The School District of Philadelphia is asking for more community feedback on its facilities planning process that will help decide which schools the district will recommend closing.
The newly launched Facilities Planning Process Emerging Themes Survey identifies four main themes that have emerged from community input on the district’s Facilities Planning Process (FPP), and offers a chance for community members to submit their feedback on each theme.
The themes include:
Strengthening pre-K through eighth-grade programming through better use of space.
Reducing unnecessary school transitions for students.
Reinvesting in neighborhood high schools as community anchors.
Expanding access to grades 5 through 12 criteria-based schools.
The district was expected to release its updated list of school closure recommendations to the Board of Education in November. The district has also missed other deadlines throughout the FPP, including data sharing.
The final recommendation plan to the Board of Education will sort schools into five possible outcomes: maintain, modernize, co-locate, repurpose or close.
The decision-making process will be informed by four data categories:
The school’s building score, based on the condition of the space.
The program alignment score, based on how well buildings support “high-quality” programs like special education and physical education.
The capacity/utilization score, based on the school’s enrollment level compared to its capacity.
Its neighborhood vulnerability score, based on which schools are located in places experiencing “high social vulnerability” conditions, such as poverty, lack of transportation and crowded housing.
Many schools in the district are currently over- or underenrolled or are housed in older physical spaces.
The district has maintained that it is “committed to robust community engagement” throughout the process, citing 47 public listening and learning sessions, 35 principal data verification sessions, a district-wide survey with over 5,700 responses, and the release of a data website sharing all school-based scores. But some advocates, parents and community members have expressed concerns, ranging from lack of data to concerns for the transitions for students and staff at closed schools.
Superintendent Tony Watlington has maintained his stance that the goal of the process is to “provide greater access to high-quality academic and extracurricular programs across neighborhoods.”
The survey will close on Thursday, Dec. 11. The district said a summary of this feedback will be released “later in December” and will be used to inform the final presentation on school closure recommendations.