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The School District of Philadelphia is knee-deep in a process to close, colocate, and renovate schools in the coming years. And district officials say they want to hear more public feedback on how that process is going.
This month, the district announced it would delay the release of a draft plan outlining proposed outcomes for every school, in order to gather more community responses through a survey it launched this week. Superintendent Tony Watlington told City Council members on Tuesday that such a plan would be put before the school board sometime this winter.
“We know that many of the district’s aging and unequal facilities are underenrolled or overenrolled,” Deputy Superintendent of Operations Oz Hill told reporters on Monday ahead of the survey’s release. “This process seeks to more efficiently use our limited staff and facility resources to improve and enhance the quality of education for our students.”
Over the past year, district employees and consultants have hosted some 47 “public listening and learning sessions” and have received over 5,700 responses to an earlier survey about the closure process. But many parents, advocates, and community members say despite all that, the process has come across as vague, frustrating, and overly controlled.
Parents and neighbors at an event Chalkbeat hosted in partnership with Germantown Info Hub last month said it felt like the district was front-loading community engagement early on without providing tangible information about plans for each neighborhood school.
What they want, community members said, is to know what the future holds for their school, not general information about district-wide processes. And they want time to weigh in on those individual school plans before anything is set in stone.
District spokesperson Alex Coppadge told reporters on Monday that principals have made it clear that school-level engagement and partnership will be critical once the draft plan is released.
“We get it. People want to know exactly what’s happening to their specific circumstance, and so we want to be empathetic towards that” Coppadge said. “We want to create space and ample time to make sure that whatever that engagement looks like, is thoughtful, is meaningful, allows us the opportunity to take their feedback back and really try to move forward as partners.”
Once the district releases plans for individual schools, Coppadge said there will be an “extensive engagement period,” but declined to say how long and when that would be.
“I know that it will not be a rushed process, and that we will try to do it as thoughtfully and meaningfully as possible,” she said.
You can respond to the new district survey here.
Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.
