Chalkbeat

Here’s who could be chosen for the new Philadelphia Board of Education

2024-03-13T00:06:34+00:00

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The Philadelphia Board of Education will have at least two new members, according to a list of candidates submitted to Mayor Cherelle Parker.

The 13-member Education Nominating Panel voted to approve its shortlist of 27 finalists at a public meeting Tuesday evening. The list includes former teachers and administrators, education advocates, business leaders, and labor union officials and appears to represent a range of ages and neighborhoods.

Otis Bullock Jr., chair of the panel, said the group was “just looking for diversity all around the board.”

“You need some folks on here with some gravitas … and legislative experience,” Bullock said. He added if the school district is looking to legislators in Harrisburg for additional funding for the cash-strapped district, “you need some folks that know how to do that.”

Parker’s board picks will have the power to set the education agenda in the nation’s eighth largest school district. Board members can authorize or deny new charter schools, hire and evaluate superintendents, guide curriculum decisions, and approve the district’s $4.5 billion budget.

Seven of the names on the panel’s list are current board members, but board Vice President Mallory Fix-Lopez and Julia Danzy were not on the list. Earlier this month, Fix-Lopez unexpectedly announced she would be resigning, and Danzy had previously indicated she would not be reapplying.

Which candidates Parker chooses to sit on the board — in conjunction with her budget proposal expected to be released on Thursday — will signal her education priorities for the city.

Parker has indicated she may be more open to expanding the charter school sector than her predecessor Jim Kenney. The school board has not approved a new charter school since 2018. Charters, which are publicly funded but privately run, now educate upwards of 70,000 students in Philadelphia, about a third of those enrolled in tax-supported city schools.

Indeed, many of the public comments at Tuesday’s meeting included calls for more charter seats and resources for those schools, a fair authorization process, and an end to charter school closures.

Many of the written comments, which were read aloud at the meeting, were identically worded, and echoed something Parker has said. She wants to eliminate the “us vs. them mentality” between district-run and charter schools.

Despite speculation that Parker’s nominating panel would try to load the shortlist with pro-charter activists, few of the 27 people on the list appear to have direct or deep connections to charter schools.

This is the first full school board nomination process since 2018, when former Mayor Kenney chose his nine appointees to replace the School Reform Commission. It had governed the city school district since 2001, when the state took over the district citing financial and academic distress. Since then, Kenney appointed a few additional members to replace some who resigned.

Lee Huang, a former board member, said Tuesday he would not “sugarcoat” that serving on the board was challenging at times. The position is unpaid, demanding, and comes with intense public scrutiny.

“It was long hours …. and you’ll get yelled at,” Huang said. “That’s part of the job.”

Parker will choose nine people (or request more names if she is not happy with the 27) and send those to City Council, which will hold public hearings. With its approval, the board members will take their seats starting May 1.

In alphabetical order, here’s the list. The mayor’s office provided biographies for each candidate.

Sarah-Ashley Andrews (current board member)
Nakia Carr
Timothy Crowther
Crystal Cubbage
Leticia Egea-Hinton (current board member)
Cindy Farlino
Mark Gittelman
Cheryl Harper
Keola Harrington
Michael Henderson
Jameika Id-Deen
David Irizarry
Dominique Johnson
Whitney Jones
ChauWing Lam (current board member)
Letisha Laws
Maddie Luebbert
Colleen McCauley
Cheryl Mobley-Stimpson
Wanda Novales
Michelle Palmer
Lisa Salley (current board member)
Marisa Shaaban
Joan Stern
Reginald Streater (current board president)
Cecelia Thompson (current board member)
Joyce Wilkerson (current board member)

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

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

Philadelphia teachers protest punishments for taking non-consecutive sick days

2024-02-29T23:55:53+00:00

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Philadelphia teachers fed up with a district policy that penalizes them for taking contractually guaranteed sick days decided to share their feelings publicly this week.

About 50 district employees rallied outside the Philadelphia school district headquarters ahead of the school board meeting on Thursday, demanding the district withdraw its policy that disciplines teachers for accumulating non-consecutive sick days, even though the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers’ contract with the district includes 10 sick days.

The rally represents an escalation by educators who are unhappy with the policy, which is also known as the occurrence policy or “3-5-7-9,” and comes after a year-long campaign organized by the Caucus of Working Educators, which is a group within the union. Nearly 2,000 PFT members, out of roughly 13,000 total members, signed a petition from the caucus against the policy.

Chanting teachers wore red union T-shirts and held custom signs declaring things like: “3-5-7-9 is dehumanizing.”

Charlie Hudgins, an algebra teacher at Lincoln High School who attended the rally, said the policy just “doesn’t make sense.” Hudgins is one of a number of teachers who have expressed showing up to school unwell to avoid discipline.

This week, Hudgins said he was hit with a stomach bug. He went in anyway, with a fever and a face mask. “I didn’t want anyone to give me any trouble for it,” Hudgins said.

In a statement to Chalkbeat, the district said that “the goal of these conversations is to encourage attendance and provide support when needed.” It also said suspension or termination for poor attendance is “extremely rare” and that no teacher “should come to work when they are sick.”

At Thursday’s board meeting, Superintendent Tony Watlington said, “We do not expect any teacher to come to school with the flu or to ignore a personal or family emergency ... for any teacher in the district who feels like they’ve been treated inappropriately …make that known in writing.”

Last January, Watlington told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board that the policy could be revised. The teachers union reached a tentative agreement with the district on a new contract this week, but it doesn’t include any changes to the occurrence policy, according to the union.

A single occurrence is one instance of taking sick time — taking one to three sick days in a row counts as one occurrence. If a teacher takes a sick day on a Tuesday, comes in on Wednesday, and takes another sick day on Thursday, that counts as two occurrences.

The occurrence policy features gradually escalating punishments for non-consecutive sick days.

After three occurrences, the policy directs administrators to hold an informal meeting with the teacher and give them a memo. By five occurrences, an administrator leaves a “warning memo” in the employee’s file. After seven occurrences, the teacher attends a formal meeting and gets a formal write-up in their file. By the ninth occurrence, the instructor receives another formal write-up, a suspension recommendation, and meetings with a principal and another higher-level administrator.

Any more absences could lead to suspension or termination.

The Caucus of Working Educators has been sharing teachers’ experiences on its social media pages, too. According to the posts, one teacher was “docked occurrences” for using sick days for cancer treatment, another was warned after taking sick days for prenatal appointments. And one instructor was penalized for taking sick time after their mother died.

Shira Cohen, a seventh grade math teacher at Feltonville School of Arts and Sciences and the school’s union representative, said the district’s description of the policy contradicts how it looks in practice.

“We work in a really punitive district, despite all of the messaging that they might put out,” Cohen said.

Cohen said she has often avoided scheduling doctors appointments over health concerns. “I was constantly in fear of this occurrence policy,” Cohen said. “I was not well. I couldn’t do my job.”

Cohen and Hudgins both said the policy drives teachers to leave the job. The district had close to 400 vacancies at the start of this school year.

Dan Reyes, an organizer with Caucus of Working Educators, said to the crowd at Thursday’s rally that “it’s a damn shame” that it isn’t addressed in the tentative contract, “but we aren’t going to wait for someone else to address it.”

The district also said in its statement this week it will “review” its processes related to the occurrence policy after this school year.

All of the school board members declined Chalkbeat’s request for comment. But during a December meeting, board Vice President Mallory Fix-Lopez said the policy “de-professionalizes the space that teachers work in.”

The overall message it sends to teachers, Cohen said, is: “Your health does not matter ... your humanity is not a priority to us.”

Correction: Feb. 29, 2024: A previous version of this story referred to the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers as the source of the petition against the occurrence policy. The petition came from the Caucus of Working Educators.

Sign up for Chalkbeat’s monthly text updates on the Philadelphia Board of Education

2024-01-23T14:57:46+00:00

Want to stay up to date on the latest news from the Philadelphia Board of Education and be able to text all your school board questions to Chalkbeat’s journalists? Sign up for Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s free texting service.

Our bureau sifts through agendas and documents, attends board meetings, and interviews Philly leaders, educators, and community members before and after the meetings. We report the important school board votes and decisions and tell the stories of the people affected by those decisions.

And with our texting service, you’ll always stay in the loop on the latest Philadelphia school board news.

This is one more way our team works to keep you informed, spark conversation, and inspire you to take action. Our team wants to hold district officials accountable for doing right by their students while also sharing what’s important to students, parents, and teachers.

Here’s how it works:

Sign up by texting SCHOOL to 215-709-9650 or enter your phone number into the box below.

Once you sign up, you’ll get a reminder text before each meeting plus a text after the meeting with the relevant news, and an occasional text when there is additional school board news.

Plus, the texts are a direct line to our journalists. If you have questions you don’t see the answers to, you can text back and ask us.

The Philadelphia school board typically meets the last Thursday of every month at 440 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, 19130. You can learn more about the board, view its meeting schedule, and learn about public comment here.

Caroline Bauman is the deputy managing editor of engagement at Chalkbeat. Reach her at cbauman@chalkbeat.org.

North Philadelphia hails opening of T.M. Peirce, its first new public school building in 70 years

2023-12-21T20:12:57+00:00

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It was, Kendra Brooks said, a long fight.

She and other activists had advocated for years for a new school in their North Philadelphia neighborhood to replace the old T.M. Peirce Elementary building, which was built in 1909. But their pleas went unheeded — until a building engineer discovered flaking asbestos, causing community outcry.

Similar conditions at other schools have led to prolonged building shutdowns recently. In T.M. Peirce’s case, the district determined that the old building was so full of hazards like lead and mold that it had to be demolished. The Board of Education voted in September 2021 to replace it.

And on Wednesday, officials including outgoing Mayor Jim Kenney, Board of Education members, and Superintendent Tony Watlington celebrated the opening of a modern, $44 million school in one of the city’s most challenged neighborhoods, where about a third of residents live below the poverty line.

Peirce teachers and students will start using the new building in January, right after the holiday break. They have been located so far this school year in the nearby Pratt Elementary School, which closed in 2013 but has been retrofitted to serve as “swing space” while other schools undergo renovation or construction.

In fact, the new T.M. Peirce Elementary is the first new school built in North Philadelphia in 70 years, Watlington pointed out. (As of last year, the average public school building in the city was over 70 years old.)

“This school building says something about what we value for our students,” he said Wednesday.

Zamyrah Wicks, 8, left, and Ayaan Cole, 8, at the new T.M. Peirce Elementary School on Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023, in Philadelphia. Officials hailed the new school building as a big step forward for North Philadelphia.

The building at 22nd and West Cambria Street can accommodate 625 students in grades K-6, and features furniture and rooms designed for collaborative work, as well as an auditorium and cafeteria with all the most modern amenities.

The message to the students, Kenney and other officials said, was that they matter as much as those in affluent areas “like Lower Merion and Radnor.”

City Councilmember Cindy Bass grew up in the neighborhood, and described as a student moving from school to school as one after another closed. Now, she said, this state-of-the-art school “is the standard” for education. T.M. Peirce Principal Anthony Gordon called it “a historical moment in North Philadelphia.”

Kenney used the ceremony to tout the $1.5 billion increase in city funding for schools during his tenure. Board of Education President Reginald Streater called the new school a “down payment” that would help future generations.

And State Sen. Sharif Street called the investment a matter of educational equity, citing the recent Commonwealth Court ruling that the school funding system in Pennsylvania is unconstitutional and inequitable for low-income areas like the community around Peirce. .

“Our young people are worth it. They deserve this building,” said.

Meanwhile, architect Kevin Blackney, whose firm designed the building, said that the school was designed by the community. “You don’t know how rewarding that is,” he said.

Members of the Dobbins High School marching band serenaded the crowd at the festive ceremony.

Among those in attendance was Joan Monahan, 88, who graduated sixth grade from Peirce in 1946 after serving as the leader of the student body, she said. Her daughter designed the child-friendly furniture at the new school.

Brooks worked with Sylvia Simms, Quibila Divine, and Shakeda Gaines as part of a formidable contingent of North Philadelphia women to get the new T.M. Peirce built. Their fight rippled across the city’s politics and civic life.

In 2017, Brooks rode the campaign, as well as other battles on behalf of children in the neighborhood, to a seat on the City Council, where she still serves.

Simms’ advocacy got her an appointment to the School Reform Commission, which ran the district when it was under state control until 2017, where she continued to fight for a new school. Divine now works to help homeless citizens through the Urban Affairs Coalition, and Gaines is a deputy chief of staff in Brooks’ council office.

Speakers at Wednesday’s ceremony acknowledged their presence and their role. “We never gave up,” said Simms after the ceremony.

Students filled up the first two rows of seats in the auditorium after the ceremonial ribbon cutting in their spiffy navy blue uniforms with a logo on the chest that read: “T.M. Peirce, 21st Century Learning.”

“This is a first class, state-of-the-art facility just for you,” Brooks told them. “Take advantage of it.”

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

This is the Pennsylvania tax break that keeps causing controversy on Philadelphia’s school board

2023-12-13T22:07:07+00:00

Some of the biggest and best-known development projects in Philadelphia are powered in part by a state tax break called the Keystone Opportunity Zone.

The Navy Yard in South Philly, Schuylkill Yards in University City, and the massive new Bellwether District at the former PES refinery are all part of the program, which was created in the late 1990s to spur redevelopment of post-industrial buildings and properties around Pennsylvania.

What does the program do? In short, KOZs eliminate almost all state and local taxes for the owners of the designated parcels and businesses in the zones.

State officials have described it as “one of the nation’s boldest and most innovative economic and community development programs.” Supporters say it’s an essential tool for clearing blight, reinvigorating dormant land that might otherwise be too expensive to redevelop, and inducing employers to come to or remain in Pennsylvania rather than being enticed to other states with their own generous incentive programs.

How well it accomplishes those goals, and at what cost, is unclear.

While the program is overseen by the state Department of Community and Economic Development, no one keeps track of exactly how many new jobs it creates, or how much lost tax revenue the KOZs cost each year.

With few obligations attached to the designation, many property owners receive tax abatements for a decade or longer while their sites remain partly or wholly undeveloped.

Initially just an effort to revive 12 properties across the commonwealth, the program has morphed into a huge program covering more than 2,000 parcels, including some that were already being developed or are in economically booming neighborhoods.

There are currently 287 zones in Philadelphia, according to the city Department of Commerce. Their use as a general-purpose economic development incentive has led to battles over designations that seemed to favor one politically connected developer over another — and some have criticized it for threatening to sap the school district of badly needed tax revenues.

From a dozen to thousands of tax breaks

Inspired by a similar program in Michigan, the Pennsylvania Legislature created the Keystone Opportunity Zone program in 1998, under Gov. Tom Ridge. The initial legislation created 12 areas, before subsequent legislation permitted many more.

The property owners get a real estate tax abatement, and businesses located on KOZs don’t have to pay most state and local taxes for the period of designation, which is usually between 10 and 15 years and can be renewed. (In Philadelphia, however, they do have to pay the wage tax for employees.)

Each designation area must be approved by the state — and by local entities that stand to lose tax revenue. In Philadelphia, that’s City Council and the Board of Education.

Over time, the rules for KOZs were eased.

For example, the original law required a company located in a KOZ to either boost employment by 20% or invest at least 10% of its previous year revenue to receive the tax abatements. After the turn of the millennium, that rule was changed. To get the tax break, a tenant firm had only to sign a lease covering the duration of the zone and spend at least 5% of the previous year’s revenue on rent.

State: It’s impossible to collect data to assess the program cost

The KOZ program is often criticized for poor transparency and accountability, and a lack of clarity about how to measure its success. The state initially hired the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy in Pittsburgh to monitor the program but ended the arrangement in 2002.

“They weren’t really interested in whether it did any good, and that’s a shame,” the institute’s president Jake Haulk later told the Inquirer.

In 2009, a state legislative committee tried to review the program, but ended up without a firm conclusion — saying that the Department of Community and Economic Development didn’t provide reliable data.

The DCED claimed the program had created 63,966 new jobs and retained over 48,158 jobs, but reviewers concluded the data was “substantially overstated and not supportable.” The agency didn’t calculate the program’s cost in lost taxes, and declined to release the value of tax credits received by a sample of KOZ participants.

The committee report also noted that, 10 years into the program, about 70% of approved KOZ acreage statewide remained undeveloped and many participants “received KOZ benefits without having to create jobs or generate capital investment.”

Philadelphia had 2,755 KOZ acres at the time, of which 53% were undeveloped.

State officials said it would be expensive and difficult to collect tax data for all of the state’s hundreds of KOZs, and impossible to disentangle the program’s job-creation and development effects from those of other incentive programs.

City: Yes, but we can estimate — and it could take 50 years to pay off

One of the few substantial efforts to analyze KOZs — at least those in Philadelphia — was conducted in 2014 by then-City Controller Alan Butkovitz.

He concluded that the program created a major tax burden for a meager return, WHYY’s PlanPhilly reported. It had so far cost the city and school district more than $380 million in abated business and property taxes, he found, while netting $132 million in wage taxes from 617 participating businesses.

More than 70% of that came from businesses that were already paying wage taxes before, rather than new enterprises.

By analyzing tax data, Butkovitz calculated the KOZs had created 3,700 jobs, with the city waiving more than $100,000 in tax revenue for each one. At an average salary of $50,000 per job, it would take more than 50 years of wage taxes for those new jobs to pay for themselves.

Like the state legislative committee, the controller concluded that “the records necessary to provide adequate oversight of the KOZ program largely do not exist.”

IRS rules barred the city from releasing participants’ tax bills, and the only direct data on job creation was self-reported by the businesses.

The city’s Department of Commerce also commissioned a report in 2019 on the program’s costs and benefits.

From 2008 and 2017 Philadelphia had foregone between $40 million and $125 million each year in two types of business taxes, the BIRT and NPT, or $645 million total in 2019 dollars, the report said. A breakdown of the 2016 data showed that financial services firms received 70% of the BIRT abatements that year.

When other types of taxes were included, the total value of abatements over those 10 years was $627 million, while city revenues from wage, sales and other taxes from the KOZ businesses was $462 million, the analysis found. Looking over a 15-year period, the report projected $676 million in revenues, or $49 million more than the KOZs cost, and argued that meant the city would see a 10% return on its investment.

The larger businesses in KOZs together reported employing the equivalent of 9,025 full-time employees, the report said. That figure was not independently verified, and the report did not say how many of those were newly created jobs.

The study concluded that KOZ status had some influence on where businesses decided to locate, but the financial services firms that received most of the benefit created few jobs and there was no mechanism for ensuring participants delivered broader public benefits beyond developing the parcels.

It recommended approving KOZs only where new development would not occur anyway; providing prospective tenants with clearer estimates of the benefits of locating in a KOZ; changing laws to allow cities to offered tailored payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) plans to KOZ businesses; and limiting use of the program by companies that produce few jobs. The city has since established PILOTs for some of its KOZs to compensate for the loss of school district revenues.

What defines ‘blight’ when applying for a tax break?

Around 2004, Gov. Ed Rendell proposed designating proposed office tower projects in Philadelphia as KOZs, provoking a stormy debate.

Critics argued using the designation for downtown office towers would benefit politically connected developers and wealthy law firms, favor new buildings over old ones, and continue to move jobs around rather than boosting overall employment.

At the time, there were at least 112 existing KOZ properties in Philadelphia exempted from real estate taxes, per the Inquirer. Many companies had relocated to the zones from elsewhere in Philly, not from outside the city. Their combined assessed value was $38 million, which would translate to $3.2 million in foregone annual property taxes. The city’s total property tax collections that year were close to $900 million.

Only the future Cira Centre next to 30th Street Station ended up getting the designation that year.

Comcast’s planned tower at 17th and JFK Boulevard was denied KOZ status, but it received a reported $43 million in other state subsidies, and was built anyway.

In 2011, after Philadelphia’s first set of KOZs expired, an Inquirer analysis found that most of the job growth the state attributed to them came from just one site — a Marshall’s distribution center near Philadelphia Northeast Airport that employed 1,500 people. With the KOZs’ expiration, the tenant businesses would start paying $6.3 million in new property taxes.

By 2016, when there were close to 150 KOZ properties in Philadelphia, City Council passed a bill to add 80 more.

Critics noted that some of the new zones were already slated for redevelopment while others were in University City and other economically booming areas where tax stimulus was arguably not needed.

Council also approved then-Councilmember Helen Gym’s bill requiring KOZs to report how much subsidy they receive, the number of jobs they create and other information. Gym said the goal was to ensure the KOZs were creating jobs rather than just shifting them from place to place.

Lobbying reverses 382 board denials

Proposals to create or extend KOZs continue to generate pushback when they come before the Philadelphia school board.

In 2018, another 68 parcels in Philly were added despite concerns that many were not blighted. The Frankford Arsenal Complex in Northeast Philly, for example, was already developed and had recently sold for $6 million.

In an effort to protect education funding, the owners of those particular properties agreed to make payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, that were 10% higher than the usual amount of property taxes reserved for the schools.

In 2020, the school board initially rejected a 10-year extension for part of the former South Philly refinery, where Hilco Redevelopment Partners is building the Bellwether District. After Hilco vowed to provide jobs for graduates of city schools, a dissenting board member changed her vote, and the extension was approved.

Another controversy arose in 2020 when a wealthy law firm, Dechert LLP, sought a second round of KOZ tax breaks by moving from the Cira Centre, whose KOZ status had expired, into a planned building at Brandywine Realty Trust’s Schuylkill Yards office tower complex near 30th Street Station.

The state DCED argued that would defeat the law’s purpose of revitalizing distressed areas, but a court ruled the KOZ statute contained no restriction on zone-hopping and allowed the move to proceed.

This past August, the school board approved extensions of several KOZs but initially rejected one for the Arsenal property in Tacony. After lobbying by the developer and a visit to the site by some board members, the board again reversed itself and approved the extension.

This article has been updated with details from the 2019 city report.

Philadelphia school board reelects president, faces $407 million budget hole

2023-12-08T00:45:39+00:00

Philadelphia Board of Education President Reginald Streater will continue to lead the board for the time being — at least until mayor-elect Cherelle Parker makes her personnel decisions.

Streater and Board Vice President Mallory Fix-Lopez were re-elected to their positions in the board’s annual officer elections Thursday evening. Streater and Fix-Lopez both won with 6-2 votes. Streater and Fix-Lopez were first elected to their roles last year in a significant leadership shift for the board.

Board members Cecelia Thompson and Lisa Salley nominated and voted for each other for the roles of president and vice president respectively. Both members have previously raised concerns about the board’s transparency.

It’s unclear how long Streater and the rest of the board will keep their seats. Their terms expire when outgoing Mayor Jim Kenney leaves office in January. Parker will have the power to appoint all nine members of the board.

A spokesperson for Parker declined to comment Thursday. On the campaign trail, Parker would not say what she plans to do with the board, but told Chalkbeat she “will be looking for people with a deep commitment to our city, the children of our city, and [who] share my vision for public education in this city.”

Rough financial waters ahead for Philadelphia schools

Regardless of who’s on board for the next mayor’s term, they will be confronted with a multi-million dollar budget deficit.

Chief Financial Officer Michael Herbstman gave board members an updated five-year budget outlook for fiscal 2024 through fiscal 2028 that includes additional projections for new union contracts and other costs.

According to Herbstman, just before the pandemic, the district was facing a looming deficit of nearly $300 million due to years of “insufficient funding” from the city and state. Through “effective and efficient use,” of federal pandemic funding, “the district temporarily delayed the inevitable,” Herbstman said. That led to a balanced budget in 2023 and the same projected for 2024.

But with that pandemic aid set to run out, the district is facing a $407 million budget gap for fiscal 2025. And Herbstman said that deficit is likely to grow every year, leading to a $702 million deficit projected for fiscal 2028.

Those projections could change if the state revamps its school funding formula. Earlier this year, a Commonwealth Court judge ordered the state to do so, in order to bring its funding system into constitutional compliance.

The school district has no taxing authority and is 99% dependent on state and city dollars for its operating fund, Herbstman said, meaning “how high we can climb” will depend on state and local officials.

Herbstman said if the state pitches in an additional $357 million and the city adds an additional $144 million in fiscal 2025, the district could make meaningful progress towards adequate school funding over the next five years.

Superintendent Tony Watlington said he and other district officials are trying to signal to state and city policymakers that “we are being good stewards of the public tax dollars,” in the hopes of securing increased funding in this coming year’s appropriations process. Watlington pointed to recent credit ratings reports that he said demonstrate the district is headed in a positive financial direction.

“We’re starting with the best financial investment grade credit rating that we’ve had in nearly a half century. That’s really important,” Watlington told reporters at a Thursday briefing.

The budgeting process will be “more transparent” this year, Watlington promised. He said their plan will involve more parents, students, and community members in the budgeting process through surveys and focus groups from November to March.

Board extends contract for reading services

The board also voted to approve an extension worth roughly $477,600 for the district’s contract with Curriculum Associates for the organization’s PHONICS for Reading instructional materials.

A note on the board’s website said the extension would go towards continuing to provide teachers and students with disabilities in grades 3-8 access to curriculum that’s “been successfully used” since last school year “to significantly improve the reading levels of students” in 77 schools.

Schools across the country have been reckoning with the way they teach students to read, and Philadelphia schools will be getting their own English language arts curriculum overhaul for all students starting next school year.

During the 2022-2023 school year, 2,010 students in 77 district schools had access to Phonics for Reading, according to district data. And those students “on average demonstrated significant improvements in reading fluency and comprehension, with many students moving up a grade level during this year,” the district said in its note

However, results from the most recent state standardized tests show the majority of district students are still not reading on grade level.

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

Philadelphia shares plan for relocating students and teachers if asbestos, floods close schools

2023-12-06T18:46:42+00:00

The School District of Philadelphia has shared 24 locations where students and teachers could be temporarily moved if damaged asbestos and other environmental hazards force schools to close.

The “swing space master plan” released Wednesday has been in the works for several months. It includes few details, but does feature a map of the temporary locations, which are mostly other school buildings that are either in use but have extra space, or have been closed but are still owned by the district. News that those locations were under consideration as swing spaces was first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer in November.

Oz Hill, the district’s chief operating officer, said in a letter accompanying the plan that it will guide the district’s response to “environmental hazards such as asbestos abatement, mold remediation, building maintenance, repairs, or other safety concerns.”

Asbestos remediation has closed seven school buildings in Philadelphia since the start of the 2022-2023 year, and officials have warned more closures are likely still to come. The most recent closure was Southwark Elementary last month. District experts have said at least 293 of 300 Philadelphia district buildings contain asbestos — though they said the substance is not dangerous until disturbed.

The district has come under fire from parents and activists in the city who’ve demanded a more comprehensive and transparent approach to handling these school closures.

Hill said the new master plan comes with a commitment from the district to provide a “swift response,” “minimal disruption,” “transparent communication,” and swing spaces that have been “thoroughly assessed to meet safety standards.”

Marissa Orbanek, a spokesperson for the district, said in an email the plan could be used for anything “that renders a building temporarily unsuitable for in-person learning,” including flooding, repairs, asbestos or mold abatement, or building maintenance. It could also be used for “proactive work,” such as capital improvement projects.

Here are the locations the district will use to temporarily house students in the event of a closure:

Ada Lewis Middle School

Community College of Philadelphia’s Northwest Campus

Thomas Mifflin School

Martin Luther King High School

Roosevelt Elementary School

Austin Meehan Middle School

Washington High School

Conwell Middle Magnet School Annex

Feltonville Intermediate School

Mastbaum High School

Roberto Clemente Middle School

E. Washington Rhodes Elementary School

Penn Treaty School

Anna B. Pratt Elementary School

Strawberry Mansion High School

South Philadelphia High School

W. S. Peirce Elementary

McDaniel Annex

Bartram High School

Daroff Charter School

Robert E. Lamberton Elementary School

Morton McMichael School

Overbrook High School

Tilden Middle School

Below is a map of those locations, courtesy of the School District of Philadelphia.

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

Could an independent agency solve Philadelphia’s school facilities crisis?

2023-04-26T09:15:00+00:00

As Philadelphia schools face a growing asbestos crisis, one member of the City Council says ‘the moment is now’ to create an independent authority to handle school building construction and renovation instead of the school district.

Isaiah Thomas, who chairs the City Council’s education committee, told reporters he will introduce a resolution Thursday to hold hearings on creating such an authority.

Thomas said in a briefing on Tuesday he hopes having an independent body manage public school facilities would build trust with state lawmakers who have been wary about sending billions of dollars to repair and upgrade Philadelphia schools. And with state coffers flush with $8 billion in surplus funding for the upcoming budget cycle, Thomas said the city might not get another chance to get the money needed to update classrooms, remediate buildings laden with lead and asbestos, and build new and modern schools fit for students.

“If we can’t get this done in this budget cycle, I’m not sure that we’ll ever get the type of down payment that we need to really put a dent in the issue,” Thomas said. “If we wait until June, or July, it might actually be too late.”

Philly students, parents, and educators: How has asbestos in your school affected your educational experience? We want to hear your story.

Thomas’ proposal comes after several Philadelphia schools closed in recent weeks due to failing infrastructure that revealed damaged asbestos, and these disruptions have left families on edge. Superintendent Tony Watlington has said repeatedly the district anticipates more damaged asbestos will likely be found, but the possible scope of these shutdowns remains unclear. The asbestos problems underscore broader concerns about aging and decrepit facilities that have angered students and teachers for years. The average school building in the district is more than 70 years old.

The asbestos-driven closures have also created tension between the district and some city officials (including Thomas) who say school leaders haven’t been sufficiently transparent about the problem.

The school district had a non-committal response to Thomas’ proposal, saying it looks forward “to continuing discussions about how to improve our facilities because all students and staff should have access to 21st century learning spaces.”

The school district estimates it needs $4.5 billion to address the most pressing structural needs. Thomas is asking Harrisburg for $5 billion over five years to fix up schools, and he’s asking the district for a “safe facilities plan” detailing the building needs and costs to demonstrate how that $5 billion would be spent.

Thomas said many of the details regarding how the new authority would be staffed, managed, and funded will have to be worked out. Functionally, Thomas said it could look something like the energy authority in the city.

But Board of Education President Reginald Streater said in a Tuesday statement the board’s current partnership with the nonprofit Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation and the Philadelphia Authority For Industrial Development has been helping with school construction and facilities issues. Streater said the priority is to get more funding.

“With the infusion of more sustained, long-term funding the District has the opportunity to accelerate the work that needs to be done,” he said.

According to Thomas’ resolution, the new authority would have the ability to “bond and manage the school facilities” modernization process.

Thomas said his office is also in talks with “experts” to see how other cities and states have handled similar authorities, like New York City’s construction authority.

Across the Delaware River in New Jersey, the Schools Development Authority — an independent agency tasked with funding and managing construction for some of the poorest districts in the state — has been plagued by political scandals. The authority is also essentially out of money, and New Jersey lawmakers are now looking to overhaul it.

But Thomas said he is “optimistic” Philadelphia can get it right.

According to Thomas, some lawmakers in Harrisburg have been hesitant to spend more money to improve Philadelphia’s school buildings because the district has been accused of misspending money in the past, a charge the district has denied.

Thomas said what legislators want to see is “consistency” and a stable system that could guarantee money is spent responsibly.

“In order to get resources in this moment, we have to show Harrisburg a certain level of consistency, and reliability,” Thomas said.

Thomas’ proposed authority would build on an idea former Councilmember Maria Quiñones-Sánchez championed last year.

“We’re not going to pretend that this is a concept that we created,” Thomas said, “but what we are going to do is try to grab the bull by the horns and pull this thing across the finish line.”

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.

A week before students decide, Philadelphia’s selective high schools have hundreds of vacant seats

2023-04-06T21:30:17+00:00

A week before Philadelphia students are scheduled to decide where to enroll for ninth grade, 12 of the district’s selective schools still have a combined total of more than 700 open seats, many of which are likely to go unfilled.

The open seats, which the district reported in a statement Thursday, follow its implementation of a new lottery admissions system that was meant to bring more equity and opportunity to the process. But the system, which fully went into effect this school year, has also resulted in fewer students enrolling at many criteria-based high schools for the upcoming year. That trend has sparked concerns about forced teacher transfers, declining enrollment, and corresponding job cuts at those schools, as well as worries about some of the schools’ long-term viability.

The impact on faculty has led to several protests by students and teachers, one before the March 23 Board of Education meeting, and another on March 28 outside City Hall. The concerns are especially acute at themed and innovative high schools that serve mostly Black and brown students.

At its most selective high schools, including Masterman and Central, the enrollment historically has mostly consisted of white and Asian students, although there are signs that their demographics are changing significantly under the new system.

At its March meeting, the Board of Education announced the district would offer seats to 316 students who otherwise qualified for next year’s ninth grade in one or more of the schools but had not enrolled. The district subsequently held two information sessions to help fill those seats. But as of Thursday, just 61 of the 316 students had accepted spots.

Last month, Superintendent Tony Watlington acknowledged that the new process is flawed and said the district will try to improve it next year.

Watlington said he was reallocating $3 million from other parts of the district’s budget to minimize the loss of teachers. But he also said last month that principals ultimately make such staffing decisions based on available funding, a point the district has since reiterated.

Watlington said that only three criteria-based high schools would lose more than two teachers next year: Hill-Freedman World Academy, The Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush, and Girls High School, based on their teacher allotments and information from principals.

However, teachers from Science Leadership Academy–Beeber remain uncertain about how many teachers they could lose from their staff of 50.

Normally, Beeber would take 120 ninth graders, but for next year the projected number is about half that, said Alex Kopp, a math and computer science teacher at the school.

The lottery qualifies students based on grades, test scores (in years when they are available), attendance, and behavior. In past years, schools like Beeber were also able to interview students who came close to qualifying and appeared on paper to be a good fit for the project-based curriculum.

This year, however, they could not interview students to flesh out the class, he said. That change was part of the district’s effort to eliminate implicit bias from the admissions system.

If school staffing drops below a certain level, he might be unable to maintain his computer science and technology program.

Kopp said he respects equity as a goal for the new admissions process, especially for the most selective schools like Central and Masterman. But schools like Beeber could be adversely affected, he said, by “becoming less diverse and less able to serve students that would be highly successful” in their small, often project-based approach to learning. If that happens, “the school community suffers,” he said.

Among the 61 students among the 316 who decided to accept an offer to a selective school, the most popular were Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush, Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) High School, Franklin Learning Center (FLC), and Saul, the state’s only high school that focuses on agriculture.

Beeber was among the other schools students could choose from. Those schools included Lankenau, Motivation, Hill-Freedman, the three Parkways — Northwest, Center City Middle College, and West — and Girls High.

Students, who can apply to up to five schools, must inform the district of their decision by April 14.

Video by WHYY Movers & Makers.

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.

Philly board of education votes again to deny three charter renewals

2023-01-27T23:03:23+00:00

The Philadelphia Board of Education Thursday voted for a second time to deny renewal to three charter schools — including one that has been operating for 20 years and enrolls 1,800 students — citing concerns about potential conflicts of interest regarding their legal representation and management practices.

The nine-member board had voted nearly unanimously at its October meeting not to renew the charters of the three schools — First Philadelphia Prep Charter, Tacony Academy Charter, and Charter School for the Arts and Sciences at HR Edmunds — but made no comments at the time as to their reasons.

At Thursday’s meeting, the newly elected board president Reginald Streater made a lengthy statement outlining his objections, saying he had received feedback on the October meeting “from some members of the public, including from representatives of the impacted charter schools, suggesting I wasn’t clear. Tonight I want to elaborate.”

He didn’t say why a repeat vote was necessary, other than that his comments should be addressed to items that were on the agenda of that meeting.

“When charter schools and their charter management companies have overlapping board members or have the same legal counsel, I can’t help but question whether management fees, services, and termination provisions in these management agreements can be negotiated at arm’s length,” Streater said. “Ultimately, how are public funds being spent and what impact does this have on the educational services provided to students? Are adequate protections in place?”

Other board members didn’t speak, but the vote to deny the renewals was 7-1, with only Cecelia Thompson indicating she favored renewal. Julia Danzy was absent.

At the board’s October meeting, the votes against renewing First Philadelphia and Tacony were unanimous; the vote against renewing Edmunds was 8-1.

First Philadelphia and Tacony are managed by the charter management organization American Paradigm. Edmunds, a former district-run school converted to a charter under the Renaissance Schools initiative, is run by String Theory.

Although Streater didn’t name the firm, the law firm Sand and Saidel represents both the boards and the management companies at the three schools. All three schools also get financial services from the consulting firm Santilli & Thomson, which works closely with Sand and Saidel.

“I become concerned when I perceive charter schools’ losing autonomy to their charter management companies,” Streater said in his statement at the board meeting.

Lawyer: Charters ‘violated no law’

Sand and Saidel managing partner Daniel Saidel said in an interview with Chalkbeat that neither he nor the charter schools have violated any law or ethical principle and defended the arrangement as saving the schools money that can be applied to the children’s education.

In addition, he said, the schools signed a charter agreement given to them by the district, which subsequently sought to impose conditions.

“There’s no substance or evidence or findings of fact to show that somehow these kinds of relationships are nonviable” he said, or “illegal, immoral or unethical … Nothing was said that we did something wrong.” The denial was based on “opinion, not facts,” he said.

He pointed out that the charter schools, which are all in the northeast section of the city, can continue to operate under an expired charter.

The charter office had proposed that First Philadelphia and Tacony Academy be renewed for five years with conditions, and Edmunds for one. None of the schools fully meets academic standards set by the district, according to their most recent charter evaluations.

The summary of the charter agreements for all three schools, released as part of the meeting’s agenda before the vote, required “the submission of a conflict of interest policy that is in compliance with the Nonprofit Law and the Ethics Act and the submission [of] conflict waivers if legal counsel for the Charter School also represents the management organization for the Charter School.”

The charter office recommended First Philadelphia for a five-year renewal with conditions including the more explicit conflict of interest policy, clarity around student rights regarding expulsion, and the conduct of its admissions lottery. The K-12 school was founded in 2002 and has 1,800 students, making it one of the largest in the city, district or charter.

According to its most recent evaluation by the charter office, First Philadelphia approached academic standards for grades K-8, but failed to meet academic standards for 9-12

At the meeting, Teeona Crumpton said several of her family members who attended First Philadelphia over the last 20 years went on to college and successful careers. Her daughter is now a sixth grader there.

“This school gives youth a foundation in education that prepares them for a successful future,” she told board members. She said teachers have high expectations and students have access to arts programs, computers, tutors, and other resources.

Tacony, a K-12 school that opened in 2009, has 1,000 students. According to its evaluation, it meets academic standards for K-8, but not for 9-12. Its five-year renewal conditions were similar to those at First Philadelphia.

String Theory Edmunds, which the management company took over in 2012, is a K-8 school with 1,000 students. Its evaluation concluded that it did not meet academic standards, with scores on the Pennsylvania Performance Profile that fell below both the charter and district average.

District officials have expressed frustration that under Pennsylvania’s charter law, which has not been significantly revised since its adoption in 1997, charters can continue to operate under an expired charter unless the authorizing body moves to revoke it. By voting not to renew the charter, the board Thursday took a step in that direction.

Under the charter law, the school can appeal, with the final arbiter being the Charter Appeals Board based in Harrisburg. The cumbersome process can blunt incentive for schools and the district to reach agreement on many policies, especially complex and controversial ones around legal representation and admissions policies.

The three schools are already operating under expired charters, as Saidel pointed out. The School Reform Commission, which ran the district when it was under state control, did not act to renew these charters in 2017, when the last charters they signed in 2012 technically expired.

“This is not a new issue for the schools,” said one district official who spoke on background. “They are well aware of our issue. They have chosen not to resolve it.”

In his opening remarks, Streater also responded to criticism by elected officials to another controversial board action: its decision earlier this month to file a lawsuit against the city regarding a new ordinance that district officials say could delay the opening of school in September. The ordinance sets stricter occupancy standards for school buildings regarding asbestos and other potential environmental hazards.

After the lawsuit was filed, city officials said the district should have sought to resolve the issue through collaboration, not a lawsuit. Streater said Thursday that the district had done just that to no avail.

“This lawsuit was filed because our concerns have not been addressed,” he said.

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

Philadelphia district seeking another consultant to help with restructuring

2022-12-09T22:03:58+00:00

Less than six months after hiring an outside firm for $450,000 to advise him on ways to improve the school district, Superintendent Tony Watlington is seeking to find another consultant to position Philadelphia “to be the fastest improving urban school district in the country,” according to a request for proposal obtained by Chalkbeat.

The document says the district seeks a consultant to review Philadelphia’s organizational structure to see how it compares to “the 25 largest urban school districts and the five urban school district[s] that are improving the fastest on The Nation’s Report Card.”

That refers to the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress. Results released in October showed Philadelphia performing near the bottom among large urban school districts in 2022 in fourth grade math, eighth grade math, fourth grade reading, and eighth grade reading.

The district issued the request Dec. 6 and set a Jan. 17 deadline. The consultant would begin in April and work through April 2024.

Last April, Watlington and the board of education came under scrutiny for hiring the consulting firm Joseph and Associates to help with the leadership transition and aid in developing a five-year strategic plan. Joseph started work in June and will work through the end of this school year. The strategic plan is due next spring.

Watlington is conducting what he called a comprehensive, three-phase transition with committees charged with developing a five-year strategic plan by next spring. His transition team has made 91 recommendations for improving the district.

Some critics of the Board of Education and district policies wondered why yet another consultant is necessary.

“Why do we need more consultants and management companies and these out-of-town companies when we have a staff,” asked Lisa Haver of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, who regularly questions board and district policies.

But Michael Casserly, who retired after heading the Council of the Great City Schools for nearly three decades, said hiring consultants is common practice.

“My experience is that superintendents hire a variety of consulting firms for all kinds of things,” he said. They do it because they have a lean central office or are looking for an “outside more independent or objective review” in an effort to build public trust, or both, he said in an interview. “It’s really not that unusual.”

Watlington, who became Philadelphia’s school superintendent in June, has never run a district this large. He came from the Rowan-Salisbury school district in North Carolina, which had an enrollment of 18,000, a fraction of Philadelphia’s 119,000 students in district schools and 70,000 in charter schools. Before that he rose from custodian to history teacher to chief of schools in the 72,000-student Guilford County school system in Greensboro, North Carolina.

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

Philadelphia hits pause on blueprint for school building upgrades

2022-11-18T18:57:46+00:00

Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington said the district has paused the process it’s developed to decide on upgrades to school facilities, in order to align it more closely to the district’s future five-year strategic plan.

During a school board meeting Thursday, Watlington said the facilities planning process will be put on hold until the district adopts that strategic blueprint, but added that building work that’s already been approved will proceed.

The district’s “facilities planning process” sets long-term priorities for building and other infrastructure upgrades. In April, Philadelphia officials unveiled an interactive map that let people learn about specific conditions at neighborhood schools. And in May, the district announced public forums where people could discuss the best way to repair and upgrade the city’s aging public schools; the average Philadelphia school building is about 75 years old.

However, those moves occurred before Watlington took over as superintendent in mid-June. Since then, Watlington has focused much of his attention on trying to create that five-year roadmap for schools by — among other things — gathering input from the public and different groups and officials. The district aims to adopt that roadmap next year.

Watlington has a near-term goal of making Philadelphia one of the fastest improving large school districts, and a long-term goal of being the most improved.

Although district plans to upgrade facilities have stopped and restarted before, Watlington characterized the new pause as not just another delay.

“The difference now is that we are moving in a direction to be very clear about what our academic strategies will be,” he said Thursday.

For example, he said, if the district’s work on the five-year plan discovers a need for more advanced placement classes, career and technical education programs, or even a reconfiguration of the current K-8 structure into a middle-school format, that would dictate how and where money would be spent.

Watlington noted that he would “absolutely” consider the possibility of reconfiguring grades at schools if warranted.

“We have to take the time to identify the specific strategies and what we are going to do differently in the school district of Philadelphia to get much improved outcomes,” he said.

Here’s what Philadelphia parents think of Watlington’s listening sessions

2022-09-12T20:42:14+00:00

Editor’s note: This article was updated to properly attribute material that appeared verbatim in a Philadelphia school district press release.

Not long after Philadelphia parent Stacey Mandel left a virtual listening session on July 27 with new Superintendent Tony Watlington, she found herself asking: Were Watlington and other school district leaders actually listening?

What spurred that question was a follow-up email she got asking her what specific actions she would like to see from the district. But the email came from a woman at a public relations firm working on behalf of the district, not the district itself.

“It’s being handled by PR professionals, not educators. The language used in parent communications sounds beautiful, but feels like smoke and mirrors,” Mandel said of the process, adding, “She asked for specifics in terms of actions we would like to see. I thought all of us were pretty clear during the session. I believe she was present during the session as well.”

Mandel is one of dozens of parents and educators who have participated in sessions where they could share their thoughts and ideas about what the district does well and where improvement is needed. The sessions are part of Watlington’s first 100 days on the job — he took over as superintendent in mid-June — and are expected to wrap up this month.

The district’s special admissions process, building safety, and staffing seem to be top concerns expressed by parents and teachers. Many families said the district has done a good job sharing clear directions about things like how to sign up for the 80 sessions and where to attend them. While some said Watlington didn’t directly address the issues they raised, others came away saying that the superintendent was friendly.

Parents also raised concerns about the district’s $450,000 contract with consulting firm, Joseph and Associates, which previously came under fire over the summer from those who see it as a poor way to use district resources.

Watlington will reveal his takeaways from the sessions in October.

According to the district, Watlington held 63 listening sessions, including meetings with advocates and community leaders, in his first 60 days. Over 28 sessions, Watlington was also in contact with 370 teachers and staff members, 380 school leaders, and 170 central office staff members.

The school district has barred media from attending these listening sessions, which have taken place online as well as in person, but Chalkbeat spoke with several people who have attended them.

In addition to the input from families and educators about what the district needs, Watlington will also hear from his 80-person transition team that includes community and education leaders, who will develop reports and recommendations for him.

Watlington and the transition team will evaluate the district’s capacity to achieve the school board’s vision through its “goals and guardrails” framework through November. Then Watlington, Joseph and Associates, and district staff will develop a five-year strategic plan by May 30.

Mixed response from parents

Parent Jenny Aiello, who has two children in district schools, highlighted concerns expressed about the consultant. Aiello said people pressed Watlington on why he isn’t relying more on people in Philadelphia to show him the ropes.

She said at one point Watlington did repeat his defense of the decision to hire Joseph and Associates, which is based in Tennessee. Watlington has previously said the consultant would help him “hit the ground running,” while the school board called hiring such a consultant “best practice.” (Shawn Joseph, president of Joseph and Associates and a former superintendent of Nashville, Tenn., schools, did not respond to requests for comment from Chalkbeat.)

Another issue that led people to push back on Watlington, Aiello said, was the number of teachers he has on his transition team. When Watlington highlighted the number of teachers on the team, and asked the audience whether people thought that was sufficient, Aiello said, “The participants thought he should have at least half of that group be teachers because they’re the ones who know the district.”

Aiello also said the sessions she attended did not have moderators and in general didn’t conform to what she was told about how they would be structured.

But Eugene Desyatnik, a parent of three students of neighborhood schools, who attended an in-person session said that when he raised concerns about facilities and the district not accepting free help, Watlington “listened, wrote down notes and genuinely seemed committed.”

Watlington said that “where he came from [his prior job in North Carolina] it was no Rockefelller-rich district, but the grass was mowed, buildings were cooled and clean, and he expected nothing less here,” Desyatnik recalled, adding that this observation from Watlington made him feel “surprisingly optimistic.”

District parent Adam Blyweiss, who also teaches graphic design at Jules E. Mastbaum Area Vocational Technical School, attended an online listening session in July for district staff, and another online session last month for parents and families, coordinated with community and parent groups. He said he was able to access both without any problems.

The staff session brought up working and learning conditions in buildings that Blyweiss felt were never adequately addressed under former Superintendent William Hite. Issues that staff discussed with Watlington ranged from aging buildings and the district’s African American history curriculum to support for English-language learners and teacher planning time.

Blyweiss said Watlington’s curiosity and personality seem sincere. But Blyweiss is concerned that regardless of how the superintendent presents himself, the district might be in a similar position to where it was a decade ago, when Superintendent William Hite took over. He said he doesn’t know how Watlington and the district will deal with the last decade’s worth of “wishful thinking, sensible ideas, and painful mistrust.”

“I feel like we’re once again staring down conditions for educational upheaval,” Blyweiss said “The last time we had a new superintendent at our doorstep with a plan for transition involving dispassionate outsiders, we lost more than schools, staff, and students. We lost a little bit of the city’s soul.”

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

New superintendent, 200 staff vacancies as Philadelphia returns to school

2022-08-29T22:30:06+00:00

Schools opened Monday for 114,000 Philadelphia students in a district still facing a staff shortage and struggling to recover from the effects of the pandemic, which resulted in closed school buildings for more than a year and student learning loss that is still being assessed.

Despite these challenges, new Superintendent Tony Watlington exuded optimism and confidence as he, Mayor Jim Kenney, and other officials celebrated the first day of classes.

“I love the first day of school,” Watlington said at the Paul Laurence Dunbar School in North Philadelphia. “We’re going to do our very best, our absolute very best, every single day, to create life-changing opportunities … so that our children can experience life-changing outcomes.”

As a reminder of the variety of hurdles schools face, Watlington announced late Monday that 100 schools would close three hours early on Tuesday and Wednesday due to concerns about severe heat.

In many ways, Dunbar represents the difficulties and the promise of the new year that will pose major tests for Watlington in particular, who took over for former superintendent William Hite in June. Located in the heart of North Philadelphia, the school has a nearly 100% poverty rate. Last year, it enrolled only about 250 students, putting it at half capacity. Enrollment declines in cities across the country have emerged as a significant concern for many schools.

Mayor Jim Kenney, left, and Superintendent Tony Watlington, second from right, stand with education and government leaders to ring in the first day of school in Philadelphia Monday at Paul L. Dunbar School in North Philadelphia.

“The pandemic has had a lingering effect on us, and may continue to present some challenges,” Watlington said.

At the same time, the district expects 350 students to enroll at Dunbar this year, an increase of roughly 40% from last year, Assistant Superintendent Ariel Lajara said. The school is reportedly fully staffed. And the school is joining the city’s community school initiative that aims to provide better services and support to students in need.

To welcome students back, Watlington visited six schools across the city, including one that became the first in Philadelphia’s history to fly the LGBTQ pride flag, a few months after it was renamed for an LGBTQ civil rights leader.

Citywide, there are still around 200 teacher vacancies, Watlington said, adding that all classrooms will be staffed this week with “credentialed” educators. He said the schools are 98% staffed, a slight improvement from the 97.4% figure he used last week.

Recruitment is continuing, he said, including through the website Teach in Philly.

“We want to really make sure to understand what our children are telling us,” Watlington said. “We’re trying to make sure that this year we attend to the learning loss they experienced and we also want to help them to reacclimate to a normal school year, if there’s such a thing as a normal school year.”

Kenney, meanwhile, praised Watlington as “the best choice” to lead the district forward.

Daniel Mina, in his second year as Dunbar’s principal, echoed the emphasis on a “fresh start” and said it is important for teachers and other members of the school community to tend to students’ emotional as well as academic needs.

“One of our school priorities here at Dunbar is joy,” he said. “We know in order for your children to love school, not only do they have to be physically and emotionally safe, but more than that, they have to feel joy at school.”

Dunbar is one of three new community schools, which work in close partnership with the city to help families receive needed social services. The community schools program, launched in 2017, is a signature initiative of the Kenney administration and City Council President Darrell C. Clarke. Along with Dunbar, Add B. Anderson Elementary and Frankford High School were added to the program this year, bringing the total to 20.

Maxwell Akuamoah-Boateng, the city’s director of operations for community schools, said that they have been working all summer to consult parents and residents, manage partnerships with non-profit organizations, and develop a plan for what would most benefit Dunbar.

An important component is “out of school time,” he said, citing the importance “of engaging kids on a social level” and keeping them “off the streets.”

His office will be working with teachers and staff “to see what they are already doing that is working and what we can do to supplement that,” Akuamoah-Boateng said.

Members of Temple University’s athletic teams welcomed Dunbar students on their first day, cheering on students as they walked on a red carpet at the school door. Temple is one of Dunbar’s partners in the community schools program.

Kensington school first to fly pride flag

Elswhere, Gloria Casarez Elementary School in Kensington made history Monday as the first district school to fly the pride flag in honor of its namesake, who was an advocate for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community in Philadelphia.

In an effort to remove the names of racist historical figures from school buildings, the Philadelphia Board of Education voted in May to change the name of the school to honor Casarez, who attended the school when it was Philip H. Sheridan Elementary School. Sheridan is considered one of the most famous Union generals of the Civil War, but is also well-known for overseeing horrific campaigns against Native Americans.

Gloria Casarez Elementary School in Kensington made history Monday as the first district school in Philadelphia to fly the pride flag, in honor of its namesake.

Casarez, who was the city’s first director of LGBT affairs, died in 2014 from breast cancer.

“Like Gloria, each of you is a leader and a change maker with the power to positively change the school and your community,” Tricia Dressel, Casarez’s wife, told students at the school Monday. “Today you walk through those doors and hallways with pride, for you are the teachers and students of the absolute best school in the city of Philadelphia.”

Watlington said the school’s renaming was a “very bold step” towards ensuring that “students and families feel empowered, valued and respected.” The current head of the city’s Office of LGBT Affairs, Celena Morrison, said Monday’s events at the school represented a monument to Casarez’s legacy.

And Casarez Principal Awilda Aguila Balbuena used the occasion to stress the importance of representation to the students: “When we are able to see people, we are better able to understand and grasp who they are.”

Like at Dunbar, the number of students at Casarez Elementary seems to be on the rise. Around 465 students were greeted by school leaders on their first day back to class, an increase from around 415 last year, according to Casarez Assistant Principal Julio Nuñez, an increase of about 12%. The play area was filled Monday morning with students lined up by grades, with their teachers in front.

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

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

Philadelphia school workers vote to authorize a strike

2022-08-20T23:28:34+00:00

This story originally appeared on WHYY

Workers from the School District of Philadelphia will hit the picket line one week before the school year begins.

The district’s maintenance, custodial, and transportation employees voted on Saturday to authorize a strike, as contract negotiations with the district have stalled.

The workers, represented by the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 32BJ, rallied at Benjamin Franklin High School on Broad Street in North Philadelphia prior to the vote.

The current contract for the workers expires on August 31. Union members say their demands for fair pay and more training have not been met.

“We worked through COVID, everyone considered us a hero. Currently in negotiations and no one remembers that,” John Bynum, district leader for Local 32BJ of SEIU, said in an interview with 6abc last week. “We are just negotiating for a fair contract. I can’t answer for why the district isn’t listening.”

There are an estimated 2,000 Philadelphia school district workers represented under this contract. The lowest paid employees make $14.31 an hour.

In a statement to 6abc last week, a Philadelphia School District spokesperson said:

“We deeply value the work of our staff who are represented by 32BJ SEIU District 1201. We continue to actively participate in conversations and negotiations to secure a new contract as soon as possible, without disruption to in-person learning to begin the 2022-2023 school year. Schools are hubs of our community. Last year, we saw firsthand the joy and excitement of our students, families, and staff as they reconnected in person and began to re-engage in the caring school communities they missed so much. Keeping this momentum going is what’s best for our young people. We remain hopeful that we will be able to agree to fair and sustainable terms of a contract that values and supports our employees.”

The first day for Philadelphia students is Monday, August 29.

Philly boosts Black and Hispanic enrollment in top schools, Chalkbeat analysis shows

2022-08-18T23:33:58+00:00

Philadelphia’s new lottery admissions system will likely bolster the overall proportion of Black and Hispanic students in the incoming ninth grades across the city’s four most selective public schools, a Chalkbeat data analysis has found, although the picture varies significantly between individual schools.

At Central High School, for example, the largest and most well known of those four top-tier schools, the proportion of Black students in the incoming class is nearly twice as high as the prior year’s class, according to Chalkbeat’s analysis. And the corresponding share of Hispanic students has more than tripled.

Meanwhile, the size of the freshman class at Carver High School of Engineering and Science will increase by more than a third, so more students of all races will attend. But while Black students comprised 55% of last year’s class at the school, only 46% of this year’s incoming class is Black.

The changes to admissions — which affected all 21 of the district’s magnet programs — appear poised to considerably alter the racial makeup of several schools where Black and Hispanic students have been historically underrepresented compared to their citywide enrollment. Families throughout Philadelphia strive to have their children gain entry to these schools, and changes to how they work attract close scrutiny and intense debate.

Last year, the district changed the admissions process by placing qualified applicants in a lottery, rather than letting individual school principals continue to make final admissions decisions. For this year’s incoming ninth grade class, all students who met benchmarks based on grades, attendance, and scores on a writing test were entered into the lottery.

For the four most selective schools, which include Masterman and Academy at Palumbo, the district weighted the lottery to favor qualified students from six ZIP codes that rarely send students to four most selective high schools, automatically offering admission to all qualified students living in ZIP codes.

Historically, a minuscule fraction of students enrolled in those schools resided in those ZIP codes, which cover parts of North and West Philadelphia.

District officials said they wanted to make the system more equitable and antiracist. The goals of the changes were to increase access and participation among qualified students who may not have otherwise applied, and to eliminate any “implicit bias” from the selection process.

Several parents and students who live in the affected ZIP codes said they weren’t aware of the policy change and couldn’t say how it affected them. But Sheila Rosado is delighted with the new system. Her daughter, Esmeralda Miller, who lives in North Philadelphia in one of the six ZIP codes favored in the admissions process, is going to Central in the upcoming school year.

“We were worried that they changed the way they were doing things, but we didn’t have any issues. Every single school she applied to she got accepted,” Rosado said, adding that her daughter has always received top grades.

She said she thought the lottery was “awesome … it’s more fair, and more people can apply.”

A “successful” system will soon change again

Chalkbeat’s analysis of the four most selective Philadelphia magnet schools is based on the district’s tally of students who have accepted offers of admission. The students in the numbers provided by the district include only those who attended district schools prior to accepting offers, not those from charter and private schools who have sought admission.

In response to Chalkbeat’s request for comment about the analysis, the district said in a statement that the revised system had been “successful on all these fronts.”

There were disparate demographic trends for the incoming classes at Masterman and Palumbo.

The share of Black, Hispanic, multiracial, and white students at Academy at Palumbo all grew significantly from the ninth grade classes of 2021 to 2022, while Asian enrollment dipped from almost half of the student body to under a third.

At Masterman, where the incoming class is only 100 students and more subject to year-to-year fluctuations, Asian enrollment grew to 43% of the class. Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic enrollment dipped slightly, and white enrollment fell by 6 percentage points.

Between 2017 and 2021, just 1% of students at the four most selective schools came from the six favored ZIP codes. But 12% of the students in this year’s incoming class reside in those ZIP codes, ranging from 11.1% at Central to 13.5% at Masterman.

More broadly, there were 11,479 eligible applications to all 21 selective schools for 2022, nearly double the number from 2021, officials said.

Although the new system seems to have led to significantly different outcomes than in past years, Philadelphia’s selection admissions process continues to evolve.

On Tuesday, the district announced that while the lottery system for selection admissions would continue, scores from the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, would be reintroduced into the admissions process for the 2023-24 school year.

The state assessment, which was not administered in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, had been replaced in the selective admissions process by a separate writing test, which will now be discontinued.

District spokeswoman Marissa Orbanek said the district reintroduced the PSSA to the admissions process “because we need another criterion.” But some principals worry that using the test will whittle down the eligible pool of students.

Orbanek said the district doesn’t know the impact the elimination of the PSSA may have had on the growth of the student applicant pool for the selective schools this year, or on the higher proportions of Black and Hispanic students in the pool. But, she said, the district plans to continue studying the data and gather feedback “to continue its commitment to providing equitable access for all students.”

The district will share new minimum PSSA scores for selection admissions at the end of September.

Overall, 36% of students in Philadelphia scored proficient on the PSSA’s language arts test from 2019 (the most recent results available), while 21% did so in math, and 36% in science. But results differ markedly by race and ethnicity.

For instance, while 55% of Asian students and 42.5% of white students scored proficient in math, just 11.6% of Black students and 13.8% of Hispanic students scored at that level.

There is also concern that some students may have opted out of the PSSA last spring because they believed that the PSSA would not be a factor in 2023-24 special admissions. The district said public school students who did not take the test could substitute scores on certain other tests, although that could present logistical challenges to families.

There are three levels of so-called criteria-based schools and programs, all with differing requirements regarding grades. But all three of those levels mandate 95% attendance.

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.

Philly schools chief defends $450K consultant who surrendered teaching license

2022-06-30T22:44:52+00:00

Amid dissent over his push for the district to hire a controversial education consultant at a cost of nearly half a million dollars, new Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr. said the move will enable a speedy transition and beef up a “lean” administrative staff.

In a Wednesday call with reporters, Watlington said hiring Joseph and Associates, which is led by former Nashville district superintendent Shawn Joseph, will ensure he can focus on making Philadelphia “the fastest improving urban school district in the nation.” But some have raised concerns about Joseph’s $450,000 price tag, which will cover roughly a year’s work but exceeds Watlington’s own annual salary of $340,000.

Joseph’s tenure leading Nashville from 2016 to 2019 has also raised eyebrows. It was marked by a string of disputes, including claims that he ignored and mishandled allegations of sexual harassment against a middle school principal, as well as complaints that he attempted to award no-bid contracts. Joseph agreed to surrender his teaching license in 2019 because he failed to report 12 teacher misconduct cases to the state within 30 days, as required by state rules, according to a Tennessee Board of Education official. (Joseph contends that he signed the reports but a human resources employee failed to submit them to the state.) Joseph’s license was automatically restored but has since expired.

Joseph reached a buy-out agreement with the Nashville school board before his four-year contract was up. The terms of that agreement included a provision that in general, neither Joseph nor the board would file a lawsuit or claim against the other, according to the Tennessean. Joseph told Chalkbeat June 21 that he left his Nashville post because he and the board did not agree on how to reach “a continued focus on achieving equity and excellence” in the district.

Joseph told Chalkbeat Thursday that people tried to damage his image but that he remains proud of his work in Nashville.

“It’s been three years since I’ve been in Nashville and I’ve been working to train and prepare urban superintendents like Dr. Watlington,” he said. “Sometimes wisdom comes with pain. As you learn things, you’re able to impart that knowledge onto people.”

On Wednesday, Watlington defended his choice. “Are there other consultants out there who could be considered? Absolutely,” Watlington said. “The timeframe warranted me to make some recommendations and some steps sooner rather than later, so that I can hit the ground running on day one.”

But giving a contract to Joseph means less money for priorities like school safety, buildings, and outdated curriculum, said Renee Brown, a longtime Philadelphia education activist who has sent five children to schools in the city. She also said that as someone from outside Philadelphia, Joseph can’t fully grasp the district’s unique challenges.

“I’m very displeased,” Brown said.

The Philadelphia Board of Education agreed to hire Joseph at Watlington’s request at a board meeting in late May with almost no discussion. (Watlington officially took over the district on June 16.) The board told Chalkbeat that the decision to hire Joseph’s firm — which is charged with helping Watlington develop a long-term plan for improving the district — represented “best practice.”

Current and former Nashville school officials blasted Philadelphia’s decision to hire his consulting firm and issued warnings about the legacy Joseph left in the city.

Fran Bush, a Nashville school board member, highlighted accusations that Joseph improperly steered public money to a firm he had previously done business with.

“What I have to say is they’ve got to be very careful,” said Bush, referring to Philadelphia officials.

Watlington and Joseph have a professional experience in common: the Urban Superintendents Academy at Howard University. The academy is designed for educators who want to take on leadership roles in urban areas with a focus on academic performance and leading underrepresented and diverse populations.

Watlington is a graduate of the academy, while Joseph was one of its co-directors. When he was a co-director, Joseph introduced the academy’s 2021 cohort that included Watlington.

Joseph and Associates will help Watlington develop a five-year strategic plan for the district. That plan is due by the end of next May. The firm is also charged with assembling a transition team to help Watlington assess the district’s ability to meet its overall vision for schools, which is known as “goals and guardrails.”

Joseph led the 86,000-student Nashville district from 2016 to 2019. Local media outlets reported that Joseph won praise for his focus on students of color while he led the district. Earlier this month, former Nashville board member Will Pinkston expressed support for Joseph, telling Chalkbeat that he “was trying to do exactly the right thing and, frankly, exactly what the board asked him to do.”

But allegations about his leadership decisions dogged his time in the city.

For example, the Nashville district paid out claims resulting from the harassment complaints and lawsuits during Joseph’s tenure.

And Joseph reportedly pushed the district to sign two no-bid contracts worth $1.8 million with Performance Matters — a company in Maryland with which he had previously done business. Emails obtained by a Nashville TV station showed that Joseph began discussing a potential deal with the firm two weeks before he officially started as superintendent in July 2016.

In 2018, Nashville officials expressed disappointment that the number of district schools identified by Tennessee as most in need of support and improvement nearly doubled from 11 to 21 (the state adopted a new accountability system in 2018). Joseph said this demonstrated that certain schools needed more resources.

Jill Speering, who was the vice-chair of the Nashville board for two of the three years Joseph was the district’s top official, said she was “appalled” that he had been hired to consult in Philadelphia, “given his failed leadership in Nashville where the board had to buy out his contract in order to save the district further embarrassment.”

Another former board member, Amy Frogge, said Joseph’s practices precipitated an “employee morale crisis.”

There’s no public indication that Philadelphia district leaders are reconsidering Joseph’s contract.

On Wednesday, the Philadelphia school board again defended the decision to hire Joseph, saying in a statement that in a “large and complex” district, “transition support is intended to provide an even deeper understanding of the individuals, families, and communities this district serves.”

The board did not address the controversy surrounding its decision to hire him.

Correction: July 5, 2022: This article was corrected to say that Joseph’s teaching license was automatically restored. A previous version of the article said he had to reapply. Additionally, the article was updated to include Joseph’s defense for why teacher misconduct cases weren’t reported to the state in a timely manner.

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

Consulting firm will get $450,000 to help new Philly superintendent

2022-06-21T20:19:40+00:00

At his swearing-in ceremony on Thursday, Philadelphia’s new superintendent Tony Watlington Sr. unveiled a 100-day plan to help him transition to his new role.

What Watlington did not mention during the ceremony is the consultant who will — at a cost well into six figures — support that transition. The firm is run by the former head of Tennessee’s second-largest district who left that school system before his contract was up.

Last month, Watlington asked the school board to hire Joseph and Associates, a Tennessee-based education consulting firm near Nashville, to assist with his transition. The board unanimously agreed to pay the firm $450,000 for its services with little discussion at its May meeting. Funding for the contract will come from the 2022-23 operating budget.

The board has hired Joseph and Associates in large part to help Watlington to develop a five-year strategic plan for the district. That plan is due to be finalized at the end of next May. In addition, the firm will help assemble a transition team to help Watlington assess the district’s ability to meet its overall vision for schools known as “goals and guardrails.”

In an interview with Chalkbeat, Watlington said the consultant will also help him connect with people who can identify what’s working and what’s not working in urban school districts across the country. Watlington’s aim is to make Philadelphia one of the fastest improving urban school districts in the U.S.

“I’ve asked that external consultant to be an adviser to me, as I launch my 100-day entry action plan,” Watlington said.

The school board said in a statement to Chalkbeat that hiring such a consultant is “a best practice.”

The president of Joseph and Associates, Shawn Joseph, served as the first African-American superintendent of Metro Nashville Public Schools from 2016 to 2019, leading an 86,000-student district. Local media outlets reported that Joseph won praise for his focus on students of color while he led the district, but that his response to allegations of sexual harassment against school employees provoked controversy, as did certain contracts and a clash with principals.

The Nashville school board bought out of his contract after he served three years of his four-year contract. Joseph received a $261,250 payout when he departed his position.

In response to questions from Chalkbeat about his Nashville tenure, Joseph said it came to an end because “I did not believe that the climate supported a successful continued focus on achieving equity and excellence” in the district.

Two former school board members in Nashville vouched for Joseph’s leadership skills. Current Nashville school board chair Christiane Buggs said Joseph’s departure was due to “personality conflicts.”

“There were board members who were unable to reconcile their desire for their district with how Dr. Joseph was approaching it,” she said, adding that the contract buyout was a mutual arrangement.

And Will Pinkston, who served on the board during Joseph’s tenure, said it was a “really complicated situation” and that Joseph “was trying to do exactly the right thing and, frankly, exactly what the board asked him to do on the front end.”

The Philadelphia school board’s move to quietly hire the consultant drew some criticism. Lisa Haver, co-founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, argues the board should have discussed the matter further and doesn’t like the price tag.

“We’ve been saying for years that the board has spent way too much money on consultants and outsourcing, so this would not be out of character for any administration in this district,” Haver said. “They should not have considered this if they picked Dr. Watlington, if he had the knowledge and experience.”

In addition to leading Joseph and Associates, Joseph is an associate with Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, an education consulting and executive search firm, and has worked and supported superintendent transition teams in two Maryland counties, Prince George’s County and Baltimore County.

Joseph founded his consulting firm in 2019, the same year he left his job as Nashville superintendent.

“We are supporting Dr. Watlington as he learns about the district quickly and aligning the work that he’s doing with goals and guardrails and facilitating the writing in a report, which will provide short-term and long-term recommendations in achieving the goals and guardrails,” Joseph said.

Joseph said the transition team for Philadelphia will have between 50 to 60 people, including committees made up of district teachers and principals in the school system. There will also be outside experts, including people from local universities who have experience in supporting education leadership transitions.

Betty Morgan, who once led Washington County Public Schools in Maryland, will be responsible for writing the transition team’s report.

Watlington’s 100-day entry plan will include a listening and learning tour, a school board retreat, a senior staff retreat, and other activities to engage with the community.

From early September until the end of November, Watlington and the transition team will evaluate the district’s capacity to achieve the school board’s vision, with specific attention to the district’s organizational structure.

Starting Dec. 1, Joseph and Associates will focus on the five-year strategic plan Watlington wants. The plan is expected to be ready by May 30 of next year.
This story has been updated to correctly identify Joseph and Associates as a consulting firm and not a law firm.

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

The exit interview: Hite talks hits, misses as Philly’s superintendent

2022-06-09T21:46:02+00:00

At his final press conference in Philadelphia Thursday morning, Superintendent William Hite was characteristically reserved and businesslike. He explained how the district is honoring LGTBQIA+ staff and students for Pride Month and spelled out how young people can access meals when schools are closed this summer.

Then he turned the focus to a few star graduating seniors who are headed off to college and the military or starting their first jobs. One of them, Sarah Church, who is graduating from West Philadelphia High School and is off to Kutztown University to study criminal justice, took a moment to thank him. She noted that when Hite took over as superintendent in 2012, she was attending Thomas G. Moore Elementary school.

“During his decade of leadership, he has worked tirelessly to provide everyone with where resources are necessary to continue our growth beyond our time here in Philadelphia. As I leave the district, I know my fellow students are set up for success because of this,” she said.

Not everyone viewed him with the same rosy glow. While he always presented an unflappable front, in 2020, the Board of Education gave him a “needs improvement” rating for academic progress and systems leadership. Another low point of his time in office was the botched relocation of Science Leadership Academy into Benjamin Franklin High School, where construction problems delayed the opening of both schools for a semester.

Hite also came in for relentless criticism over charter schools, which educate more than 80,000 students, compared to about 110,000 in the district. While he long declared himself “agnostic” on the best type of school, few new charters were approved during his tenure. And he’s come to the conclusion that the charter movement has not fulfilled its mission of transforming public education.

On Thursday, Hite was asked what he would miss most when he leaves his post next week.

“What I’ll miss most are the children and the students, I’ll be missing these young people and seeing what they’ve achieved even though they have struggles,” Hite said. “That’s one reason I wanted to finish my press conferences with stories from young people.”

Tony Watlington, former superintendent of the Rowan-Salisbury school district in North Carolina, will be sworn in as Hite’s replacement on June 16.

Hite sat down Wednesday with Chalkbeat for an interview about his tenure at the district. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Why did you want to come to Philadelphia?

I wanted to come to Philadelphia simply because I saw inner city youth that needed something very different in terms of their education, and their conditions for their education. And also, there were (school reform) commissioners who were highly professional, who were focused on creating better conditions for the district, and who wanted to fundamentally change the trajectory of things like the financing, the budget, facilities, the work conditions, and so on.

Then I started talking to people in Philadelphia and to a person, everyone wanted to see something better for their children.

What do you think your main accomplishment has been?

More children are graduating from high school, we went from having over a billion-dollar deficit to having a balanced budget for the last four and a half years, and is projected to be balanced even beyond the expiration of the federal [pandemic relief] dollars. We have new systems for support for young people, like more counselors, nurses, and more music programs. We have structures that exist that help school-based staff with dealing with the social and emotional needs of children.

We had 16 “persistently dangerous” schools when I arrived. This is the sixth or seventh year where we have none. We have hydration stations now in all schools. We have a student information system.

We have more schools now that are air conditioned. We have more children in high performing schools. We have children who will graduate high school with an associate’s degree because of the new programs we’ve established.

So I think that it’s a body of work that becomes a set of accomplishments versus one thing. Last year, the most important thing for me was getting children back in school. And that still remains the most important thing, keeping them there.

Your biggest regret?

Cutting programs for students. I had to actually cut programs for students in 2013. I thought we could solve the budget shortfall by cutting people, counselors, bilingual counseling assistants, itinerant art teachers, we even started the year without extra-curricular activities.

The second biggest regret was not getting children back in school after more than a year out during the pandemic.

Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently in handling the COVID crisis?

We were forced to take children out of schools. The governor made that decision. In hindsight, now we know a lot more than we did then. If we were able to get masks faster, perhaps we could have had children back in school sooner. And you know, I think people did the best they could, especially our teachers.

But I would have tried to work to get students back sooner, much sooner, because they were struggling being out.

You were Philadelphia’s first permanent Black male superintendent. How do you think you did in terms of improving outcomes for students of color, especially Black males?

That’s the basis of our equity work. And that’s the work I’m also proud of, we have to know what the disproportionate data tells us about children – who are we suspending, who is in AP courses, who’s graduating, who’s reading on grade level. And then it’s also important to look at the policies and structures that we have in place.

When I got here, we had a “zero tolerance” policy around student behavior. Who do you think was put out of schools most often? Black males and Latino males. And so we eliminated that policy, in fact, we prohibited suspensions from kindergarten through third grade.

We have more children in these categories who are accessing opportunities, like [applying to selective schools] that didn’t have access to those opportunities before.

A recent report found that schools in this region are among the most segregated in the country in terms of race and class. Do you think that desegregation is even worth talking about and that more desegregation in schools would be beneficial? And how would we try to make it happen?

I think it is worth bringing up, but in the context of equity compensation. Because there’s certain populations that need something more and different in order to be successful. The issue becomes providing every single child with what they need in order to be successful, irrespective of where they are attending schools. The whole point is having good schools close to where children live.

Lifting kids out of their neighborhood and community in some cases doesn’t serve the purpose we would like to see it serve.

So what is the biggest obstacle to providing a great school for every kid regardless of where they live?

One obstacle has always been insufficient resources, another our fundamental beliefs about what our children can achieve. And I do think we have to have a different mindset about our children in the city of Philadelphia that allows them to access all types of opportunities. In some cases, facilities become an obstacle because there’s so much work that’s needed in and around [outdated] facilities. And I think gun violence is becoming an obstacle.

What role can schools play in trying to alleviate gun violence?

We just had a meeting with students yesterday who said the only place they feel safe is at school. And in the next breath they said we need to take out all metal detectors. We can provide safe spaces and teach them ways to resolve conflict differently.

Schools have to return to those sacred spaces where children don’t have to worry about being shot at or beat up or harassed or assaulted. You teach children how to talk about their emotions. You put young people in restorative circles so they can talk about their feelings. You do positive behavior interventions. You have youth courts where students actually do the adjudication of discipline. But when children are worried about coming to and from school, it’s going to impact what happens in schools.

Last year, we lost 30 children [to violence]. This year, we already have 22. That’s 52 children over not even two complete years. So that, to me, is at a crisis level. If a fourth grader saw someone shot in the street, the trauma services will go into that school for that day. But then the next day they’re called to the next school because there’s another traumatic event, but the fourth grader still needs that service.

We need to increase dramatically the services that are available to all children. And we have to sound the alarm that the district cannot do that alone.

Philadelphia, like the rest of the country, has experienced a teacher shortage. Why is that happening?

It’s happening because people have been talking down on the profession for the last two decades. Individuals are thinking, “I don’t want to be a teacher.” So we have to lift up the teaching profession for young people and think about teaching as leadership rather than just teaching [academic] content. These are people teaching young people social responsibility and social justice. I think we have to do a much better job of rebranding what teaching means today.

The answers to the teacher shortage are sitting in classrooms right now. We have to find ways to maybe do a Middle College type program for the development of teachers.

What have you been telling the next superintendent, Tony Watlington?

I’m telling him to learn as much as he can about the city and communities here. And oh, by the way, that’s going to take time. It’s him making sure he’s not frustrated because he’s not learning fast enough. He just has to remain patient, purposeful and intentional. To the public, I would say: People have to give him a chance.

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.

Philly brings process to fix aging schools to the public. Is it enough?

2022-05-18T00:02:34+00:00

As the Philadelphia district aims to tell the public how it is managing its aging infrastructure, parents and community leaders remain concerned about possible school closures, lack of enrollment data, and transparency when it comes to school building maintenance and safety.

The district is in the middle of public engagement about its long-term plan to improve school facilities. During this round of talks, which will take place over Zoom, the district’s facilities planning team is providing an overview of the process, including project goals and data collected from the district. These sessions began May 10 and are open to the public. Additional sessions are scheduled for May 18, 19, 24, and 25. To participate, residents can register online.

In addition, as part of that plan, all district school buildings will be evaluated over the next 12 months, with the goal of creating recommendations for each building.

To identify problems with school buildings and identify recommendations to address them, the district also launched a $1.3 million Facilities Planning Process last month. School officials unveiled a website with an interactive map that the community could use to access information about each school building’s condition, as well as facility assessments conducted by third-party industry professionals.

But the overall process has attracted concerns. For example, some parents have complained about the website’s lack of information, or the quality of it. There are also frustrations with the district’s past approach to buildings, and the teachers’ union is already warning the district not to consider closing schools.

Caroline Thorn, for example, said she is worried the new website doesn’t show when the district’s enrollment predictions have been inaccurate.

“The data shown has enrollment numbers for the last few years but they do not include on those graphs the projections they made for those years or any error rate,” said Thorn, a parent of two district students.

Thorn said she would also like the district to show exactly what calculations they are using to determine whether a school’s use of space is efficient.

District spokeswoman Monica Lewis said school buildings’ capacities were calculated by an engineering firm in the spring of 2021, while enrollment numbers come from last October. Lewis noted that the district’s website does not include any enrollment projections; the district will complete and share the next set of enrollment forecasts this coming fall.

Hopes that the district will be proactive

Outgoing Superintendent William Hite said last fall the district planned to spend some of its $1.1 billion in federal coronavirus relief on building repairs and upgrades. The average Philadelphia school building is 75 years old.

Eugene Desyatnik, president of the Bella Vista Neighbors Association in South Philadelphia and parent of three students of catchment schools, said he’s glad the district is engaging in a facilities planning process. He said he hopes it’s a sign that the district is becoming more proactive.

“To date … the voice of the community fell on deaf ears, even when the community was offering data points on neighborhood development in the pipeline, or when local institutions were offering expertise on environmental conditions,” Desyatnik said.

“The district’s typical response has been one of ‘we got it,’ followed by a crisis,” he added, “whether it’s over-enrollment, a roof collapse, or a diagnosis, followed by a reactive response.”

Enrollment could also be a factor. The student population is 120,000 down from 125,000 five years ago when the district recommended closing three schools a year due to declining enrollment.

At the same time, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan warned the district that in addition to the importance of transparency and meaningful investments, “School closures must not be part of this process.” Jordan stressed that closing schools would represent “a disinvestment from public education and a disinvestment from communities.”

Teachers last year protested over building conditions, specifically asbestos, and threatened to boycott at the start of this school year.

Sarah Winawer-Wetzel, a parent of a second grader, said she’s glad the district released the interactive map, but said the map itself reveals major and disturbing inequities.

“It’s troubling when you see how [the] historical inequitable distribution of funding means that one catchment has all metrics in green, and a school right next door is completely red or orange,” Winawer-Wetzel said, referring to the website metrics in which green signals a relatively strong score and red represents a relatively weak score.

Meanwhile, Sarah Kloss, a district parent, said her big concern is that the district is highlighting so many expensive issues that it’s not clear how it will prioritize which schools to fix. And like Thorn, she worries about the data the district will use when making decisions.

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

Philly’s historic Central High gets its first female, Black president

2022-04-22T23:21:07+00:00

Katharine Davis, the principal of Henry Elementary School in Mount Airy, has been named the 15th president of Central High School, becoming the first woman and the first person of color to lead the 186-year-old institution.

The historic appointment comes at a time when Central, the second-oldest high school in the United States and one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious and selective, is at a pivotal moment in its history as it is grappling with how to move forward with an anti-racist agenda. As the percentage of Black and Latinx students at the school has dropped precipitously over the past decade, students have grown more vocal in expressing concerns about discriminatory practices, and have made demands for change.

Davis, 34, who graduated from Central High in 2005, was chosen from among a pool of about 20 people who applied, said Assistant Superintendent Ted Domers, who led the search process. Superintendent William Hite made the final decision based on recommendations from a search committee made up of parents, students, and school staff. Her tenure will begin July 1.

“Kate came across as someone passionate and committed to social justice, as strategic, thoughtful, and poised,” Domers said.

Davis has been a school leader in Philadelphia for less than five years, first as co-principal at Harding Middle School in Frankford, where she was in charge of improving instruction, and then at Henry Elementary – which she also attended as a child – since 2019. She has never led a high school before.

But when the committee members compared her qualities and skill set to what they wanted in a new principal, and what 350 others said they wanted in a school leadership survey, it was no contest, Domers said.

“The best person available, that was Kate. Hands down, it was Kate,” said Domers.

Detour from a planned veterinary career

Davis grew up in Mount Airy in a biracial family, and graduated from Central in 2005 as part of the 264th class. Her father is retired U.S. District Court Judge Legrome Davis.

“When I think about what it means for me to be in this role, it feels surreal,” she said in an interview.

When she attended Central, she said, she didn’t feel at all out of place due to her racial background. “I was surrounded by a large, diverse population,” she said. “I felt accepted, I felt I truly belonged there. It was a safe space for me. I remember the vibrancy of the Black Student Union, and the initiatives of the cultural groups, and how important that is for young people.”

Davis didn’t always want to be an educator. Growing up, she set her sights on being a veterinarian. After graduating from Central, she attended Cornell University to major in animal sciences.

But she had a lot of other interests, including art, and she got an internship at the Johnson Art Museum in Ithaca, NY. There, she worked with local elementary school students and discovered that she had an affinity for teaching. “It changed my life,” she said.

She signed up for a course called The Art of Teaching, and spent two days a week in a local first grade classroom, where the teacher was a woman with many years of experience.

“I observed her love of teaching, her genuine love of working with students, how she constructed hands-on learning for the students,” Davis said. “There was a shift in my own experience. I saw the joy in teaching.”

She decided to minor in education, and on graduating in 2009 Davis headed to New York City for a year of teaching in a Bronx elementary school as a member of AmeriCorps. She enrolled at Pace University in Manhattan to get her teaching credentials, and then spent several years teaching in a bilingual school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

In 2015, she became the principal of a charter school in Brooklyn. Davis returned to Philadelphia in 2017 to participate in the PhillyPlus principal certification program.

Michele Whitecraft, the professor of education who taught The Art of Teaching at Cornell, remembers hoping Davis would pursue education as a career.

“I never said she should abandon her career in veterinary medicine,” said Whitecraft, who now teaches at Mansfield University, part of the Pennsylvania state system. “I know they say we shouldn’t say ‘teachers are born, not made,’ but this kid was amazing from day one. She’s just a natural, the most authentic, relatable person I have met in my career. Teaching was the perfect choice for her.”

Whitecraft added that Davis also has a strong sense of herself and her abilities. “She knows her power,” she said. “How beautiful for someone that young to see what she can contribute and not be constrained by society. She’s my hero.”

Davis said that she pursued being a school principal so early in her career because the opportunity arose. “I was a fourth grade teacher, and I absolutely loved teaching and thrived in the classroom, but what I found is I enjoyed working with adults and leading in spaces in schools,” she said.

“A leader works through a strong instructional lens, and believes in the diversity of the school community,” Davis added. “A leader works to honor student voices and unite the community.”

Central in the throes of change

Her leadership skills will be tested at Central, which has more than 2,400 students. Founded in 1836 to educate boys, it was the first high school in Pennsylvania. It did not admit girls until 1983, and then did so under court order. Black boys were admitted starting in the 19th century — Alain Locke, the philosopher and critic and author of “The New Negro,” graduated in 1902. By the late 20th century, the school had a student body that often came close to mirroring the city’s overall racial demographics.

But its recent history with race has been problematic, or at least more visibly difficult. Two years ago, in the wake of 2020 police killing of George Floyd, students formed a “Black at Central” group that brought attention to microaggressions and what they felt was discrimination at the school.

The students, backed by some faculty, issued a list of demands that former principal Tim McKenna agreed to meet, including implicit bias training for teachers and administrators, the hiring of a diversity, equity and inclusion officer (which has been done), and more active recruitment in schools and neighborhoods that rarely send students to Central and Masterman, the city’s other most highly selective school.

Davis’ appointment comes after a concerted effort by a group of Central students, alumni, and parents for the district to choose a Black principal. Parent Joe Quinones, a leader of this group, said he believes that “putting eyes on the process” led to a Black president of Central High.

A Black president, he said, will “leave no stone unturned relative to [improving] the diversity profile of the school.”

A big issue Davis will face is a steadily declining share and total population of Black students in recent years. In 2011, Central was 32% Black; today that figure is 18%. Just over half the Philadelphia district’s students are Black.

This year, the district revised its selective admissions system for all so-called “criteria-based” schools like Central, in an effort to improve access to students from marginalized groups. Students who meet basic criteria – in Central’s case, all As and Bs, 95% attendance, and a certain score on a controversial writing test – are placed in an admissions lottery. In an effort to eliminate bias, the system removes principals and school teams from the decision-making process that determines which students are admitted.

Until now, students had to score at least in the 88th percentile on the state standardized tests, but those tests have not been administered for the last two years due to Covid. Another demand of the Black at Central group has been to eliminate test scores from the admissions process, but the district – which will get a new superintendent later this year – has not said whether it will reinstate the test as a requirement going forward.

A report from the district’s Office of Research and Evaluation shows that more students of all races qualified to enter the lottery this year for admission to Central and other selective schools – although the report also showed that smaller percentages of Black and Latinx students, compared to white and Asian students, met the more stringent qualifications for Central and Masterman. Officials have yet to release data showing whether the new system has affected the demographic makeup of Central’s incoming ninth grade for 2022-23.

Davis is confident in her leadership skills to tackle these and other challenges.

“I know intentional decisions have been made by the School District of Philadelphia to maintain racial diversity at Central, and I look forward to being a leader to uphold and continue that work,” Davis said. “For many reasons, the time has come … for a diverse individual to lead the school. I am honored to be the first female and the first African American to lead Central.”

Philadelphia saw a surge in midyear teacher resignations, data shows

2022-02-25T23:12:25+00:00

Editor’s note: This article was updated to remove material that appeared verbatim on the PHEAA website.

A labor shortage that marred the beginning of the school year in Philadelphia has continued and could get worse, with a midyear increase in teacher resignations, according to district data presented at Thursday’s Board of Education meeting.

According to the data, 169 teachers left the school system between Dec. 1 and Feb. 15 — double the number of teachers who resigned during the same period last year. That figure doesn’t include the 178 teachers that are currently on leave or sabbatical. The district employs about 9,100 teachers.

That’s also a change from the start of the year, when resignations were largely from the central office, not the teacher workforce, officials said.

Teacher attendance is also lower this school year, with a 20% increase in daily teacher absences compared to last year. Sixty-eight percent of teachers attended 95% of class so far this year. Amid a COVID surge following winter break, for instance, many schools shifted to remote learning to cope with sick teachers and staff.

Asked if he would characterize this year’s loss of district employees as a trickle or a water main break, Superintendent William Hite said the current staff shortages were the latter and were exacerbated by other absences.

“It all depends on the positions. At the beginning of the year transportation felt like a water main break right? Because we were not able to just get candidates into those roles. But as we start to work on the problem, then it becomes more manageable, but I do think it depends on both the positions and in many cases the places,” Hite said.

Some positions are harder to fill than others, said Larisa Shambaugh, chief talent officer for the school district. The areas with the largest number of vacancies include: special education, elementary, math, English, English as a second language, and science.

Shambaugh noted that teacher vacancies vary significantly by school. For instance, 162 schools have a “fill rate” for teachers of more than 95%; the rate is the ratio of the number of hires per month to the number of job openings. Fifty-three schools have rates of 85% to 94% for teachers. And seven schools are below 85% for teachers.

Teacher diversity has also been a concern in the district’s teacher recruitment efforts. More than 70% of the district’s students are Black and Latino, yet teachers are mostly white. Black teachers make up 24.5% of the 9,100 teachers in the district, while white teachers make up 67% of the teacher population, according to district data.

The labor market also has affected school staffing, officials said. Wages are increasing, making the market more competitive for employers. Some employees who might have worked for the school district can find other jobs, causing the district to work harder to recruit staff.

To attract climate staff, for instance, a role where the fill rate dropped from 92.7% last year to 62.4% this year, the district is proposing temporarily removing the requirement for a high school diploma and conducting a ZIP-code targeted marketing campaign.

Substitute requests also are higher with 982 substitute requests, on average, per day — that’s 726 more per day than last year. It also has been increasingly difficult to get the number of substitutes needed each day, district officials said.

To address substitute numbers, the district has tried several strategies, including offering daily bonuses to substitutes and hiring 143 full-time building substitutes to support schools on a daily basis.

District officials also said they were looking at strategies to address teacher vacancies, including higher salaries, retention bonuses, a comprehensive marketing strategy, early notification of intent to retire or resign, a pipeline of teacher residency, and more staff and support to the recruitment team.

Some of those items would be subject to bargaining with the teachers union.

To attract school nurses, which also has been an area with vacancies, the district announced a student loan relief program this month.

The current fill rate for nurses is 89.4%, compared to 97.8% last year, even though the district has hired 32 nurses since August. That’s an area the teachers union has drawn attention to throughout the school year, as the COVID pandemic has increased the workload for nurses.

Hillary Linardopoulos, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said of teacher and other vacancies that “A lot of it will come down to ensuring students and staff have the resources that they need to really promote working and learning conditions that are good for staff and students. That’s critical.”

Kristen Luebbert, a humanities teacher at the U School, addressed the staffing issue during the registered speakers portion of Thursday’s meeting.

“Teachers don’t leave because of students. We don’t leave because of quote unquote tough neighborhoods or quote unquote, bad communities. We leave because of bad administration, crazy, meaningless paperwork requirements and toxic working conditions.”

At the start of the school year, a shortage of bus drivers, food service workers and others wreaked havoc on the system. Buses were late and trash piled up in school yards. Transportation and food services still were among the positions with the lowest fill rates as of this month, officials said.

From Aug. 16 through Oct. 1, the district saw a significant increase in resignations from central office and, to a lesser extent, nurses, general cleaners, and secretaries. But not from teachers, Shambaugh said.

But the district said the “great resignation” is not affecting all roles this school year.

School-based administrators were 99% staffed at the beginning of the school year and remain almost fully staffed at 97.5%. Building engineers are currently staffed at 70%, which is about what the fill rate has been for the past four years.

Anyone interested in teacher positions can visit www.teachinphilly.com or www.workinphilly.com.

Philly will announce its superintendent finalists next month

2022-02-23T00:56:41+00:00

The Philadelphia district has narrowed down its list of 400 applicants for superintendent to a small group of finalists and will announce their names in March, the city’s Board of Education said Tuesday.

Among them, 71% are male, 64% are Black, and 20% are Latino. One of them has held a leadership position in the district.

Current Superintendent William Hite will leave the job in August after 10 years to become the CEO of the educational nonprofit KnowledgeWorks and the inaugural superintendent in residence and executive fellow at Yale University. The search to find his replacement began in October with 17 in-person and virtual listening sessions across the city. A 13-member advisory committee of community leaders, business representatives, clergy, and educators was assembled in December.

The finalists will participate in meetings with district stakeholders and one public, in-person, live-streamed town hall where students, parents, teachers, and principals will be able to ask the candidates questions.

The candidates also will take part in three in-person group sessions, one for 11 parents, one for 10 students, and one for 11 teachers and principals. The board is inviting Philly residents to nominate themselves to be chosen for the small groups. Participants must be vaccinated. The meetings are scheduled to be live-streamed through Facebook.

The board will choose the new superintendent in the spring.
Bureau Chief Johann Calhoun covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. He oversees Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s education coverage. Contact Johann at jcalhoun@chalkbeat.org

Near his exit, Hite picked to teach and mentor senior education leaders at Yale

2022-02-14T21:48:56+00:00

William Hite, who will step down in June as Philadelphia’s public school leader, has been named the inaugural superintendent in residence and executive fellow at the Broad Center at Yale University’s School of Business for the 2022-2023 school year.

On July 1 he will also begin his new job as CEO of the national education nonprofit KnowledgeWorks. It’s unclear if he will remain in Philadelphia.

In his position at Yale, Hite will lead content facilitation where he will moderate discussions and introduce activities for the cohort in the Fellowship for Public Education Leadership program during the 2022-23 school year

Hite also will teach in and support the master’s in public education management degree program and be charged with providing mentorship to members interested in district leadership roles.

The departing school leader has said he will remain in his role during the search process to find his replacement. When he announced his resignation in September, after serving for almost ten years, Hite said he would remain in Philadelphia until the end of this school year.

Leaders at Yale thought Hite’s background in taking on issues of race and equity in the classroom made him a frontrunner for the fellowship.

“From his laser focus on equity and inclusion to his innovative approaches to effecting meaningful change in underserved communities, he has proven himself to be a paragon of transformational leadership,” said Hanseul Kang, assistant dean and executive director of The Broad Center at the Yale School of Management.

In 2020, Hite wrote an open letter to the school community that grew into an antiracism program, the Equity Coalition, which is a participatory, inclusive group that would set recommendations around what the district’s equity work should be. The effort is aligned with the school board’s strategic plan in its “goals and guardrails.”

“With COVID, we were all virtual. We saw that was traumatic for many of our young people and for our city. Our leadership team had begun some general equity work; then we had the horrendous murder of George Floyd,” he said in an interview with Yale last year. It was the last straw, he said then.

“His impactful, inclusive, and imaginative approach is very much in keeping with the Yale School of Management’s mission to educate leaders for business and society,” said Kerwin K. Charles, an economics professor at Yale.

Though Hite has sought to bring equity to the district, efforts to enhance the selective admissions process have received pushback. In addition to a lottery, preference is given to students from five city ZIP codes that have sent few students to selective schools. The aim of the new system is to make the demographics at the most prestigious schools more reflective of the district’s student population, which is primarily Black and Latino. Student applicants who qualify from targeted ZIP codes and choose selective schools are automatically accepted.

But some angry parents have argued that the new process also has caused problems, as some students this year received no offers at their selected schools.

“I wish to congratulate Dr. Hite on being appointed as Yale School of Management’s inaugural superintendent-in-residence, effective at the end of June,” said Board of Education President Joyce Wilkerson in a statement Monday. “We remain grateful for his continued leadership and service to the school district. Hite is a key part of the plan to onboard his successor.”
The search to find Hite’s replacement is on schedule, according to Wilkerson. Following the finalist announcement next month the school board is expected to invite the final candidates to Philadelphia for a series of meetings where the public will have the chance to address them. A final announcement is expected in the spring.

Philadelphia Parking Authority’s demand for a refund could have big implications for district, CFO says

2021-12-21T02:14:27+00:00

School officials say they are seeking more information and weighing their options after the Philadelphia Parking Authority claimed that it overpaid the district by $11.3 million in 2020 and wants a refund.

The district’s chief financial officer, Uri Monson, said that while the amount may seem small compared to the district’s $3 billion annual budget, the PPA’s move could have big implications for the district’s future planning if it is allowed to stand.

Monson said that money from the PPA, given annually as part of a longstanding revenue-sharing arrangement, is “recurring money” and adds up over time. If the annual amount can’t be predicted with some certainty, “that significantly affects how we make investments in schools,” he said.

The $11.3 million is 77% of the $14.7 million the PPA paid the district last year.

As far as Monson can tell, the PPA is recalculating what it should have paid the district in the 2020 fiscal year based on new estimates of its future liabilities, he said.

PPA’s latest action “has raised questions,” he said. “We don’t understand all the numbers and are not convinced all the things they’re putting in are supposed to be counted” as part of the state’s revenue-sharing formula.

The PPA told Monson it “does not have any supporting documentation to provide” to back up its claim of overpayments, according to an email obtained by Chalkbeat through the office of City Council member Helen Gym. But emails between Monson and the PPA’s chief financial officer suggest that the overpayments had to do with miscalculations relating to debt incurred as a result of its obligations to retirees.

The PPA also did not explain why those funds were tied to payments to the school district and not another part of its budget.

Monson has been aware of the claim since October. The issue became public after the school district presented its quarterly report to the City Council.

Gym organized a protest Monday outside the PPA office, where people go to pay and contest parking tickets. She was joined by leaders from the district’s two major unions, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators. Also, there were advocacy groups, including Children First and the faith-based organization POWER.

“The PPA wants to siphon millions of dollars from our schools where every single day students and staff … endure conditions that would never be tolerated in a wealthier, whiter school district,” said Hillary Linardopoulos, representing the PFT.

The amount that the authority wants back is equivalent to the cost of 100 teachers, counselors or nurses, or could be used to remove a lot of asbestos, mold, or lead pipes in the district’s aging schools, Gym said. She called the PPA’s action “an outrage.”

A PPA spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

In 2004, Republicans in Harrisburg engineered a takeover of the PPA, which not only hands out the tickets when meters expire but also runs the Philadelphia airport, operates parking garages across the city, regulates taxis and limousines, and manages red light cameras.

As part of that deal, some of the revenue PPA collects from parking tickets is supposed to be paid to the school district. It was expected to yield $45 million a year for schools. However, that much money has never materialized, and in some years, there have been no payments at all.

In 2014, parking fines nearly doubled, which PPA justified as a way to send more money to the schools. But after that, money sent to the district declined until the City Council held a hearing in 2016, drawing attention to the issue again.

A blistering 2017 audit by then state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale found that PPA potentially shortchanged the district by $77.9 million.

Since 2015, revenue from the PPA to the district totaled $53 million, meaning that PPA is seeking the return of more than 20% of its payments since then. The district got nothing in the 2021 fiscal year due to the pandemic, said Monson, but it had been counting on returning to annual PPA payments of about $15 million a year in its future projections.

Monson said that PPA has promised additional answers in January.

Writing test added to Philly’s selective admissions process is being misused, professor says

2021-12-09T20:57:10+00:00

A machine-scored writing exercise introduced this year as part of the admissions process for five of Philadelphia’s top public high schools is being misused, an education professor says.

Joshua Wilson, an associate professor at the University of Delaware who studies automated essay scoring, said the writing tool is meant to identify struggling learners and inform classroom instruction, not make high-stakes decisions about students’ futures.

“No one has done research on whether it can be used to make placement decisions,” Wilson said about the writing tool, MI Write, which is a product made by Measurement Inc., based in Durham, N.C. Using it this way is a “mistake,” he said.

“I believe the use of Mi Write in this context is very problematic and should be reconsidered,” Wilson told the Philadelphia school board at its Thursday meeting.

In response to Wilson’s criticism, district spokesperson Monica Lewis issued a statement to Chalkbeat saying that the district had been “assured by the vendor that using this tool to score essays as part of the application process would be appropriate.”

Lewis said that one of the five schools, Parkway Center City Middle College, had for several years been using a computer-graded writing sample for admissions with “positive feedback.”

Measurement, Inc. did not immediately respond to an email request for comment. But a document on its website says MI Write scores should not be used to grade students.

“It would be very unfair to assign a grade to a student based on its evaluation of an essay,” the document says. “One student might benefit from transferring [the scoring engine’s] scores to grades, while another might be penalized. MI Write was designed to help students practice their skills in writing and to improve them based on feedback.”

This year, the school district overhauled its selective admissions process in an effort to improve access for traditionally underserved students. Instead of giving individual school leaders final say over who is admitted, all students who meet the qualifications are entered into a lottery.

Each school can still set standards for grades, attendance, and behavior. But missing the cutoff on the machine-scored writing sample can eliminate a student from the lottery.

Concern about the writing test is only one of several issues being raised about the new process. Several parents and students registered to speak at the meeting on this topic.

Black and Latino enrollment at the district’s two most coveted and rigorously selective schools, Central High and Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School, has declined in recent years, an issue highlighted during the national protests that followed a police officer killing George Floyd last year. Alumni, students, and some faculty at the two schools demanded that the district act. Black enrollment at both schools is below 20%, in a district where more than half of the students are Black.

The goal of the new system, officials said, is to address racial disparities in admissions and open opportunities to more students by attempting to minimize any bias that could occur as school leaders shaped their next class.

“We worked hard to avoid data points that involved human assessment,” said Karyn Lynch, the district’s chief of student support services, when she announced the new process in October, on the day that the application window for fall 2022 admissions opened.

At Thursday’s board meeting, she offered a strong defense of the new process “as eliminating privilege so other students can finally have the opportunity they had not had before. We have also heard from many excited students who are suddenly are aware of a school selection process where they didn’t participate in the past but are participating now.”

As part of the new system, the district also gave preference to students living in five ZIP codes where students are underrepresented at top schools.

Wilson, the professor, called the effort to make the system more equitable “a noble goal,” but said the question was “how to get the action to match the intention with a more valid way of doing it.”

Besides Central and Masterman, the other three schools requiring the writing test are Academy at Palumbo, Parkway Center City, and Carver High School of Engineering and Science. Carver and Parkway Center City are majority Black, while Palumbo is one-third Black and one-third Asian American.

Before the change, students were admitted to the five schools based on grades, attendance, behavior, and a writing sample.

Standardized test scores were a big factor before the pandemic, but they haven’t been administered since spring 2019. Officials eliminated their use for this cycle, but have not said whether they will resume using them in the future. Standardized test results typically correlate with socioeconomic status, putting underserved Black and Latino students at a disadvantage.

The MI Write test used this year gives students a prompt, mostly on topics that don’t require detailed background knowledge. Questions might include “What is your favorite subject and why?” or “If you could go back in history and meet someone, who would that be?” Students have 90 minutes to write an essay that is immediately scored on a scale of six to 30.

To qualify for Palumbo, Carver and Parkway Center City, the student needs a score of 17. For Central and Masterman, the score is 22, according to the district.

Wilson raised concerns about how the district determined the cutoff scores on the MI Write test for admission. “Where’s the research that validates the cut scores?” he said. “I think Philadelphia has the burden of showing the proof that these cut scores are appropriate.”

Wilson said that 17 “is just below the median, and probably not that high a bar.” In a 90-minute sample, he said, “it would probably be achievable for most kids unless they really lack basic skills.”

At the board meeting, member Mallory Fix-Lopez said she had heard that some students are getting fractional scores, such as 21.9, and asked Lynch if the scores would be rounded up so students would make the cutoff for Masterman and Central. Lynch said no.

Fix-Lopez said the students she spoke with who missed the cutoff by tenths of a point are Black and Latino, “the population we were particularly looking at to address equity issues.” She said she would like to see demographic data on otherwise qualified students who fell into that kind of gap.

Student Nora Ouarirdi told the board she scored a 21.1. “I cried,” she said. “For students worked incredibly hard, this doesn’t seem particularly equitable.”

Wilson also noted that the instrument doesn’t score for content. “I can write a beautifully written response off-topic and get a good score,” he said.

Students take the computerized exercise in class, and immediately learn their score. Students are taking the test now; the testing window is between Nov. 29 and Dec. 18.

Timothy Boyle, principal of Science Leadership Academy Middle School, said that 43 of his students took the test last week, and almost all scored above 17. Based on what he knew about the students, he said he wondered what the scores actually revealed about them.

One straight-A student scored a 21, one point shy of the score that would make them eligible for Central or Masterman. Another student, with a 1.5 grade point average, scored a 20, putting them above the cutoff for three of the five schools, though they might be ineligible based on other factors. “How does this result in more fairness and more opportunity?” Boyle asked.

The scoring system is based on an algorithm derived from what trained human raters produced based on the six-trait writing model, which includes rubrics for ideas, organization, sentence fluency, word choice, and style conventions. Each trait can receive a score between 1 and 5, adding to a maximum score of 30.

Wilson said the main use and benefit of machine-scored tests is to encourage teachers to assign more writing because it helps them to pinpoint student weaknesses and guide improvements quickly. “Scoring and evaluating writing is so time consuming,” he said.

Boyle also applauds the effort to make the system more equitable. But he said if district leaders suspect bias on the part of its educators as a reason for the disparities in the demographics at its most selective schools, it needs to tackle that issue directly.

“They say they don’t know if this [new process] is going to work,” he said. “It’s like they are throwing stuff at the wall, and confusing action for strategy.”

The high school selection process includes three tiers — the five “criteria-based” ones at the top, “citywide admission” schools with a particular theme or focus, and those with catchment areas that have special programs.

In the statement, made in response to Chalkbeat’s questions, Lewis said that this year, the district received more high school applications compared to last, suggesting that the effort to broaden access is working. She said 15,382 students — from both inside and outside the district — submitted 62,591 applications (each student can choose five schools), which amounts to “365 more students participating in the process than last year.”

Lynch and Superintendent William Hite, who will end his 10-year tenure in August, have said that the intent is to continually refine the process.

“We know that change can be difficult and we also know that the time for equity-focused change is now,” the district’s statement said. “This year’s changes are a starting point” that will lead to “further enhancements...as we move toward becoming a stronger and more equitable school district.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use the National Guard to get Philly kids to school? Hite is considering it.

2021-09-15T18:40:07+00:00

Philadelphia School Superintendent William Hite said Wednesday that he has called Gov. Tom Wolf’s office to see if the state’s National Guard could help transport children to school.

The bus driver shortage remains so acute that he felt it was necessary to take that step, he said.

“I made a call to the governor’s office yesterday to start the process of what it would take to consider something like that,” Hite said at a morning press briefing. “They’re amenable to helping us solve the problem.”

The governor’s office said in a statement that “we are working with the schools to evaluate the situation,” noting that the problem does not only affect Philadelphia.

“The administration is aware of the challenges the School District of Philadelphia and some other schools are facing with hiring school bus drivers,” said Lyndsay Kensinger, the governor’s press secretary, in an email. “States across the country are experiencing similar situations.”

Since the start of the school year on Aug. 31, the Philadelphia school district – along with others across the state and nation – has been struggling to find enough school bus drivers to meet its needs. Parents have taken to social media to share stories of children not getting to school on time, not getting home for hours, or being left off at the wrong bus stop.

The impact of the shortage continues to be “pretty strong,” Hite said, acknowledging that many students are “not showing up on time and not being returned home in a timely manner.” The district itself maintains a bus fleet to transport some of its own students and has three bus driver vacancies, Hite said. But the major problem is a labor shortage among the contractors it pays to transport most students, including those attending private and charter schools.

The district is responsible for transporting 45,477 students each day. Students travel by bus, cab and van. Most of its own students transported are those with disabilities, and younger students who live more than a mile-and-a-half from their school or need to cross hazardous routes to get there.

Due to the driver shortage, the district also changed start times for most schools, with most starting at 7:30 a.m., 8:15 a.m. or 9 a.m. That means the same bus could make three runs each morning and afternoon. The upheaval has caused consternation among many families who had to rearrange their own schedules to deal with the last minute changes.

Hite said that many National Guard members have commercial drivers’ licenses, which would allow them to drive a van. They would also have to undergo special training.

This week, Gov. Charlie Baker deployed Massachusetts National Guard members to help drive children to school in several districts. About 250 members were participating in training starting Tuesday.

Philadelphia is also paying parents to provide their own transportation, and recently doubled the amount per month from $150 to $300 as a further incentive. Hite said that so far 2,000 parents have signed up and the district has planned for as many as 10,000 families to choose this option. Last school year, when the district offered hybrid schooling from March through June, 4,000 families signed up for a similar program, he said.

“We’re getting calls every day,” he said.

Hite also said that he would reach out to Amazon, which announced it was creating 4,800 jobs in Philadelphia, to see if it could help, but he wasn’t sure how. He suspected that Amazon’s hiring could worsen the situation because it would be competing for the same pool of workers as the district.

“This is not a problem that money can solve in and of itself,” Hite said.

After parents express frustration with weather notifications, Philadelphia schools go virtual Friday

2021-09-02T21:14:48+00:00

Despite the havoc wreaked by the tail end of Hurricane Ida, Philadelphia’s school district opened Thursday, with notice of a two-hour delay for some schools that came so late some parents already had dropped off their children.

On Friday, the district plans to go all-virtual in acknowledgement that conditions aren’t expected to improve. Superintendent William Hite made the decision after a nudge from Mayor Jim Kenney and in the face of outrage from the teachers union and parents.

“The city has shared that road conditions and other impacts from the storm are not expected to improve by tomorrow,” said an afternoon email sent to parents. “Therefore: All district schools will engage in 100% digital learning.”

After last year’s remote learning, all students should have access to laptops, making the pivot to virtual possible. Teachers and other staff members also will work from home Friday. School will reopen for in-person learning Sept. 8 after the observance of Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah.

The heavy rains and winds brought on by Ida sent the city’s two rivers to record high levels, flooded roads and basements, downed some power lines, and shuttered most suburban schools. City officials at a press conference Thursday termed the damage as a “once in a 100 years” event.

District leaders, however, decided to open as usual for its 120,000-plus students. It did not go smoothly.

The teachers union called the decision “irresponsible.” Some parents were furious — communication about the delayed opening went out at 8:45 a.m., after many parents had dropped off their children or were en route to school.

“Y’all should have had a plan, yesterday was a tornado watch. There are children that are sitting out in these yards because parents don’t know that there is a two-hour delay,” said Shakeda Gaines, a parent and president of the Philadelphia Home and School Council. “How dare you had these kids outside like that? It is unacceptable. It is not a game. This is not something that we want to play with.”

Jazmin Ellis, of Olney, said her son’s school starts at 8:15 a.m., but she didn’t receive any notice until 9:45.

“I got no phone calls, nothing,” she said.

Delores Brown, who lives in the Northeast, said the only reason her two children were able to get to school with the changed times is that her family has a car.

“The district shouldn’t have even started school this early. They weren’t prepared for anything. This was poorly handled, you know it was poorly handled,” she said.

Cierra Freeman described an odyssey of closed roads, U-turns and detours to get her daughter from Brewerytown to school in the Northeast, only to discover after arriving 45 minutes late that school wasn’t open yet because of the delay.

“This is horrible,” she said.

At the press conference, Hite said he acted in the face of “an evolving situation,” and the 8:45 a.m. communication “went out later than we would have liked.” The delay affected a small number of schools, he said, those with scheduled opening time of 9 a.m. By that hour, Hite said, officials had a better idea “of what the roads looked like and the difficulties individuals would have getting to and from schools.” Most schools have start times of 7:30 a.m. and 8:15 a.m.

Two elementary schools, James Dobson in low-lying Manayunk and Albert Greenfield in Center City, did close Thursday because of power outages, Hite said. Others had to alter dismissal procedures. The message to close went out to Dobson at 7:06 a.m., about 90 minutes before staff was due to report. Greenfield’s message went out at 7:10 a.m., an hour before staff was due.

Hillary Linardopoulos, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said in a statement, ”It simply does not make sense that SEPTA, [the city Office of Emergency Management], and other departments were sharing on the ground condition reports that clearly showed that opening schools would be dangerous, and yet the district moved forward.”

Hite said they made the decision to keep most schools open because “we consider ourselves an essential service.” SEPTA also was running normal routes “and in some cases children were already on buses on their way to school.”

In the letter to parents Thursday, Hite apologized “for any inconvenience [the late notice of the delay] may have caused our families. Please know that decisions were made based on the best information available at the time, and plans were in place to support the staff and students who were already en route to schools as well as those with later tiered start times.”

At the press briefing, city officials stressed the seriousness of the storm and its continued effects.

“This is a truly historic event,” said Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel, head of the city’s Office of Emergency Management. His inspectors out in the field “are saying they’ve never seen anything like this...flooding has reached levels we haven’t seen in 100 years.”

Asked for his reaction to Hite’s decision to open schools, Kenney said “hindsight is always 20-20.” He noted that this call is made by the Board of Education and the district’s administration, not by the city. “Everybody seems to be safe,” he added.

But union officials blasted the move.

“We vehemently disagree with the district’s call to keep schools open today,” the PFT said in a statement. The city’s teachers live all over the region, including some in New Jersey and Delaware, and union officials said many teachers had trouble traveling into schools.

City Council member Kendra Brooks and state Rep. Liz Fiedler issued a statement blasting the district’s “mishandling” of the flood response, especially the two-hour delay. “This last-minute decision made by the District is just one example of a pattern of disrespect for our school communities, poor planning, and poor communication with families across the city,” they wrote.

Parents also took to Facebook and Twitter to express their ire about the late notice for the delayed opening.

“Didn’t tell us until 8:38...I was sitting in my car getting ready to pull off AFTER dropping my kids off at school. Somebody def dropped the ball this morning,” wrote one mother.

“This is ridiculous!” wrote another. “This call should’ve been made no later than 5:00 am.”

The storm has apparently also roiled an already tense situation at the Julia R. Masterman Demonstration School, where teachers have been protesting over what they say are unsafe conditions around dangerous loose asbestos. The district is currently replacing the roof on the 90-year-old building.

Due to water damage, the storm caused a ceiling tile in a fourth floor classroom to fall, dropping some dust onto desks, said teacher and protest spokesperson Ethan Tannen. The district said that it has remediated potentially dangerous asbestos in 60 locations at the school, but the teachers and the union’s environmental consultant, Jerry Roseman, contend that officials have not been forthcoming about loose asbestos above ceiling tiles throughout the building.

The classroom was cleaned up and closed for the day. No students were present when it happened, according to the district.

“There was a ceiling tile that fell, and that issue has been inspected and resolved,” Hite said. “That’s why we’re replacing the roof.”

Former Philadelphia school board member Angela McIver addresses sudden resignation, board effectiveness

2021-07-27T21:29:28+00:00

Angela McIver was one of Mayor Jim Kenney’s picks to sit on Philadelphia’s Board of Education after the state-run School Reform Commission dissolved four years ago.

Since being on the board McIver has been credited with creating the “goals and guardrails” initiative to focus on student achievement. So it came as a surprise to many when McIver announced her resignation earlier this month during a board meeting. At the time, neither McIver nor board President Joyce Wilkerson gave a reason for her exit or disclosed what she’d be doing next.

“I had no friction with board president Joyce Wilkerson or Superintendent Hite,” McIver told Chalkbeat Tuesday. “The decision was really difficult for me because I was committed to staying on and seeing through the goals and guardrails that the board put in place. I’m a small business owner and my business really did suffer from the pandemic.”

The Texas-born, New Mexico-raised educator fell in love with Philadelphia and decided to stay after graduating from Hampton University. She later earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.
McIver founded the Trapezium Math Club, which helps children build foundational math skills through after-school programming. But due to the pandemic the program had to pivot and reimagine itself and start from scratch.

“We were an in-person hands on face-to-face program that rejected technology so we had to pivot to technology to offer math online and keep our philosophy about learning and keep it as technology free as possible,” McIver said. “We had to close our brick and mortar location. We could not keep it open and to stay in business, we had to pivot to an online model.”

Her departure comes just months after Kenney appointed three members: Lisa Salley, Reginald Streater, and Cecelia Thompson. Now the mayor will need to find another board replacement with schools reopening for in-person learning in a few weeks.
The mayor’s office told Chalkbeat it will work with the school board and other stakeholders and develop a timeline to reconvene the Educational Nominating Panel, which will submit names to Kenney for consideration for the vacant seat.
The city will provide an update, including a timeline, when the panel reconvenes and the nomination process begins, according to spokesperson Sarah Peterson.
McIver said she has no plans on coming to the district in a leadership capacity. “But I absolutely loved being on the board, so if I could come back in the future I would accept that position again.”

She spoke with Chalkbeat about her time on the board and how the governing body can be more effective for the city’s students.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The board unveiled its goals and guardrails last year to focus on student achievement. What would make this system of accountability successful?

Implementation would make the goals and guardrails effective. I think it was very clear that everyone knew my stance on the goals and guardrails. I don’t believe we should be focused so heavily on reading and math scores. My theory of action is if we provide and invest in students and schools in the guardrails then the other pieces take care of themselves. To move the needle in reading and math test scores, you create school environments where students and teachers and families love to be, you give children options of extracurricular and athletic programs that keep them connected to the school and invested in the school and invested in coming. If you create that then the reading and math scores are an easy thing to improve.

Teachers opposing the anti-critical race theory legislation in Harrisburg want the school board to take a stand. They want the board to say regardless of what happens in Harrisburg, that it is going to continue to encourage teachers to teach about racism and teach about the truth in the past of this country. Do you agree?

Yes, they should. Critical race theory is just teaching history. We know that so much of history was taken out to present a particular point of view. And critical race theory is simply teaching the full history and it’s being used as a ploy of people on the right. I don’t even think it merits much conversation. But I can’t imagine that the board would not back that.

Is the district in better hands under local control as compared to being governed by the state when it was under the School Reform Commission?

Absolutely, 100%. When it was under the SRC the decisions and actions that were being taken were simply financial ones. Under the locally controlled school board, everything that drives the decisions has to do with students — it’s student centered and focused on equity and having deep, meaningful conversations about how we make this happen for students.

How can the school board be more effective in the future? Thoughts on how the mayor selects members?

So I just want to say that Mayor Kenny has been completely hands off. I’ve been impressed by how he picked the board and then let the board do its work without interference. So that is a wonderful thing that he has done. I think the board itself has worked really well together. I think a nine-person board is a good number. We bring diversity of thought, there is a lot of camaraderie and understanding and acceptance of differences of opinion. There are some things that I disagreed with and I think the board should consider, and I think for instance, the speaker’s policy. I think we would be better off if we let whoever wants to speak, speak. I think we should revisit the speaker’s policy. That’s not news to any board members. They know how I have felt about it. We are a democratic entity. We speak for the people, we represent the people, we don’t speak for ourselves. As board members, we represent the community, then we should give the community an opportunity to speak their voice.

Is the charter renewal process fair for schools with little resources?

I think it’s difficult for charters with fewer resources to be successful. No, I don’t think the charter renewal process is fair. I think that prior to this charter renewal process, we didn’t have a system in place that allowed us to look at schools across the board. That being said, we know the charter school organizations that have very strong boards that have wealthy boards that can support them are at an advantage. And the unfortunate thing is that those schools that are run by people of color don’t have access to those kinds of resources that put them on an equal playing field.

So there’s something that needs to be fixed there. I don’t think it’s the charter renewal process that’s the problem. It’s that running charter schools requires far more than just the money that schools receive from the district. It makes running a charter school very difficult. I helped start a charter school. And I’ve had people ask me subsequently to be part of a startup for charter schools and I always tell them you don’t want another charter school. You think you’re going to be doing these amazing, wonderful things with children and creating these exciting education opportunities and what you’re doing is spending time figuring out how to get a permit for the dumpster that goes behind the school and figuring out how you’re going to get the resources to pay for cafeteria tables.

You’re not running a charter school, you’re running a business. I would encourage people who think that they want to move forward and do charter schools to really think very deeply about it. And I think the process for authorizing and monitoring charter schools is good in helping prevent these problems from happening before they even start.

Let’s reflect on your accomplishments on the board. What do you look back on and are most proud about?

I am proud about my guardrail for extracurricular and athletic opportunities. I really wanted to stay on the board just to push for this because I believe to my core that the issues that we’re dealing with when you have to help when you’re hiring more school safety officers, when you’re putting more money into school safety officers than you are into supports and resources and opportunities for kids. We are doing the wrong thing and I think that I have been very loud and very focused on that piece and I am very proud of that and hope that somebody on the board picks up that mantle and continues to fight for this.

I was also the one board member who voted against the budget. It really came down to one thing that we’re spending three times as much, that budget has three times as much money put towards school police officers than it does towards athletics. And to me that makes absolutely no sense. We are creating the problem right? It becomes self-fulfilling when you hire more officers, the messages that you’re sending to schools become self-fulfilling and how we allocate our resources. It really says everything about who we believe our children are, what we believe our children deserve.

Schools were forced to close last year due to COVID. When you look back, your thoughts on the school year that was through the pandemic and how it was managed?

I think it highlighted the sheer discrepancy in resources. We would not have changed what we did last year, but we need to really consider how we make significant changes in our infrastructure and capital investments so that if something like this were to happen again, if we were to shut down again, we wouldn’t have to shut everything down and keep students home. That was not ideal. It highlights a far bigger problem and that is how schools are funded in our state. I think this is a much larger issue and people who are committed to equity across the board, whether they are in Philadelphia or suburban schools should be fighting for equitable allocation of resources because it did not have happened. It did not. We should have had access to our resources, should have been what our suburban counterparts had, and we should have been able to and we couldn’t. It just highlights the disparity in resources for schools.

I hope we don’t have to shut down again. The school district really needs to be thinking 10 years, 20 years out in terms of what our Infrastructure is going to look like. So how are we going to address that? We need to have bigger conversations about that and be more proactive than reactive, which I think we’ve been for the past decade.

Philadelphia school district to install new air purifiers despite concerns from air quality specialist

2021-07-21T23:07:42+00:00

The Philadelphia school district will move forward with installing air purifiers in nearly every city classroom despite criticism from an air quality researcher that the purifiers are insufficient to curb the spread of COVID-19 and that some could produce harmful chemicals.

Officials met with Michael Waring, a professor of environmental engineering at Drexel University, on Monday as a “courtesy” to discuss his concerns, said Monica Lewis, a district spokesperson. But she said his input won’t change the district’s decision.

Chief Operating Officer Reggie McNeil believes the devices are safe, she said, and the district consulted other air quality specialists after Waring raised his concerns. Lewis didn’t name the other air quality specialists or say what they told the district.

The district purchased more than 9,500 air purifiers for $4.5 million and plans to install them by the end of the month, Lewis said. She said the district used the same purifiers in some classrooms during the spring’s hybrid learning.

Waring said he’s “deeply disappointed” that the district is sticking with the products.

The purifiers purchased by the district use ActivePure technology, which neutralizes viruses by pulling oxygen and water molecules into a “patented honeycomb matrix” and releasing “powerful oxidizers” back into the room, according to its website. District officials said at last week’s press conference that the technology was “originally developed for NASA” and could eliminate 99% of the virus “within three minutes.”

Waring said the purifiers only generate one-tenth the amount of airflow needed to effectively neutralize airborne viral particles in the average-sized classroom, and the emission of oxidizers could be “harmful to human health” and aggravate respiratory conditions like asthma.

He said the district should have rejected newer technologies that use oxidizers, and instead opted for purifiers that have high-efficiency particulate air filters, or HEPA, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The school district has squandered a huge opportunity to outfit every classroom with an appropriately sized HEPA air purifier,” Waring said. “This alternative would have had large impacts on reducing any potential COVID transmission in our schools, as well as providing indoor air quality benefits lasting beyond the pandemic.”

The district did not respond to questions about how officials vetted the chosen air purifiers. In a statement to Chalkbeat, Lewis said the district “chose to pursue purifiers that didn’t simply use HEPA filter technology but expanded beyond that to reflect technology developed by NASA.”

ActivePure said in an email to Chalkbeat that its devices are “safe and effective.”

“Testing proved its effectiveness against six clinically relevant pathogens, and its safety including no creation of ozone or byproducts,” the email said.

At a June 24 meeting, the Board of Education approved a $6 million resolution for personal protective equipment. Some of that was for the purifiers, said board spokesperson Janice Hatfield. District officials announced the air purifier selections last week.

The district added to public concern and confusion last week by posting a description on their website of an incorrect purifier model. (Officials bought three different models of air purifiers, but currently have a fact sheet for only one model available on the district website.)

Last week, the district posted a fact sheet for the Vollara Air and Surface Pro, which, according to its manual, can produce 40 times the FDA-required amount of ozone. High levels of ozone are unsafe for people, and can aggravate respiratory conditions, like asthma. A spokesperson for ActivePure said that particular device is only designed “for use in unoccupied spaces.”

The district corrected its mistake Monday, replacing the previous spec sheet with one for the Aerus Pure and Clean, which is advertised as “ozone free.” The two models look nearly identical. District officials said the first spec sheet was uploaded in error.

Waring said his initial criticism was based on the spec sheet for the incorrect purifier, but added that the two models function similarly. While the lack of ozone emission makes the latter device slightly safer, “all other concerns are the same,” he said.

Philadelphia teachers, principals say they were caught off guard by district’s proposal to change start times

2021-05-27T23:32:53+00:00

Teachers in Philadelphia say they were blindsided by the district’s proposal to change school start times - some by as much as two hours - for the coming school year.

Under the proposal, schools would start at three possible times, 7:30 a.m., 8:15 a.m. and 9 a.m. Right now school times vary, with many starting at 8:30 and earlier times for some students.

Superintendent William Hite said the district is considering the change in start times because of concerns about a shortage of bus drivers. During a virtual press conference Thursday he said the district has been in “constant communication” with teachers about the proposal.

But members of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and Teamsters Local 502: CASA, the principals union, said communication on the proposed schedule change was poor. They also criticized the process for staff members to vote on the proposed changes.

In a statement Thursday, the PFT said, “To have sweeping schedule changes implemented from the central office is unacceptable and is in stark contrast to the school-based process that is in place.”

The teachers union said the changes would “pose extreme hardships on students, staff, and families.”

District officials originally intended for high school students to start their day later, Hite said. But a draft of the proposed schedules show high schools starting at the earliest proposed time. Hite said some of the schedules “may have evolved” with feedback.

At Thursday’s Board of Education meeting Hite said the district is expecting a shortage of bus drivers, based on the experiences of other school districts.

“We’re anticipating that as a challenge, and we’re already seeing that with our normal recruitment efforts, like with our contractors, finding drivers, we are anticipating that being a real issue, and we have followed, like the other transportation services, both in the surrounding districts and here in the city, and all are struggling with that problem,” Hite said. “And if they’re all struggling with that problem, we’re anticipating that will be a problem for us.”

Board member Mallory Fix Lopez said she was concerned “we are creating more problems” by trying to solve another one. She also said it was late to be making such a big change.

Hite said nothing has been finalized and it will be “in the next month or so” as the district continues to get feedback.

Some teachers and principals say they were given little time to discuss the proposal. This process is to take place at the school level with the intervention of a joint federation-district committee if necessary.

In the spring of each year, the principal in each school is to design a master schedule or roster for the next school year, according to the official contractual process. If the principal and the building committee don’t reach a consensus on a master schedule or roster for the school by May 25, the principal and building committee have five working days after May 25 to submit to the federation-district committee a memorandum that describes areas of consensus and defines issues on which they continue to differ.

“Last Friday I began getting texts from some of my staff telling me there were bell schedules out that people were very concerned and principals were upset and teachers who had been informed by perhaps their principals were concerned about it and I said I had not seen anything,” said Jerry Jordan, president of the PFT.

Amanda Dorneman, a teacher and building representative at Richard Wright Elementary School, said there was not much time to meet as a building committee with the school’s principal.

“Part of our contract states that we need to meet to discuss roster and scheduling and agree upon that by a certain contractual date,” Dorneman said. “It made it difficult for everyone to come to an agreement because we were caught off guard.”

Robin Cooper, president of the principals union, said there was not enough time to brainstorm possible strategies around the early start. “That takes time and planning with your teams,” she said. “We don’t want principals to be the face of inadequate planning.”

Damaged asbestos, peeling lead paint, and mold still in some Philadelphia schools, says teachers union

2021-05-12T22:13:39+00:00

Dozens of Philadelphia public schools continue to have serious environmental hazards, including damaged asbestos, peeling lead paint, and mold, according to an analysis by the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

The union’s report, based on inspections of school buildings and district records largely unavailable to the public, outlines the scope of facilities problems that plague Philadelphia schools, which have an average age of 70 years. In the report, union officials identified six main hazards in the city’s aging buildings: lead paint, lead in drinking water, asbestos, lack of ventilation, mold and roofing issues.

In a statement released Monday afternoon, teachers union officials urged the district to invest in facilities upgrades and remediate “toxic conditions” for teachers and students. They also asked for improved transparency about environmental hazards in schools.

Remediating the most pressing environmental concerns would cost about $200 million, according to the report, and simply maintaining all public school buildings would cost billions more. According to the district’s 2017 Facilities Condition Assessments, the district has a 25-year deferred maintenance backlog of needed work, which would cost an estimated $4.5 billion to complete.

Several Philadelphia City Council members asked Superintendent William Hite at a Tuesday hearing about his plans for fixing the district’s aging buildings. Hite said the district will spend $325 million of its $1.1 billion in federal stimulus funding on facilities improvements.

In response to the union’s report, district spokesperson Marissa Orbanek issued a statement Wednesday morning, saying the district has spent $250 million on remediating buildings in the past year and plans to invest $2 billion in capital improvements over the next six years.

“These investments will be an important step toward improving the quality of our facilities, but this does not eliminate our need for long-term federal and state funding for continued infrastructure support,” Orbanek said.

PFT representatives did not testify at Tuesday’s hearing.

Elementary school students returned to buildings in early March after a contested reopening effort between the union and the district. Many teachers, parents and union officials argued that Philadelphia’s school buildings couldn’t safely reopen in part because they didn’t have adequate ventilation to curb the spread of COVID-19. A third-party mediator ultimately decided that students could return to buildings in phases, and the district installed air purifiers in some classrooms to mitigate virus spread.

Most high schools reopened Monday under the district’s plan, bringing back ninth graders and 10th through 12th graders with disabilities.

But ventilation issues in school buildings remain, the union’s report said. Many air handling systems are decades out of date and need to be replaced.

“The lack of adequate [ventilation] is a major, recognized contributor to increased illnesses and respiratory symptoms...that adversely impacts student and staff’ health and safety, contributes to absenteeism and lost time for both students and staff from school, and compromises educational achievement and opportunity,” the report said.

Short-term fixes for ventilation systems would cost tens of millions of dollars, whereas major upgrades, which many schools need, would cost hundreds of millions, the report said.

The report also highlighted issues with asbestos, a cancer-causing substance common in pipe insulation and floor tiles. Under the federal Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act, or AHERA, the district must fully inspect schools every three years and complete walkthroughs every six months to find loose or flaking asbestos that can pose a health risk.

The most recent round of walkthroughs was delayed due to the pandemic, but the union’s report said there was another problem: the six-month inspections completed in December 2019 “were so poorly done … that the process was stopped and a full review and new effort had to be restarted.”

Asbestos in schools has been a major point of controversy for years. A botched asbestos abatement effort at Benjamin Franklin High School in 2019 sickened multiple people and forced students and staff to temporarily relocate. Ten schools were forced to temporarily close during the last school year due to asbestos concerns, the report said.

Hite said that the district has removed 250,000 feet of asbestos since abatement projects kicked off at the start of the pandemic, but he has not provided a list of remediated schools.

There’s an “ongoing lack of specific and granular collaboration, coordination, and cooperation” between the district and the PFT surrounding facilities issues, the union said in its report. District officials have not responded to pressing issues reported through the PFT Healthy School Tracker App, where teachers and students can report environmental hazards in their buildings.

Of the 281 issues reported since schools reopened in March, the district has not responded to any of them, according to the report. There are close to 1,500 outstanding problems reported through the app that the district has not addressed. The district should address issues marked “Immediate” within a day, issues marked “Urgent” within three days, and issues marked “Important” within 14 days, the report said.

But Hite said Tuesday that the district doesn’t have access to those app submissions, and officials only receive information about the submissions through the PFT.

The district provides some building condition reports on its website, including the 2017 Facilities Condition Reports, and the most recent inspections for lead paint, lead in water and asbestos. The most recent six-month walkthroughs that document asbestos hazards have not been digitized or uploaded to the website.

“The urgency of addressing the facilities crisis cannot be overstated,” the report said. “This work can be done and it can be done well.”

Philadelphia launches COVID-19 dashboard to monitor cases at schools. But some groups question its accuracy.

2021-04-09T01:07:52+00:00

A month after the first group of Philadelphia students returned to their classrooms, district officials launched a dashboard late Thursday to help monitor COVID-19 cases in schools.

“We understand that having access to real-time information about COVID positivity rates in our schools is important for our families and community, and we are happy to provide this new tool,” said Superintendent William Hite.

The dashboard includes information on the number of tests performed and positive cases in schools, as well as cases confirmed off site that have been reported to the district. It lists all schools, including campuses that have not opened.

But Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan, who called for the creation of a public dashboard after Mayfair Elementary School in the Northeast temporarily shut down last month, said Thursday that the district’s dashboard has errors. He said a “cursory review” found errors in the number of cases reported at Mayfair and Edward Gideon School in North Philadelphia.

This dashboard displays information about COVID-19 tests and positive cases for both district students and staff. Groups are questioning its accuracy.

“We have been insistent on a dashboard, but unfortunately it clearly falls short in terms of accuracy,” Jordan said. “The data on this dashboard is critically important, and it is urgent that the district share accurate information with the public.”

According to the district’s site, the tests and positive cases include both self-reported results and the results of district testing. Out of 10,337 students and staff tested, 64 cases have been confirmed since the reopening of schools last month through April 3, according to the dashboard.

“As the data shows, the positivity rates in our schools are very low,” Hite said Thursday. “We hope this helps to build further confidence in the safety of our schools as we plan to welcome more students back for in-person learning.”

Visitors to the dashboard can find out the percentage by weeks and the number of students and staff who have tested positive. The dashboard also provides a map of positive cases by school.

Up until Thursday, the only updates provided to the general public were weekly reports given by Mayor Jim Kenney and the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley, every Tuesday. The weekly reports are also on the city’s website.

In the absence of a district dashboard, two groups, Parents United for Public Education and the Caucus of Working Educators, or WE caucus, had created their own public tracker to provide teachers and families with information.

Both groups Thursday also raised doubts about the accuracy of the district’s tracker.

“While we’re glad to see the district has finally published an initial dashboard, what we’ve seen so far falls short of the full transparency and accuracy that parents need and deserve,” Parents United for Public Education said in a statement Thursday. “As with many other issues, we feel that this represents a missed opportunity for a partnership with families and staff to ensure that the product meets the needs of those who are closest to the day to day operations of our schools. As we’re seeing again with this dashboard, when that collaboration and communication is not present, the results miss the mark.”

The tracker created by the two groups currently shows nine confirmed COVID-19 cases since Monday and 95 positive tests total since schools reopened at the beginning of March — including a few more days than the district’s dashboard. The two groups said they verified the information in the dashboard using COVID-19 exposure letters, which go out to staff members and families after positive cases are recorded.

In a statement Thursday, the WE Caucus said there were “many questions about the accuracy, reliability, and methodology” of the district’s data. Like Jordan, they also said the new dashboard appeared to be missing positive cases from schools.

“We will need much clearer explanations of where this data is coming from and how it is being calculated before we can trust the information,” the statement said.

Philadelphia district will get more than $1 billion from rescue plan

2021-03-11T00:51:50+00:00

The Philadelphia school district stands to receive almost $1.3 billion from the American Rescue Act that passed Congress Wednesday and is expected to be signed by President Biden on Friday.

That is nearly a quarter of the $5.1 billion allocated to Pennsylvania for K-12 education. The aid will be distributed through the federal Title I formula, which is weighted toward districts and students in poverty. In Philadelphia, the poorest big city in the nation, two-thirds of its public school students live below the poverty line. The city enrolls more than 10% of all the low-income students in the state.

The mammoth $1.9 trillion legislation gives up to $1,400 in direct payments to individuals, significantly expands the child tax credit for low-income families and increases food stamps, now called SNAP benefits.

“In Philadelphia, where we struggle with one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, the American Rescue Plan’s support for qualifying families with children could lift an estimated 59,000 children out of poverty,” Darrell Clarke, president of the City Council, said in a statement.

In addition to the money going to the school district, the city will also get more than $1.4 billion in aid, Clarke said.

School officials confirmed the amount of aid they are expecting, but said they are awaiting “final language” and possible restrictions before confirming what the money will be used for.

The bill says the funds are available through September 2023, though federal guidance for the previous two stimulus packages allowed districts an extra year to allocate the funds.

The new stimulus money could help school districts across the country reopen safely, covering some of the additional costs of opening school buildings in a pandemic. It also could provide school districts with the funds to address trauma and potential learning loss with after-school programs, an extended school year or summer school.

Superintendent William Hite has said he plans to extend the year past June 14 voluntarily for teachers and students who want to participate and the district has provided behavioral health counselors to every school.

According to the National Education Association, among the permissible expenses are modernizing HVAC systems. Adequate ventilation has been a huge issue in Philadelphia’s old school buildings as the district starts a phased reopening. Other building-related expenses permitted include those related to social distancing in schools, purchase of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and hiring more custodial staff for cleaning.

Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson plans to present a revised “lump sum” budget at the board of education’s next regular meeting on March 25 that will have more details, district spokeswoman Marissa Orbanek said. The board also has a meeting on March 18, one of two required each year to hear public comment.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece said schools must spend the money by October 2023. It has been updated to note that districts may get an extra year beyond that to allocate the funds.

Some Philadelphia teachers report unsanitary conditions in reopened schools

2021-03-10T22:32:04+00:00

Mouse droppings in classrooms. Empty sanitizer bottles. Dirty bathrooms. Moldy paper towels.

Since returning to 53 Philadelphia district schools last week, teachers have been cataloguing what they say are unsanitary conditions, despite promises from the district that buildings had been thoroughly cleaned and made safe.

The website #phled reopening tracker, started by members of the Caucus of Working Educators, urges teachers to post pictures and descriptions of conditions they find as they re-enter school buildings for the first time since the shutdown last March caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

In less than a week, the site has received more than 30 testimonials, most of them anonymous, sometimes with the school specified and sometimes not. At a time when emotions are high and anxiety is widespread as school buildings gradually reopen, it has become a place for teachers to bare their anxieties, highlight policies they consider misguided, and broadcast their deep distrust of district officials.

“We feel lied to and betrayed seeing the condition of our school,” read one anonymous post. “Went in today and furniture was not cleaned, mouse droppings are everywhere.” Said another: “Zero indications that our room was ever cleaned since last March. We’re waiting to find out if there’s a mold issue in the ventilation. In another room there was mold on the desk and chairs.”

Many of the testimonials have been widely circulated on social media, often with the hashtag #onlywhenitssafe. There is also an Instagram site called covid_leaks_sdp.

Other Philadelphia Federation of Teachers’ members, which include paraprofessionals, counselors, nurses, and secretaries, use the site to complain that they have been denied requested accommodations to continue to teach remotely due to health issues.

Or, they say, they are wary of returning to school buildings before being fully vaccinated, especially when there are few or no students in their classrooms, as is the case for some.

Max Rosen-Long, who manages the reopening tracker site, said it is not an official WE Caucus project. But it has been propelled by teachers who joined the group, which was formed in 2014 to prod the PFT into taking more of a proactive stance around social justice and progressive causes, similar to union movements in Chicago and Los Angeles. In 2016 and 2020 it challenged longtime President Jerry Jordan for leadership, last year getting more than a third of the vote.

“Members got together to start this. We were hearing stories,” said Rosen-Long, a Spanish teacher at Science Leadership Academy at Beeber. The reports he is getting are “concerning because it’s not just a matter of buildings not being clean, but how can we trust the school district with these other issues like ventilation if they can’t handle things like refilling soap and hand sanitizer dispensers.”

According to the district officials, 1,600 staff members have asked for accommodations, and all but 190, or 12%, were granted. The district estimated that about 9,000 staff members are either direct or indirect support personnel for the prekindergartners through second graders who are part of the district’s gradual reopening.

Fatim Byrd teaches Spanish to fifth through eighth graders at Mayfair Elementary School, but is considered “indirect” support for the younger students because he regularly supervises a second grade classroom for a half hour or so at a time when the regular teacher must attend meetings.

He is not doing that now, but still must show up at the school and conduct his remote middle school Spanish lessons from there. He is putting himself “at unnecessary risk” he believes, for no reason.

“There’s no in-person student I’m seeing right now,” he said. As a Black man with asthma, he said he is in a high-risk demographic for COVID-19.

“I want to know why is it so important for all these different personnel to come in, when most parents don’t want their kids to come back. We’re not filling classrooms at all, there are less than five kids per class,” he said.

About 30% of the 32,000 eligible students elected to participate in the hybrid model, according to the school district.

Byrd said he has received his first vaccine, and will feel more comfortable after receiving his second shot. After prodding from the district and the PFT, the city pushed teachers higher on the priority list for vaccinations and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia opened clinics to vaccinate them. Most, who are due back in buildings and want their shots, should be fully vaccinated by early April, according to the city’s health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley.

As part of the memorandum of agreement on safe reopening that the PFT signed with the district, there is a process for members to report breaches of the promised protocols, such as failure to keep hand sanitizer in stock, post safe occupancy numbers for all rooms, maintain proper social distancing between desks, and install plexiglas barriers in offices. Members report problems to their union building representatives, who keep checklists and follow up.

“Monitoring compliance will be an ongoing issue, and we’ve already quickly resolved a number of issues we received,” said PFT spokeswoman Hillary Linardopoulos in an email.

Kate Sannicks-Lerner, a veteran kindergarten teacher at Julia deBurgos Elementary School, has been a vocal opponent of the district’s policies and posted several pictures of unsanitary conditions at her school when she showed up for work last week. She also filmed a video in which she explains that she is seeking an accommodation because her husband is at high risk should he contract COVID-19.

“I can’t afford to be that one teacher who gets COVID, comes home, gives it to my husband, and it kills him,” she said. “Schools weren’t safe before COVID.”

Sannicks-Lerner said late last week that her accommodation request had been granted and she is now teaching remotely.

District officials did not respond to questions about the conditions reported on the site. But Superintendent William Hite has said repeatedly that he believes all schools are safe, acknowledging that there is always a risk but noting that studies have shown that schools are not a major source of viral spread.

Philadelphia superintendent receives ‘needs improvement’ rating in two areas

2020-12-14T23:17:35+00:00

The Philadelphia Board of Education released its 2019-20 school year evaluation of Superintendent William Hite on Monday, rating him as “needs improvement” in systems leadership and in promoting student achievement.

This is the first time he has received a “needs improvement” rating in any category from either the board or its predecessor, the School Reform Commission, since he started in the 2013-14 school year.

The year “uncovered operational challenges,” the evaluation said, citing the botched co-location of Science Leadership Academy and Benjamin Franklin High School and the continued closing of schools with potentially hazardous asbestos.

It also said that while Hite is focused on student learning outcomes, “our data continues to show that students across Philadelphia are not achieving at the levels necessary to reach their fullest potential.” The board on Thursday announced it was reframing its own stewardship of the district around improving student achievement, an initiative it is calling “goals and guardrails.”

“We look forward to working with Dr. Hite to bring the focus of our city onto this critical issue in order to ensure all students are given an education that allows them to thrive, succeed and lead in a global society,” the evaluation said.

Hite got a “distinguished” rating in professionalism, financial management, and human resource management, and a “proficient” rating in communication and community relations.

Hite took responsibility for the building renovation project that resulted in students at SLA and Ben Franklin having to be relocated for half of the last school year, before the COVID-19 pandemic shut all school buildings. He also said he looked forward to working with the board on its “goals and guardrails” project.

The board also cited “the successes that should be celebrated under Dr. Hite’s leadership which included a system-wide pivot to accommodate the instruction of over 120,000 district children remotely, continuing to grow the number of teachers of color across the district, and receiving a reaffirmation of the district’s credit rating from Moody’s with the statement ‘the Philadelphia School District’s current financial position is the strongest and most stable of its recent operating history.’”

In 2017, the reform commission extended Hite’s contract through 2022.

Last month Hite said that he hasn’t been contacted about a cabinet post in a Biden administration after his name appeared on a short list of preferred candidates for education secretary.

Democrats for Education Reform, a group that was influential in shaping the education agenda of the Obama administration, sent an email to supporters with possible candidates for the country’s top education job, including Chicago schools chief Janice Jackson, head of Baltimore schools Sonja Brookins Santelises, and Hite.

“I’m happy to be named as one of those individuals, but I haven’t had a lot of time to focus on it,” he said. “And no, no one has reached out.”

Talk of closing schools, tax breaks top Philadelphia school board meeting

2020-09-18T23:39:22+00:00

During a contentious six-hour meeting the Philadelphia Board of Education unanimously passed a controversial corporate tax break, while one member proposed closing schools and another said she was “disgusted” by newly restrictive speakers’ policies.

“If you really believe that Black lives matter, having that conversation about closing schools right now was utterly ridiculous,” said teacher Keziah Ridgeway, a member of the Melanated Educators Collective, or MEC,. “Y’all have money, in the words of Tupac, to fund everything else, but you don’t have money for our schools.”

Fellow educator and MEC member Dana Carter told the board it needed to stop planning service cuts and start holding Superintendent William Hite accountable for documented missteps.

“The miseducation of Black children leads to Black deaths,” Carter said. “How are we discussing school closures without talking about the $51 million we fumbled at Ben Franklin?”

During the meeting on Thursday, Hite updated the board on plans for reopening and online access, and vowed to reexamine controversial online policies that require hours of screen time for young students. “We’ve heard a great deal [from] teachers and families about the struggles,” he said.

The board also formally swore in two new non-voting student representatives, Keylisha Diaz of the Philadelphia Military Academy and Toluwanimi Olaleye of Carver High School for Engineering and Science. Member Leticia Egea-Hinton urged the pair to ask “tough questions” about district policy and practice.

“When you talk, we listen,” Egea-Hinton told the new student reps.

But the evening’s bitter discussions, which featured a new policy to mute public testimony when speakers stray from their registered topic, left many feeling that the board created three years ago is doing no better than the School Reform Commission, its state-run predecessor, at delivering equitable education or holding executives accountable.

“Board members seem to salivate over the closing of public schools,” said Kelsey Romano, a teacher at Saul High School and a co-chair of the district’s equity committee. “We will not forget the $600,000 office renovation and the employee paid for two full-time jobs in two districts. The trust is all but shattered.”

The evening’s most contentious debate concerned the proposed Keystone Opportunity Zone tax break for Hilco Redevelopment Partners, which board members approved with one abstention, pleasing trade unions and economic development officials, but infuriating advocates who saw it as a needless giveaway.

The session also featured a sobering financial presentation from chief financial officer Uri Monson, detailing millions in new costs - including rising cyber-charter payments - and millions more in lost revenues, thanks to plunging tax collection projections. Monson’s gloomy forecast was followed by a surprising suggestion from board member Lee Huang: that the district begin considering closing schools to save money.

“We may be forced to have that conversation,” Monson replied.

Huang acknowledged that closures can be “highly traumatic,” and critics swiftly countered that they wouldn’t save money either. Councilwoman Helen Gym called Huang’s suggestion “a terrible take” that doesn’t take history into account.

“Multiple studies on mass school closings around the country AND here in Philadelphia challenge the assertion that mass closings improve finances,” Gym tweeted.

The evening exposed other rifts. Led by Robin Cooper, the head of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, or CASA, a string of principals and school staffers blasted the district for what James Murray, head of Rowen Elementary in West Oak Lane, called “systemic racism and inequality.” Among CASA members’ concerns: inadequate personal protection equipment, an overly aggressive push to reopen buildings, and discriminatory hiring by the district.

Tension among board members was also apparent. Members Mallory Fix-Lopez and Angela McIver spoke against the new policy to mute public testimony that veered off topic. Board President Joyce Wilkerson defended the policy as reasonable, but Fix-Lopez said it left her “disgusted.”

The evening was not without its bright spots for officials. Hite’s decision to suspend “leveling” of school staff earned him thanks from parents and teachers.

Education advocate Tamir Harper, a 2018 Science Leadership Academy graduate, praised the Hite administration’s recent work and assured the board, “we will get through this.”

After Ben Franklin IG report, Philadelphia board members challenge Hite on trust

2020-08-21T04:45:51+00:00

The Philadelphia Board of Education met Thursday for its final action meeting before the start of the school year, approving a large staff-training contract, rejecting a proposed tax break, and unanimously endorsing the inclusion of a Black Lives Matter “Week of Action” in the annual school calendar.

The board met just a day after the release of an internal inspector general’s report that leveled scathing criticism on the administration of Superintendent William Hite over its handling of the renovation of Benjamin Franklin High School and the co-location of Science Leadership Academy.

The report detailed flawed planning and project management, missteps that endangered the health of staff and students and forced the two schools to abandon the building for months while the botched job was completed. In their opening remarks Thursday, board members raised serious questions of trust, communication, and accountability. None challenged or criticized Hite directly, but several suggested that their trust in his administration has been shaken.

“Right now we should feel connected to … communities,” said member Mallory Fix Lopez, but instead the board feels disconnected and “pulled in every which direction …. due to continued missteps by management.”

Fix Lopez said the lack of clear communication around the Ben Franklin fiasco is part of a larger pattern in which the board is given incomplete and misleading information about complex initiatives.

“I strongly feel the board was left in the dark ... We cannot accept this. It is not isolated, is not an anomaly,” said Fix Lopez. “We need to be able to trust what we are told. That’s no longer easy for me.”

Board member Maria McColgan wanted assurances that “measures [will be] put in place” to ensure that district leaders are told “when there are multiple concerns flagged … so we don’t have this happen again.”

Vice President Leticia Egea-Hinton told Hite that better communication will be “super critical” to allow the board to believe that “with future projects that … some of these things will be corrected.”

Member Lee Huang said the report had revealed “a need for a drastic change away from a culture that rushes things,” and doesn’t always give the board the information it needs. Angela McIver likewise called for “a dismantling of the culture” that made the Ben Franklin failure possible.

And member Ameen Akbar said he was troubled by gaps between the administration’s words and its actions. “Change happens at the speed of trust,” Akbar said. He encouraged Hite to make good on his administration’s many promises, not just with construction projects but with social justice and anti-racism efforts. “No matter what plans we have, trust is an issue across the board,” he said.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Hite responded, adding that he “regrets” how the project was handled. “It’s going to be our actions that have a lot more to do with [building trust] than our plan,” he said.

Hite outlined steps already taken, including the hiring of a construction management firm to supervise major projects, and promised new “systems” for “constant feedback” from stakeholders and contractors.

He also vowed to improve the overall culture of the central office. “I do think we have to reorganize ourselves … so that people aren’t just hustling around trying to complete tasks as quickly as possible,” he said.

But while the board avoided directly challenging Hite’s performance, public speakers were not so shy. Lisa Haver of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools (APPS) said her group believes it’s time for Hite to resign.

“If the meeting were held in the auditorium, I would be standing up and screaming,” said Haver. “The Ben Franklin and SLA students were collateral damage in the Hite administration’s struggle to save face … if Black lives matter to this board, they will use their power to hold Dr. Hite accountable.”

Long Night

It was another long night for the board and the public, featuring 68 registered speakers, along with about a dozen submitted written testimonies. Many speakers raised concerns about the return to digital learning; others called for removal of police from schools and increased spending on counselors and other student supports.

Robin Cooper, head of the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators, or CASA, the principals union, said her members remain frustrated by district leaders who are asking them to simultaneously prepare to reopen school buildings and prepare digital learning plans. Principals and staff need better training and guidance around digital learning, she said.

“Union input is never authentically considered” when district officials make their plans, Cooper said. “While [principals] are in buildings schlepping boxes, their minds are on virtual learning.”

Cooper said the district’s failures in the Ben Franklin/SLA project are emblematic of its overall approach.

“There was no plan B. They put all of their eggs in one basket, and they were destroyed.”

In other news:

- The board rejected a request from the City of Philadelphia to approve a tax break for a South Philadelphia development project. The proposal would allow the creation of a Keystone Opportunity Zone for a portion of the massive, now-shuttered refinery near the Philadelphia Airport. The KOZ proposal would guarantee the district an annual payment equal to 110% of the property taxes, while allowing the property owner, Hilco Redevelopment Partners, to avoid paying other taxes.

The board declined to approve the KOZ proposal in a 4-3 vote (one abstaining), based largely on concerns that promised jobs and job training opportunities will not materialize. (A majority of five votes is necessary to pass board items.) Numerous community members spoke against the project, citing Hilco’s controversial record in other cities. Board president Joyce Wilkerson said the rejected measure will now go “back to the [Kenney] administration” for revisions.

- The board unanimously approved a resolution to support an annual “Black Lives Matter Week of Action.” Member Maria McColgan tried to table the motion, out of concerns that teachers and principals had not had a chance to weigh in, and that the measure would prove a mere “Band-Aid.” But following a short but spirited debate, with no second for her motion, McColgan agreed to support the resolution.

Member Akbar assured McColgan that the vote was the beginning, not the end of the social justice conversation. “We vote on it because it’s been years in the making,” Akbar said. “We are committing to do all of the work that Black Lives Matter includes.”