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The Philadelphia school district released a long-awaited data repository Wednesday that officials say will help guide decisions about which schools it will close and which ones it will invest in.
But for those waiting for concrete information on how school data will inform the district’s facilities plan — and which schools it will shutter — details remain scant.
The data website includes information on school enrollment and capacity, and gives schools utilization scores from “severely underutilized” to “severely overcrowded.” It also scores schools on a 100-point scale for building condition, neighborhood vulnerability, and whether a school’s space meets the needs of students. Schools receive ratings per category between “unsatisfactory” and “excellent” based on those scores.
However, the calculations behind those scores are unclear. If a school’s building quality is rated as “poor,” that means a building requires “moderate repairs,” according to the district’s data FAQ. But that could be because of a lack of adequate air conditioning, or the presence of toxic materials like friable asbestos or lead. Or it could mean the building’s electrical system is outdated.
The data shows the scope of many schools’ problems. Forty buildings are rated as having an “unsatisfactory” building condition. Fifty-five are enrolled at less than 50% capacity.
District officials say an “unsatisfactory” score does not mean a school will close, but that instead it will help officials understand different needs.
“This is the first time that we have one repository with all of our data that informs what the needs are,” said Deputy Superintendent Oz Hill. “It really paints a very broad and comprehensive picture, or mosaic, of what the school’s needs are, where we’ve been making investments, and how we move forward with this process.”
On mobile devices, the dashboard was difficult to view when it launched; graphics often overlapped, for example.
Throughout the facilities planning process, which began in 2022, Superintendent Tony Watlington has repeated that the aim of the facilities plan is to provide more resources and better opportunities to all public school students. The data, he said, will help ensure the district spends its limited resources well. He also said he can’t provide further details about how the district weighs different factors.
“We’ve got to better utilize our budgets, our people, our buildings, all of our resources in service of providing more high quality academic and extracurricular programming across all the neighborhoods of Philadelphia,” Watlington told reporters in a briefing before the data release. “That’s what this is about.”
The district began sharing initial data during more than a dozen community engagement meetings over the summer at schools across the city. Many educators and families Chalkbeat spoke with said they appreciated learning more about the process. But some voiced concerns that the district’s data did not accurately reflect their schools.
District officials said they met with principals over the summer and walked through dozens of schools to ensure the data is accurate. Some updates are now apparent.
At a community meeting over the summer, for example, the district’s handouts showed that Feltonville Arts & Science middle school was at 62% utilization, with 542 students enrolled in a building meant for 874. But many educators connected with the school said that did not seem accurate. In the new data release, Feltonville Arts & Science’s capacity is listed as 756, and its utilization score is 72%.
District officials say they plan to host more engagement sessions this fall, and have met with principals to explain how they can share information with families.
Time is limited. Watlington said the district still plans to share recommendations for which schools to close, colocate, repurpose, and modernize to the Board of Education this fall. They plan for the board to vote on the recommendations by the end of the year and roll out changes starting next school year. Some recommendations, he said, will be phased in over a longer term.
Still, Watlington said, “there are no fixed decisions at this point.”
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.
