve academic rigor.

“We have a number of schools in the district that are significantly overenrolled and a number of facilities significantly underenrolled,” Watlington said. “We will address both of these issues in a facility plan that is focused on student achievement and in a manner that supports the community.”

Among other outcomes, Watlington said, he hoped the plan would allow all eighth graders access to algebra. It is currently available to students only at selected schools, highlighting inequities within the district. Algebra is a requirement for admission to Masterman, the district’s most selective high school.

Watlington said he planned to appoint a project team to oversee the process and promised that the district would hold several virtual and in-person listening and learning sessions, in collaboration with the mayor’s office, during October through December. A final plan will be completed between February and the fall of next year, he said.

Most, but not all, of the principals who spoke were from schools with low enrollments that presumably would be candidates for closure.

Loud cheers followed principal Sabrina Feggins’ plea for her school, Kearny Elementary, which has fewer than 200 students. Principal Aliya Catanch-Bradley of Bethune, a K-8 school with just over 400 students, dashed from a back-to-school night to give her testimony.

“We are just as good as any other school,” she said. “We are a school that takes back all of our children after all our charter school colleagues send them back to us … we don’t deny our students, we would never.” Her school, in a low-income North Philadelphia neighborhood, has just over 400 students.

Will Brown, principal of Parkway West, noted that schools like his – a small, experimental “school without walls” that dates back to the late 1960s – were founded specifically to be small and include real-world experiences into student learning.

“Rightsizing is a corporate term,” he said, adding that his school is among the “fastest improving in the state,” with test scores that have climbed above their pre-pandemic levels. “Our students are achieving and moving forward to become city leaders.”

Crystal Edwards, principal of WD Kelley school, recounted how student test scores, and student and teacher attendance have improved in her school, which has 222 students. Quoting Shakespeare, Edwards concluded, “Though she be but little, she is fierce.

While he didn’t testify at the meeting, Arthur Steinberg, the president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, issued a statement warning that this round of facilities planning “must not repeat the mistakes of the past,” and that the district must fully consult each school community before any decision is made. “Any attempt to repeat prior mass school closures … will be met with fury by the PFT,” Steinberg said.

The resolution passed by the board says that district-operated schools have a capacity of 180,000 students, but currently enroll 116,000. In addition, several district buildings that are now rented to charter schools have a capacity of nearly 20,000 students, but enroll less than 14,000.

The contracts were for DLR Group for nearly $4.5 million for planning services and $430,000 with Brownstone PR and Insight Education Group for community engagement.

Defending teacher Keziah Ridgeway

Several speakers spoke up against the district’s removal from the classroom of Northeast High School social studies teacher Keziah Ridgeway after the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia filed a complaint against her.

The complaint accused Ridgeway of antisemitism and a threat of violence, citing a social media post that included an emoji of a gun.

In emails sent to the Northeast community about the reassignment of a staff member, presumably Ridgeway, Northeast Principal Omar Crowder cites “statements made on social media that may violate school district policy.” The emails do not mention any classroom behavior or assignments.

Ridgeway has said she has been the victim of harrassment and threats against her in response to her pro-Palestinian views. In one classroom assignment, she asked students to compare a modern oppressed group’s use of art to Black spirituals. At a Black History Month assembly, she highlighted a video made by two students of a podcast about Palestinian art.

“I have witnessed a concerted effort to accuse teachers in the District, including Ms. Ridgeway…of endorsing anti-semitism and violence because of statements of sympathy for Palestinians and work with students in her classroom,” said retired English teacher Dina Portnoy. “These accusations are without any merit.”

The Board of Education also swore in new nonvoting student members Charles Rinker, Kenzy Ahmed, and Jake Benny.

Northeast student Hazel Heiko called Ridgeway “an amazing teacher who changed the way I act and think,” and called her removal a form of censorship. City Council member Nicolas O’Rourke submitted written testimony to the board calling the charges against Ridgeway “baseless.” State Representative Chris Rabb also submitted a statement saying “we must not allow students or educators to be attacked for discussing critical global issues.”

Without speaking about the Ridgeway case, Watlington announced that the district is launching an initiative with Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania, along with the organization Facing History and Ourselves, to promote a “dialogue of respect” in classrooms around contentious political issues.

Clarification Sept. 23: This story has been updated to clarify the circumstances of Northeast High school teacher Keziah Ridgeway’s reassignment.

Correction Nov. 15: This story has been updated to clarify which groups the district contracted with for community engagement.

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.

Chalkbeat’s guide to back-to-school-night meetings

2024-09-03T21:36:55+00:00

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Back-to-school-night meetings can be exciting for educators and parents. They are opportunities to form meaningful relationships, share goals for the new school year, and get everyone on the same page before classes kick into high gear.

But the start of a new school year can also bring some anxiety and uncertainty. Teachers are learning new names and personalities along with their mandatory curriculum requirements. Families are juggling school, work, and extracurriculars.

So we want to make this year’s back-to-school-night a little less daunting.

Chalkbeat asked more than a dozen teachers and parents: What makes a successful back-to-school meeting? What should parents be asking their child’s teachers? What do educators want parents to know?

Above all, Philadelphia families and educators said: Go in with an open mind, give each other grace, bring a pen and paper, and always leave with reliable contact information.

Here’s a guide and some conversation starters to hopefully make the best of your back-to-school-night:

Questions parents can ask teachers

What is your preferred communication method? How can I best reach you? Do you hold office hours?

Educators and parents are often on different schedules and have different levels of internet access or other connectivity. While it may not be possible to always adhere to everyone’s perfect scenario for getting in touch, Maritza Guridy, a parent with kids at Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School in the Nicetown neighborhood, recommended setting some clear guidelines: Do you prefer texting? Phone calls? Emails? Are there hours of the day when you will be unreachable except for emergencies?

What is your view on homework? How long should my child be spending on at-home assignments?

Teachers often have very different philosophies and expectations about homework. It’s good to know early if your child’s teacher has strict late policies, flexibility around absences, and how involved parents or caregivers should be with bigger projects and assignments.

How do you deal with discipline in the classroom? How can I be a partner in helping monitor my child’s behavior?

Knowing how your child’s teacher — and their school — approaches discipline is important. Many parents said it’s helpful to know at the start of the school year how an educator manages their classroom, consequences for late work, or misbehavior. Elaine Wells, a parent and grandparent, said caregivers and teachers can work in partnership to keep kids focused and motivated in class and at home.

How can I stay updated on my child’s progress without overwhelming you?

Wells said she’s a very involved parent and doesn’t just want to hear from a teacher when there’s been an incident or “when things are bad.” She said if her child or grandchild has done something really positive either academically or socially in the classroom, she would love to hear about it. If something concerning happens, Wells said she’d prefer to know early before she sees a failing grade on a report card or gets a call about consistent misbehavior.

Is there anything else I can do that will help you support my child?

Several parents told us they understand how overworked teachers may be — they’re often managing large class sizes, crumbling school buildings, and a lack of resources. There will likely be obstacles this school year and challenges to overcome. Parents and teachers should work together to support students through the difficult times — whether that’s school closures due to damaged asbestos, or implementing a new curriculum.

“I recognize that it’s not just on our teachers,” Wells said. “It’s about building a partnership.”

Toya Algarin, a teaching aide in the district and grandparent of seven, said the most important research a parent can do to help their child succeed in class is to get to know them, Algarin said. “Find out what makes them happy and what makes them tick,” she suggested. Then, share that information with their teacher as they’re getting to know your child.

However, if your child has important health or behavioral needs that impact their safety or ability to learn, it’s important to mention those to their teacher early.

And don’t forget to bring an apple, she said, to show you appreciate their efforts.

Questions educators can ask parents

What is the most reliable way to reach you?

The first step to staying connected to your child’s school is to make sure the phone number, email address, or other contact information is up to date and consistent. If you know you change numbers frequently, or you don’t always check your email, make sure the school has the number or email address of someone you trust who can pass along any important information.

If parents or caregivers are separated, make sure you inform your child’s school that they should be sending information to multiple people.

Do you know how to access and use the school’s communication tool, like ClassDojo app, Parent Portal, or Google Classroom?

Educators said they spend a lot of time making sure their apps are updated with grades, syllabuses, and often, many parents’ questions can be answered by checking that portal. If you’re uncomfortable using the app or need some help to navigate it, parents should ask if there are any resources or IT people at the school who can provide assistance.

Many public library branches also offer computer access and may have staff able to help parents use their school’s preferred communication platform.

Wells said she knows grandparents like her can sometimes struggle with new technology. Her advice is to try to log in to your school’s system before back-to-school night, so that if you encounter any issues you can resolve those early.

Can we make another appointment if we need an in-depth conversation about your child?

Philadelphia school district educator and parent Andrew Saltz said back-to-school night comes early in the year and requires teachers to have a lot of time-restricted introductory meetings. Saltz said parents should come prepared with general questions about classroom etiquette and expectations, but they should be wary of asking anything too specific about their child — their teacher may have only had a few days to get to know them. If parents have specific concerns or want a more in-depth, individualized conversation, they should bring their calendar and ask to set up a time for a more robust talk.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia school board denies charter school application for third time

2024-03-01T02:49:54+00:00

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Philadelphia Board of Education members voted to deny an application for a new charter high school Thursday night, citing declining academic performance data and several recent charter school closures in the city.

Board members voted 6-3 to deny the proposed Global Leadership Academy International Charter High School, which sought to enroll 150 students in ninth grade its first year and build up to 600 students in grades 9-12 by year five.

Board President Reginald Streater said the decision was a “hard one” because of the strong community support for the school. But he said he had too many concerns with the details of the application and cited his experience watching multiple charter schools “collapse” in recent years.

The board hasn’t approved a new charter school in the city since 2018. But Mallory Fix-Lopez, the board’s vice president, noted that the board has “expanded the charter sector by over 2,000 seats” since 2018. It remains to be seen whether the board’s stance on charters clashes with new Mayor Cherelle Parker’s vision for public education in the city.

Global Leadership Network CEO Naomi Johnson-Booker, a longtime Philadelphia educator, has tried for years to add a high school to the already existing two Global Leadership K-8 schools. But the board has repeatedly rejected her attempts.

One of GLA’s schools, Global Leadership Academy at Huey, is a Renaissance charter school. The district turned the school over to the network in 2016, but it has since failed to significantly improve student academic performance.

Peng Chao, chief of the district’s Charter Schools Office, presented academic data for GLA’s existing schools which shows sharp declines in the percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced proficient in English Language Arts and Math standardized tests from the 2017-18 school year to 2022-23.

Chao also noted the charter group’s proposed curriculum materials for high school English language arts, mathematics, and science “still do not fully demonstrate that the proposed charter school would meet all grade level requirements” set at the state level.

“There is a question there as to whether they would truly be able to achieve all of their academic requirements,” Chao said.

In defense of her schools’ performance, Johnson-Booker cited a flood in one of the school buildings that interrupted testing during one school year and the impacts of the pandemic that affected school performance nationwide.

Several students, parents, and elected officials testified in support of GLA and the proposed high school at the Thursday board meeting, saying the school community provides a safe and positive environment for students in the city.

But ultimately, board members said they had too many concerns with the application.

Board member Lisa Salley, who voted to approve the school, took a different view. She said the charter school office’s “analysis is anemic and needs work.”

The charter school approval process has come under fire in recent months for alleged bias against Black-led schools. However, an investigation found district leadership never deliberately discriminated against such schools.

In a statement following the vote, Ken Kilpatrick, a spokesperson for Global Leadership International, called the board’s decision “myopic and selfish” and said the organization “will be reviewing our legal options and will announce our next steps when prepared to do so.”

Logan Peterson, a spokesperson for the board, said the network can appeal to the state’s charter appeals board or resubmit their application.

Meanwhile, Parker’s assertions that “high quality” charter seats would be valued as much as traditional district seats during her tenure as mayor have raised questions as to whether the school board would begin approving charters again.

The board’s decision could have significant political ramifications. Parker has convened her Education Nominating Panel to consider reappointing or remaking the board to reflect her priorities. She’s given no signal yet whether she intends to replace any of the current members. Parker could decide to replace none, some, or all of them.

The next public meeting of the Education Nominating Panel is scheduled for March 12.

Board approves contracts for parent stipends, nurses

In addition to the charter decision, the board voted to approve more than $230 million in contracts for classroom furniture, payments for substitute nurses, stipends for parents who drive their kids to school, and more.

Here are some of the items included in those contracts:

$60 million for “furniture and classroom fixtures.”
$50 million for “educational resources” including textbooks, gym supplies, science materials, and other items. This does not include core curriculum items.
$10 million for ESS Northeast, LLC for payments to substitute nurses and other school staff.
$10.5 million for a contract with The Home Depot for custodial supplies and equipment.
$36 million for monthly payments to parents who drive their children to school. According to the district, there are approximately 14,000 households or parents that are enrolled in the program for the 2023-2024 school year.
$2.7 million for Catapult Learning, LLC and Littera Education, Inc. for a high-impact tutoring pilot in two middle schools serving grades 6-8 for the 4th marking period. (Less than 1% of students used these programs as of 2023.)
$10 million for furniture and equipment for “Digital Literacy Labs” including computers and “codeable robots.” According to the district, there are 113 elementary and middle schools that offer digital literacy in the city. The district wants an additional 74 schools to have access to these labs by the start of the next school year.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia teachers say they are passionate about their jobs but feel underpaid and overworked

2023-11-30T21:31:41+00:00

Philadelphia teachers feel supported by their school leadership, their students, and their colleagues, but nevertheless feel overwhelmed by their workload and the demands made on them.

And they think their own school is doing well, but they think the district as a whole is going in the wrong direction. They say they are passionate about their job, but think they are underpaid and overworked.

Those were among the key results of a survey of 734 district and charter school teachers conducted on behalf of Elevate 215, a nonprofit organization once called the Philadelphia School Partnership, which was a proponent of charter school expansion. There are more than 8,200 teachers in district schools and another several thousand in charters.

Asked to pick their top three concerns, teachers cited their workload (46%), unrealistic expectations around student achievement (41%), and inadequate salary or benefits (39%).

Based on responses to survey questions, teachers in charter schools are somewhat more satisfied with their jobs than those in district schools. For instance, 79% of charter school teachers said they were satisfied with the “vision and priorities established at my school,” compared to 64% of district teachers. And just 33% of district teachers expressed satisfaction with the condition of their facilities and level of resources, compared to 71% of charter teachers.

There were also key differences in attitude among veteran teachers versus their newer colleagues and between white teachers and those of other races, especially regarding whether they plan to stay in teaching over the long haul.

In one interesting finding, just 41% of teachers who have been in the district at least 16 years feel the district offers the possibility for a “rewarding career.” A higher proportion of those with five or fewer years’ experience, 52%, agreed with that statement.

In the survey, charter teachers, which according to the survey skew younger and have less experience, expressed higher levels of satisfaction with their salaries and working conditions.

Charter teachers also said by higher margins, 68% versus 41%, that they felt their “input matters” regarding school policies and practices.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said that the survey offered “no big surprises,” rather reflecting “concerns that I and my staff have been hearing from our members,” top among them being teacher salaries that are not keeping up with inflation. He said many PFT members leave for higher salaried jobs in suburban districts.

“Teachers indicated that they really like what they do, but want to be respected for what they do as well. We’ve been hearing that for a number of years,” he said.

He also said he wasn’t too surprised by the finding that charter school teachers, who are not unionized and tend to make less money, expressed somewhat higher satisfaction with their salaries. Many of them are new and in their first jobs, he said. “We were all excited when we got our first jobs,” he said.

Most teachers in Philadelphia are white and female, although based on the survey responses, there seems to be an uptick in male teachers and teachers of other races. For instance, 71% of the teachers surveyed with five or fewer years of experience are female, compared to 81% of those with 6-10 years and 82% of those with 11 years or more. Also, 49% of those in teaching for five years or fewer were white, compared to 67% of those with 6-10 years’ experience and 69% of those with more than that.

Teachers of color are also more likely to live in Philadelphia – 70% of Black teachers and 81% of Hispanic teachers, compared to 54% of those who are white. Teachers of color are also less likely to be fully certified, with 29% of Black teachers and 39% of Hispanic teachers having an emergency certification, compared to 6% of whites.

The survey was conducted between Sept. 27 and Oct. 9, with respondents recruited via email invitation. The margin of error is 3.6%.

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.

From attendance to academics, two award-winning Philadelphia principals discuss how they lead

2023-04-24T19:37:30+00:00

Lillian Izzard grew up in the Philadelphia neighborhood around Edison/Fareira High School in a single-parent family with five siblings. As a high school student at a Catholic school in the 1980s, she watched the construction of Edison, grand and modern for its day, in awe.

A 33-year veteran of the school district, Izzard is now Edison’s principal. As hard as the assignment is — given that her students generally come from low-income backgrounds and must deal with issues including addiction and violence — Izzard couldn’t be happier. Since her appointment less than a year ago, she has helped create an equity coalition at the school and helped students build constructive social connections.

“I had always wanted to be here,” she said.

About a mile away, Amanda Jones works as the principal of Luis Muñoz-Marin Elementary School, a K-8 school that serves as a feeder school for Edison/Fareira. Jones, the daughter of educators who grew up in integrated, middle-class Mount Airy, graduated from Masterman High School and has worked at the school for 10 years, where she’s overseen improvements in test scores and prioritized attendance and student government.

“The people in this building bring me joy,” she said.

For their work, Izzard, Jones, and five other principals won the Lindback Award for Distinguished Principals, the district’s most prestigious honor for school leaders. Each award, which the district presented last week, comes with $20,000 for principals to use to improve their schools. The two educators relish the chance to build relationships with families and children, and provide places of potential and stability, in one of the most challenging areas of the city.

When the principal’s job at Edison opened up last year, Izzard was principal of Fels High School in the Lower Northeast, a place she could have “happily retired from,” she said. But although she was initially reluctant to change jobs, she felt the pull of her old neighborhood and the challenge of leading Edison.

The school, in a neighborhood plagued by poverty, drugs and violence, has an enrollment of around 850, there is so much transience that many of the many of the students who started the school year at Edison aren’t the ones who finish it. Nearly a quarter of the students don’t speak English as their first language, and a quarter receive special education services.

After getting the job, she spent a month in the summer alone in the building, she said, planning and strategizing before teachers and students returned.

“I came with a vision. This is a school in my neighborhood that services a lot of students who look like me,” said Izzard, who is of Puerto Rican descent. “I wanted to create opportunities for them I would have liked to have for myself if I was a student here.”

Among the changes she made right off the bat: She reintroduced Spanish classes for native speakers, as well as Honors Spanish. She also took steps to integrate special education students into school activities, including into its media center and instructional trips to the community.

And the equity coalition she formed brings together students, staff, and administration to address community issues by “identifying and providing resources and opportunities” for those “who have been denied such from racial or gender disparities.”

Another major change she made of a different kind was to require students, and staff, to put their cell phones inside Yondr bags, which prevent them from being used during the school day. Despite some early resistance, the move has changed the school’s atmosphere. Izzard said teachers have told her how students are now more engaged in the classroom.

At the same time, she plans to use the Lindback money to create a “multi-purpose space” where students can expand their social networks, and explore how their passion for video games and other online diversions can lead to jobs in esports and the gaming industry.

“After months where students were not able to socialize in person,” Izzard wrote in a statement for the Lindback judges, referring to the pandemic, “gaming showed that students benefited by improving their creativity, memory and teamwork.”

”While she is close to being eligible for retirement, she said, “I don’t think I’ll be going out next year. I want to really take the school as high as I can take it before turning it over to someone else.”

Leading a school turnaround effort

Jones arrived at Muñoz-Marin as a teacher in 2013. Three years later, she helped fend off an effort to convert the struggling school to a charter as part of the district’s turnaround strategy under the School Reform Commission. She became principal in 2020.

Instead, she helped lead an internal turnaround effort that saw improvements in math and reading scores among students who, like Edison’s, live in a poverty-stricken neighborhood plagued by gun violence and addiction.

“We got new teachers to join the staff and introduced a new curriculum,” she said. “And we got a lot of funding that we didn’t have before.”

As principal of Luis Muñoz-Marin Elementary School, Amanda Jones has overseen an improvement in test scores and has used various strategies to try to improve attendance.

The money paid for more teachers, including interventionists for reading and math, a climate manager, a behavioral specialist, an additional counselor, “and mental health supports we didn’t have before,” Jones said.

Jones hasn’t just hired new staff, but kept educators at the school. This year, the district started the school year with more than 200 vacancies, but Muñoz-Marin had only one.

But the challenges in the school, which enrolls around 500 students, are great. Many of the students miss big chunks of the school year as families go back to Puerto Rico for months at a time. “Attendance is something we’re struggling with,” she said.

She has created incentives to encourage more regular attendance, including a family barbecue for those who met targets.

In addition, Jones has established a student government in which only students with good attendance are eligible. The student officers “are able to make decisions” about important issues, she said, and hold town hall meetings once a week.

While Jones comes from a family of teachers, she studied Communications at Bloomsburg University, changing her career focus after working with single mothers one summer. She said her experience at the school has helped her understand the importance of creating connections with the Muñoz-Marin community.

“It’s kind of interesting to lead in the building where you started,” she said. “For example, my eighth graders that are graduating, I was their kindergarten teacher. So I am very strong at [building] ties, especially with the families, just because I’ve been here for so long.”

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.

Damaged asbestos closed three Philadelphia schools this year. More could be coming.

2023-04-17T16:06:22+00:00

As Philadelphia education leaders confront a growing asbestos crisis, they also face a conundrum: The more they do to discover the extent of the problem and address it, the greater the impact on students.

And meanwhile, frustrated parents are demanding the district show them a way forward.

“What will be the plan in the future when these types of things occur?” said Sheila Johnson, whose daughter attends Building 21, which abruptly closed in March after the district discovered flaking asbestos and hasn’t reopened. “[District leaders] have already stated that yes, there may be other schools affected by this because of the older buildings. So what are you going to do?”

The recent discovery by inspectors that asbestos was routinely used in plaster in school buildings, which was not previously assumed, creates risk that the material could eventually become dangerous. And the accuracy of previous inspection reports that marked buildings safe with respect to asbestos has now been thrown into serious question.

Last week, Frankford High School and Mitchell Elementary School also closed their buildings to remediate flaking asbestos in plaster walls and ceilings. In letters to parents, district officials and the building principals said that both schools will remain closed for the rest of the school year and likely into the summer.

Such closures have spurred fears that a series of building shutdowns is looming in the district, where students are still trying to recover from disruptions to in-person learning caused by COVID. There’s also been a dispute between city and district officials about whether the district has kept parents and others adequately informed about asbestos-related issues, which have posed problems in aging Philadelphia schools for years.

After officials shuttered Building 21 — a small high school located in a 100-year-old former elementary school — due to damaged asbestos, most Building 21 students have been learning virtually. A few have opted for in-person learning at Strawberry Mansion High School, which is six miles away.

That virtual learning has not worked for many students.

“My daughter is sinking like a ship,” Johnson said of her 11th grader. She said virtual learning for two years during the pandemic pushed her child into a depression and now, the majority of her high school career will have been remote.

‘Incomplete or inaccurate’ reports on asbestos in schools

Scientific research has shown that breathing in asbestos fibers can cause certain diseases and increase the risk of certain cancers, including lung cancer and mesothelioma.

Previous estimates have determined that approximately 80% of Philadelphia schools were built prior to 1978 and are likely to contain asbestos. It was commonly incorporated into floor tiles, pipe insulation, and some paint and cement roofing in school buildings constructed prior to the 1970s.

A district statement on Friday said of the 321 school buildings in the city, 295 district buildings “have asbestos-containing materials.”

Undisturbed asbestos is not harmful, and it is only considered dangerous when it begins to flake. But other infrastructure problems — failing roofs, leaky windows, or faulty boilers that release steam — can compromise asbestos. And the district has suffered from years if not decades of deferred maintenance on buildings that on average are more than 70 years old — all of which makes the discovery that asbestos is also in most plaster more concerning.

Superintendent Tony Watlington said in a statement on April 7 that “in the coming weeks and months, we continue to anticipate that more damaged asbestos will be identified.” But the district’s facilities plan doesn’t say what it will do if more schools are closed for extended periods.

The most recent federally mandated report posted for Building 21 is from 2018-19, and showed asbestos in plaster at various locations, including the auditorium ceiling, but not throughout the school.

But the discovery of the material in plaster in Building 21 set off alarm bells, and spurred the district to retest in Frankford and Mitchell, the district said.

The plaster in Building 21 was for years marked safe by inspectors on building reports. The district now says those records were “incomplete or inaccurate,” throwing into question decades of inspection data.

Watlington, who is coming up on his first anniversary as superintendent, is facing a daunting challenge: The more the district investigates, the more damaged asbestos it’s likely to find. That means more school closures and asbestos remediation for a district that is already billions of dollars in arrears when it comes to facilities repairs, upgrades, and maintenance.

And according to the district’s facilities plan released late last month, 29% of its facilities workforce positions were vacant.

But what matters to Sonja Grant, another parent of a Building 21 student, is that “there was no consideration of parents” when the school first closed.

Grant said she wanted to respond to a survey, speak to school leaders at a roundtable, or otherwise open a dialogue with her school and the district.

But Grant said “they did not respect us enough or care enough to give us an option or ask ‘what would you like to see?’ or ‘how would you like us to move forward?’”

Philadelphia district response targeted by politicians

Asbestos is not a new issue for the district. In 2019 alone, several Philadelphia schools were forced to close because of damaged asbestos. In 2020, the district settled with a teacher who contracted mesothelioma for $850,000. And students and teachers have perennially fought for remediation efforts to make their buildings safe.

The federal Asbestos Hazardous Emergency Response Act, or AHERA, requires asbestos inspections in schools every three years. The AHERA reports, which are posted on the district website, say “NAD” — no asbestos detected — for most plaster walls and ceilings in Mitchell, Frankford, and Building 21.

Michelle Whitmer, an asbestos expert at The Mesothelioma Center who has written about the issue in Philadelphia schools for years, said plaster containing asbestos is considered a more dangerous type of asbestos product because of its “friability.” That means it can be easily crushed into a powder, releasing the dangerous fibers into the air.

That the plaster was originally noted as not containing asbestos is worrying, she said.

“To me that suggests that they may have not done proper testing to identify what was actually inside the material,” Whitmer said.

According to a district presentation to the City Council last month, the school system has a three-year, $24.2 million contract with Tetra Tech, a consulting and engineering firm, “to support and restructure the District’s Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act management program.” Tetra Tech took over management of the AHERA inspection process last August.

AHERA reports show Tetra Tech managed the Mitchell building inspection last December. Its report says no asbestos was detected in plaster walls and ceilings at the time. Investigators did detect asbestos in some floor tiles, pipe insulation and other areas.

Tetra Tech did not respond to several requests for comment.

In an April 7 statement, the district said identifying the problem is necessary and finding damaged asbestos is evidence of success.

“This is not an indication of the program failing, but rather the program is working to protect health and safety through the identification and management of environmental concerns,” the district said.

The statement also noted that the oldest buildings tend to have the most plaster, and that these buildings “have been prioritized in this plaster review.”

For some, that position represents an improvement in Philadelphia schools. Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said Watlington is being more “transparent” than leaders have in the past.

“So much over the years, has been swept under the rug,” Jordan said in an interview. “The buildings have been neglected forever. And I know that that sounds like an exaggeration, but it really isn’t.”

Monique Braxton, a district spokesperson, declined to answer specific questions about long-term plans regarding asbestos removal and school closure.

But other power players in the city say the district has fallen short. Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, a Frankford graduate, has suggested the city might withhold district funding until it shares a detailed asbestos plan, and cautioned that the district’s response could impact its state funding. And mayoral candidate Helen Gym blasted the district for “being reactive” instead of prepared.

“‘I’m just disappointed with the district in their handling of our children’s education,” said Johnson, the Building 21 parent.

Billions needed to address failing infrastructure in schools

The danger from asbestos in schools across the country continues to cause concern in the federal government and elsewhere. In recent years, there has been exposed asbestos in schools in cities like Chicago, New Orleans, and Berkeley, Calif.

In an interview, Mayor Jim Kenney said he was “disappointed” that the district had not alerted city officials earlier to the scope of the problem. “I wish we had known about this sooner,” he said.

But he added that the city is ready to help.

“I’m not an expert on asbestos, but we’ll do whatever we can to get these schools back online,” he said, which could include enlisting members of the construction trades to help with asbestos removal and abatement.

The district estimates that $4.5 billion is “required to address building systems that are either failing, damaged or beyond their service life.” Facilities reports say an additional $430 million is also needed to “address health hazards, risks, and life safety deficiencies.”

But regardless of what the district does next, parents like Johnson and Grant say they need to be at the table.

“We are rational people,” Grant said. “We want results and we want to be heard.”

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.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

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A unique Philadelphia school cultivates family members as staffers

2022-12-08T15:28:20+00:00

Kimberly Singleton was the parent of a student at Overbrook Educational Center in West Philadelphia when she lost her job at a billing company. Already an active volunteer at the school, she jumped at the chance when she saw an ad in the school newsletter for a classroom assistant.

Singleton got the job in February 2020 — an “interesting” time to start, she said, given the impending COVID pandemic — and when the school needed a substitute teacher, she suggested her daughter Kassidy apply. Now both of them work at the school, which Kassidy’s brother attended.

The Singletons are two of 11 staffers at the educational center with family ties to the school, where nearly a third of students are blind or visually impaired, according to its website. While other Philadelphia schools have family members working side by side, it’s “definitely unique” to have so many, district spokeswoman Marissa Orbanek said. And it’s not just a nice statistic. Principal Meredith Foote says the family culture, in which children see friends’ parents as teachers, staffers, and volunteers, “makes everything better.”

“When your child goes there or you’ve had a child go there, you treat everyone as if they were your child,” Foote told Chalkbeat. “It makes children want to come to school, and it makes adults want to be there for each other.”

“Family members want to come back, and we want to hire people who are invested in the children and in the community,” Foote told Chalkbeat.

The center started in the 1970s as a partnership with Overbrook School for the Blind, and has been accepting non-visually impaired students since the early 1990s, Foote said. The school accepts students via lottery, and there’s currently a waiting list, she said. The school boasts a high attendance rate, with 86% of students attending 95% or more school days, according to Foote.

The staffers said it’s the sense of family and community at the school, which has 278 students in grades K-8, that keeps them motivated. As a classroom assistant, Kimberly Singleton said, she encourages parents to stay involved.

“There’s a family atmosphere,” she said. “That’s what I always loved.”

A school’s welcoming policy for the community

School secretary Bonita Liles and her daughter, Love, are another mother-daughter pair at OEC.

Bonita Lyles was a secretary at a school in North Philadelphia when she started volunteering at OEC’s office. Lyles developed close relationships with school leaders and when the opportunity for a full-time position at the center came up, she applied and got the job.

Love Liles, a former OEC student herself, helps sixth to eighth graders with life skills as an aide, and is working toward her education degree. Love Liles is visually impaired herself, Foote said, so “they see someone they can look up to as a role model.” She said she plans to hire Love once she gets her degree.

“It’s wonderful working with her,” Bonita Liles said of her daughter. “I know where she is, and she knows where I am.”

Colleagues’ praise for Love Liles’ skills also brings her joy, she said. “I like hearing the positive feedback I get when they find out she’s my daughter,” she said. “She’s quiet with the kids, but stern. It warms my heart to know she’s thriving here.”

Love Liles said she appreciates the “small community” at OEC. “It’s a lot easier to get to know everyone,” she said. The atmosphere also fosters teamwork when there’s a big project coming up and helps with conflict resolution, she said.

“We’re really close with the community as well,” Bonita Liles said. Community connections “help the school a lot,” she said.

OEC climate staffer and parent Ellis Hamiel echoed that theme. “It’s almost like a small family,” he said. “We all work together to make sure the school’s running smoothly no matter what.”

Hamiel has three children at the school, and “they love it,” he said. One benefit of working at the school his children attend is that he can easily talk to teachers and keep up with lesson plans, he said.

Hamiel is active in Leaders of Tomorrow, one of several activities the school offers. He recruits male role models to come to the school and talk to boys about their experiences and how school helped them get where they are. His wife does the same for girls, he said.

“These people stay in contact with the kids,” Hamiel said. “That’s what’s keeping them focused on school. If they fail at something, we don’t turn our backs; we find ways to tutor them.”

The school has an “open-door” policy, and encourages family and community members to volunteer, Foote said. “If parents want to check in on their children, or a coach in the neighborhood wants to come in and help out, we do all of the volunteer paperwork necessary, but we’re encouraging as many extra hands as possible, because we always need help,” she said.

Meanwhile, students at the center get a kick out of seeing the mother-daughter Singleton duo at school, they said.

Kassidy said she’s asked questions like whether her mother did her hair that day. “I’m like, ‘No, I’m grown,’” she said. “I don’t think they understand: You still have parents when you’re grown.”

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.

Advocates call for Pennsylvania to send $100 million to 100 underfunded school districts

2021-04-16T01:12:44+00:00

Advocates for fair school funding in Pennsylvania announced a new campaign Thursday called “Level Up” that calls for the state to funnel $100 million in additional revenue to the 100 districts that lose the most under the current system for distributing state education aid.

They say it gives the legislature an “alternative” to boost funding to some of the poorest districts in the state, which includes Philadelphia and other urban areas. Many small rural districts are affected as well.

It comes as Republican legislative leaders show no signs of supporting Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposal to increase basic education aid next year by $1.5 billion and distribute the money based on a fair funding formula adopted by the legislature five years ago but only used for new money. Now, just 11% of the aid is distributed that way. Legislators limited use of the formula because some districts, primarily those with shrinking enrollment, would have lost significant revenue.

Pennsylvania ranks 44th in the state share of total education spending, which puts more burden on local property taxes. And it has the worst disparities of any state between its wealthy and poor districts.

Level Up is a coalition of children’s and students’ rights advocates, educator associations, research and policy groups, and civil rights organizations who want Pennsylvania to invest more money in schools.

“Our coalition is supportive of the governor’s plan to boost funding and address equity,” said Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center. This idea, she said is “an alternative approach that immediately begins to address the needs of the state’s most underfunded districts.”

Representative Michael Schossberg, an Allentown Democrat, introduced legislation that would create a mechanism for distributing any additional pot of money.

Schlossberg was one of several people, including superintendents, teachers and students, who detailed the consequences of inequitable education spending in Pennsylvania.

“My wife is a teacher in Allentown and her school was built in the 1870’s,” he said. Allentown is only now starting to ease into in-person learning while neighboring districts have been open for months.

In his wife’s classroom, “her [ventilation] system is a window, if it opens,” he said. Parkland High School, just blocks away but in an adjacent district, is in a modern building with separate wings for arts and music programs, he said.

What makes the Level Up approach different, he said, “is that it has more of a chance of passing” than the governor’s proposal.

Frank Dalmas, superintendent in the tiny impoverished Sto-Rox district outside Pittsburgh, said he has consistently been forced to cut services.

“This is a tool in the tool box for lawmakers….a principled way to drive money... to districts that need it the most,” he said.

The $100 million Level Up money would be driven through the fair funding formula, which is based on enrollment and takes into account a district’s poverty, taxing capacity and other factors.

Pennsylvania schools, like others around the country, are getting federal pandemic relief money. But that is temporary, and won’t fix the embedded inequities in the system, the advocates say.

Tomea Sippio-Smith, the K-12 education policy director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, another of the advocacy groups supporting the Level Up campaign, called it a “pragmatic” approach to getting needed money to struggling districts.

“At this rate, it will take decades and decades” for districts to achieve adequate and equitable funding, she said.

ELC, along with the Public Interest Law Center, is suing the state on behalf of six school districts and several parents to force it to distribute education dollars more equitably and assure that all students have adequate resources. The suit, the first in decades to get this far, is scheduled for trial in September. Pennsylvania judges have consistently ruled in past cases that education funding is a political, not judicial, matter.

But even if the suit is successful, it could be years before the funding system actually changes.

The 100 most underfunded districts educate disproportionately more of the state’s Black and Latino students. Earlier this month some Democratic legislators used the April 4 anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to pull together a coalition of city officials, advocates, students and teachers to support Wolf and call for revamping how education is funded in Pennsylvania and for a significant increase in the state’s contribution.

State Senator Vincent Hughes, a Philadelphia Democrat, called the state’s system racist and unconstitutional.

“The funding of education in Pennsylvania is separate and unequal,” said Hughes, who organized the event. “Pennsylvania is one of the worst states in the nation in terms of how it funds an adequate basic education.”

Despite nonrenewal, one Philadelphia charter school remains hopeful

2020-12-23T23:53:46+00:00

Administrators at Universal Daroff Charter School in West Philadelphia are appealing the decision by the city’s Board of Education to not renew its charter status.

Though it’s unclear when the Charter Appeals Board in Harrisburg will rule, the school is optimistic about the outcome.

Penny Nixon, superintendent and CEO of schools at Universal, said their students are learning. “This notion that we cannot educate our children is false and must be addressed.”

Daroff prides itself in educating students who come from some of the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. Located at 56th and Vine in West Philadelphia, it’s one of two charter schools under the Universal umbrella slated for closure. The other is Universal Bluford, at 57th and Media in the Carroll Park section of West Philadelphia.

Universal has joined a coalition of Black-run charters in Philadelphia claiming systemic bias has led the school district to recommend their closure or non-renewal, at a much higher rate than other schools. They say that Black and Latino charter leaders operate 19% of the charter schools in the city, yet account for 87% of those recommended for closure or non-renewal in recent years.

Bluford and Daroff have underperformed their peers on academic and management measures. The charter office rated both the lowest among the district for finances and administration. Both district reviewers and classroom observers noted poor board practices and “mixed” levels of quality instruction and student performance.

Nixon argued that both Bluford and Daroff outperform schools serving a similar demographic. She’s confident that a fair comparison with district neighborhood schools would show Universal Bluford and Daroff deserve applause and appreciation.

“Our schools are not perfect, and there are minor operational issues that we have addressed,” she said. “However, there is nothing that substantiates a non-renewal recommendation given the great work that we have done turning around both schools that were failures under the school district.”

She said the renewal system is broken and that any bias must be eliminated.

James Ruffin, Daroff’s principal, acknowledged the school faces some behavioral problems. ”But if you look at Daroff students, they are hungry for knowledge and they want what every student wants,” Ruffin said. “I also want to dispel the myth that our parents don’t care about their kids. They want the best for their kids.”

Nixon alleges the Charter School Office did not follow its own process by failing to send both schools in writing its final non-renewal recommendation before making it public.

In an April 9 email, the Charter Schools Office stated that it didn’t send the reports because it hadn’t been informed nor could it identify the CEO of either school.

“This claim by the CSO was both puzzling and inaccurate,” Nixon said.

“In my capacity as superintendent of Universal Schools, I have been the CSO’s point of contact for both schools for their previous charter renewals and the recipient of the ACE [Annual Charter Evaluation] reports for both schools for the past five years,” she said. “Therefore, it is not clear as to why the CSO would not have sent the reports to me or at least have contacted my office to ascertain where the final reports should be sent.”

Philadelphia has more than 80 charter schools, enrolling more than 75,000 students.

Daroff and Bluford together serve 1,250 students. The schools are among the city’s Renaissance charters, which are public charter schools and can only enroll students from their neighborhoods.

When they ran Philadelphia schools, the state and the School Reform Commission created the Renaissance Schools initiative in 2010 to try to turn around low-performing elementary and middle schools. But 10 years later, critics who say Renaissance campuses remain low performing have pushed for abolishing the initiative.

“Remote learning takes a tremendous amount of effort,” Ruffin said. “The silver lining has been my teachers and students are learning so much more about technology and platforms, that once we go back to face to face it will push our entire program to the next level.”

The school teaches from an online program called i-Ready that also enables it to test students to see what they’ve learned and how well they’re meeting state standards, said Katie Hollenbach, assistant principal at Daroff.

“The program is used to supplement the core curriculum and as an additional resource for targeting diverse learners and skill sets. It also helps the school diagnose and tier instruction based off of students’ needs,” Hollenbach said.

Nixon believes the charter schools will win their appeals.

“Universal feels strongly that when the charter school law is applied fairly and impartially by objective reviewers both Bluford and Daroff charters will be renewed,” Nixon said, “because renewal for both schools is what is fair, just, and equitable.”

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