http://thenotebook.org/blog/125429/philadelphia-school-district-wants-close-37-schools-relocate-or-reconfigure-dozens-more
District wants to close 37 schools and relocate or reconfigure dozens more
by thenotebook on Dec 13 2012 Posted in Latest news
Photo: NewsWorks
Germantown High School is one of 44 schools the District has recommended be closed or relocated.
by Benjamin Herold for NewsWorks, a Notebook news partner
Saying the struggling Philadelphia School District is “out of time and out of options,” new Superintendent William Hite has unveiled a sweeping plan to close 37 school buildings by next fall.
All told, the District will call for 44 schools to be closed or relocated and nearly two dozen more to undergo grade changes.
Based on recent enrollment figures, roughly 17,000 children might be moving to new schools.
North Central, West, and Northwest Philadelphia would be hit particularly hard, with high-profile buildings including Strawberry Mansion, University City and Germantown high schools slated for closure.
Hite said the closings plan presents the city with tough choices – and a historic opportunity.
“At the end of this process, we believe that we will have a system that better serves all students, families, and stakeholders,” he said.
But as details of the closings leaked out earlier this week, community backlash brewed. A coalition of labor and community groups planned a protest rally at District headquarters for Thursday afternoon, and activists began lining up to denounce the plan.
Most of the displaced students will be reassigned to schools that perform no better academically than the schools being shuttered. The savings from the closures – about $28 million annually – are meaningful, but far from a game-changer.
“Is this worth the disruption of thousands of families?” asked the Rev. LeRoi Simmons of the Germantown Clergy Initiative and Parents United for Public Education.
Hite, on the job for just three months, acknowledged that the closing recommendations will cause “controversy and angst.” But he was adamant that the cash-strapped district has no choice.
“If we don’t take some of these actions now, we actually have no money to spend,” he said.
The School Reform Commission is scheduled to vote on the recommendations in March, after a series of public meetings and community forums that will kick off Saturday.
The case for closing schools
The School District is broke.
This year, the District borrowed $300 million just to pay its bills. Over the next five years, officials project a cumulative deficit of $1.1 billion.
If approved, the school closings would help plug that hole. Officials project that the moves would save the District roughly $28 million in personnel and maintenance costs next year, with those savings recurring in future years.
Any savings will be partially offset by millions of dollars in transition expenses and new investments in the receiving schools.
Whatever the exact figures, Hite said that eliminating wasteful spending on “empty seats” is critical to the District’s continued survival.
“If we don’t realize those savings, then we would have to find other ways to get that amount of revenue,” said Hite, citing a new round of layoffs or increased class sizes as possible alternatives.
After years of steady decline due to population shifts and the mass exodus of students to charter schools, officials want to raise the District’s “utilization rate” to about 80 percent. Only 67 percent of the seats in District-run schools are now occupied, they said.
Improving the quality of public education in the city is the other main rationale for the aggressive closings plan, Hite said. Long term, District officials say, the “rightsizing” effort will allow the District to give more money and attention to fewer schools.
In the short term, however, most of the students being displaced by the closings will end up at schools that are no better academically than their current schools. Some – including the 900 students now attending Bok Technical High, who would be reassigned to troubled South Philadelphia High – will end up at schools that perform worse.
Hite promised that the District will be “investing millions of dollars on educational program enhancements” and renovations at the schools receiving new students.
In a statement released Wednesday, activist group Parents United for Public Education preemptively blasted the plan.
“National studies have shown that districts do not improve academically or financially though mass closings,” reads the statement. “The [Philadelphia] District has failed to demonstrate what it will do differently from other cities to address those concerns.”
and.....
http://thenotebook.org/blog/125431/northwest-philly-reacts-philadelphia-school-closings-proposal
Northwest Philly reacts to school-closings proposal
by thenotebook on Dec 13 2012 Posted in Latest news
Photo: Brad Larrison for NewsWorks
Word was just getting out about the projected school closure when children were arriving for classes on Thursday.
by staff at NewsWorks, a Notebook news partner
This story will be updated throughout the day.
Northwest Philadelphia is home to six of the 37 schools that the School District has proposed to close by the end of the school year.
The schools slated to close include Germantown High School, Theodore Roosevelt Middle School and Robert Fulton Elementary, which are located in Germantown. Also on the list are John F. McCloskey and John L. Kinsey elementaries in West Oak Lane and Jay Cooke Elementary in Logan.
The closings would affect more than 2,600 students in Northwest Philadelphia.
The School Reform Commission, which has the final say in the matter, is expected to make its decisions in March.
As word of the proposal filtered out into the community, many shared their reactions with NewsWorks.
The scene at Germantown High
Outside the High Street school on Thursday morning, parents were more concerned about the proposed closure than any of the students.
An 11th grader who identified herself as "Lexus" got the news of her school's recommended closing in a text from a friend who attends Martin Luther King High School Promise Academy.
"She said, 'You know you coming to King High? 'Cause G-Town getting shut down,'" Lexus said.
MLK and Roxborough High are listed in the district's proposal as locations that Germantown students will go if the school is shuttered.
Even though her daughter is graduating this year, Tinksha Nathaniel was particularly upset by the news.
"They claim they don't have enough teachers, so now you crowd them even more by combining schools?" Nathaniel said. "It's not being said loud enough for a majority of parents to know. ... I don't remember getting any information, any mailings or anything."
Students and parents alike raised concerns about bad blood between students at Germantown and MLK as being an issue should the schools merge
"You want to send a bunch of kids from this neighborhood over to another neighborhood?" asked a parent who didn't want to be publicly named. "It ain't going to do nothing but cause more violence."
Most students casually making their way to the school's campus seemed uninformed and uninterested in the swirling rumors of their schools impending closure. Not so for alumni, though.
"It's like being punched in the stomach," Vera Primus, president of Germantown High School's alumni association, said Thursday morning.
Primus, a 1971 graduate, is particularly upset that efforts — successful ones by her account — to improve the school over the years may now go to waste.
"It seems like nobody cares," Primus said. "They just do whatever they want to do."
and the Hit list.....
http://thenotebook.org/blog/125428/here-are-schools-district-recommends-closure
Here are the schools the District recommends for closure
by thenotebook on Dec 13 2012 Posted in Latest news
Here is the final list of the School District's recommendations for school facility and program closures, which were released earlier today.
and......
http://parentsunitedphila.com/2012/12/13/top-questions-about-school-closings-a-year-of-turmoil-and-uncertainty/
Top questions about
school closings: “A
year of turmoil and
uncertainty”
(Photo: NewsWorks)
(This post is being updated regularly as new information unfolds)
This afternoon the district will announce the closing and consolidation of dozens of schools listed above, setting in motion a year of turmoil and uncertainty for thousands of families across the District. We are deeply concerned about the District’s ability to prioritize and re-invest in the District-managed neighborhood schools under its care. While past conversations have discussed facilities modernization and management, this conversation has been primarily on consolidation and closure with far too little mention of what additional resources will flow to schools.
We have significant questions and concerns about the list above:
- The stated savings of the school closings (which are typically ambitious according to most studies) is barely 1% of the District’s budget. How does the District justify throwing thousands of families and school communities into chaos for such small savings?
- What are the projected administrative costs of the school closings? How have they been factored into the supposed savings numbers being presented?
- Last year, the District expanded charters at a projected cost of $139 million over five years. School closings will achieve “savings” of little more than that same amount. Have we expanded charters at a direct cost to our neighborhood schools?
- How does the District justify closing five neighborhood schools in zip code 19132 (TM Peirce, LP Hill, Whittier, Pratt & Strawberry Mansion High School) and five neighborhood schools in zip code 19121 (Duckrey, Meade, Reynolds, Morris and Vaux HS, which will convert to an elementary school)? What is the District’s responsibility to the children and families in those neighborhoods?
- There are top quality schools on the closure list such as George Washington Elementary School with an SPI of 2 (SPI “1″ is considered the best) and Abigail Vare Elementary with an SPI 3. Abigail Vare is perhaps one of the most diverse higher functioning schools in the district (33% black, 23% Latino, 18% Asian, 15% white). In an increasingly racially segregated district, why not support racially diverse successful schools and figure out ways to modernize facilities?
- Last year, students from Fitzsimons and Rhodes High Schools saw their high schools closed and were transferred to Strawberry Mansion. This year Strawberry Mansion is slated for closure. A host of young people will now be forced to attend three high schools in three years. How does this make any academic sense?
- University City’s closure forces students to criss-cross neighborhood boundaries in West Philadelphia that should be accompanied by a full discussion on student safety and transportation. How has this been thought through?
- How does the District justify blindsiding the Germantown High School community about the slated closure of this flagship school? Parents and community should not be the last to know while third party operators, Boston Consulting Group and others crow about their access and influence on this list:
- What is the District’s commitment to providing transportation to students throughout this consolidation and closing process? How can parents remain confident about transportation and access when schools like GAMP are threatened with losing bus service?
- Where is the investment back into neighborhoods schools? For example, its been suggested that proceeds of sale go toward debt service. Why would the money not go toward modernizing the facilities of the primary school students would attend?
As we said in our statement yesterday: This is a process that has marginalized parents. It is not clear that the District will achieve significant financial and academic gains. We cannot discern a demonstrated re-investment and commitment to the District-managed public schools which remain and which are responsible for absorbing new students and responsibilities. And we have lasting concerns about whose voices mattered when this final list was created.Parents United for Public Education supports the PCAPS rally this afternoon at 4:30 p.m. at 440 N. Broad Street.
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