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Philadelphia School District Closing Nine Schools?

by: Rebel - Havertown, PA
started: 11/03/11 10:34 am | updated: 11/03/11 10:34 am

Philadelphia School District officials on Wednesday recommended closing nine schools and making grade changes at 17 others due to declining enrollment, aging facilities, and a brutal fiscal situation.

But the School Reform Commission signaled that perhaps the changes did not go far enough.
If the SRC adopts the recommendations next year, these would be the first large-scale school closings in the district since 1981.

Each closing would save the district between $500,000 and $1 million. And while the cash-strapped school system does need to find savings, acting Superintendent Leroy Nunery said, the decisions are being driven by educational needs.

"We need to aim for a more efficient footprint reflecting the times and the demographics of the city," said acting Superintendent Leroy Nunery II.

"We need to align our resources in a way that benefits the education of our students."

"We need to do more," acting Chairman Wendell Pritchett said.

With a student population now less than 150,000, the district has lost more than 50,000 pupils in the last decade, many to a growing charter-school movement. Officials have estimated there are 70,000 empty seats citywide.

The schools slated for closure are: Levering, Harrison, Sheppard, Drew, and E.M. Stanton elementaries; Pepper Middle School; and FitzSimons High, Sheridan West Academy, and Philadelphia High School for Business.

Most would close at the end of this school year, but FitzSimons, Sheridan West, High School for Business, and Pepper would be phased out.

Each closing would save the district between $500,000 and $1 million. And while the cash-strapped school system does need to find savings, Nunery said, the decisions are being driven by educational needs.

Also, more than a dozen grade-configuration changes would take place over the next few years. There are 25 different grade configurations, and officials want to move to standardize them to just four - kindergarten to grade five, K-8, 6-8, and 9-12.

Officials said they hoped to bring most schools to a recommended range of between 450 to 800 students for elementary schools, 600 to 800 for middle schools, and 1,000 to 1,200 for high schools. Some exceptions would remain.

Combined with grade changes and consolidations made this school year, the moves announced Wednesday would shed 14,000 seats. The district had said it wanted to cut 35,000 seats by 2014.
That would put the district at a utilization rate of 71 percent. Its stated goal was 85 percent.

"There are multiple stages to this," Nunery said. "This is not one-and-done."

Officials have not yet finished a plan for high schools and career and technical education schools - formerly called vocational schools - that will spur further changes, Nunery said. That plan will come in the "next several months."

If approved, the proposed closings of FitzSimons and Pepper Middle School and the changes recommended at E.W. Rhodes would end the district's most recent experiment with single-sex education, which began in 2004.

All-male FitzSimons and all-female Rhodes are now 7-12 schools. Rhodes, under this plan, would revert back to a middle school, FitzSimons would close, and high-school-age students would move to nearby Strawberry Mansion High, which is well under capacity.

Pepper, which would be phased out, has some single-sex classes.

The district has said it would pay attention to its empty buildings, working with communities to find appropriate reuses. Nunery said he has already heard from parties, including charter schools, interested in vacant schools.

Larry Eichel, project director of the Pew Charitable Trusts' Philadelphia Research Initiative, said that when researchers examined school closings in cities across the country, they found there were two ways of handling them: closing several schools at once, as was done in Kansas City, or spreading closings over several years.

Philadelphia, Eichel said, appears to have taken the second path. "I think that is probably the more popular route, if you look at other cities," he said.