PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) \u2014 The Philadelphia School Board adopted a budget Thursday night that will make major classroom cuts, drying up some long-term red ink. Meanwhile, City Council members are continuing to fight the district\u2019s facilities plan.<\/p>\n
The school board signed off on a $4.6 billion budget for next year that includes $225 million in classroom cuts<\/a>. Schools will lose teachers, counselors and climate staff as the district reduces expenses to address its $300 million structural deficit<\/a>. <\/p>\n Teachers and counselors would be reassigned to other schools to fill vacancies, and class sizes would likely rise. <\/p>\n Superintendent Tony Watlington said the cuts are due to underfunding.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile I\u2019m agnostic to how we get the dollars, I do want to note that we desperately need additional revenue,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Board member Joyce Wilkerson blamed the chronic underfunding on Harrisburg.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of these decisions are not decisions we would want to make ordinarily. For me, it highlights a statewide failure and a federal failure,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Watlington has said the teacher reassignments wouldn\u2019t happen if City Council passes the mayor\u2019s proposed rideshare tax as a source of revenue<\/a>, but many members are still seething over the school board\u2019s vote<\/a> last month to close 17 schools<\/a>. <\/p>\n At a rally before the board meeting, City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier said the district ignored community input.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen a school didn\u2019t fit their stated criteria, they just invented a new reason to close it. The fix was always in,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She called on the six school board members who voted for the facilities plan to resign.<\/p>\n \u201cCouncil is going to take a thorough look on how we get a school board that is responsible and accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) \u2014 The Philadelphia School Board adopted a budget Thursday night that will make major classroom…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,25116,71,70,29946,1998],"class_list":["post-205290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-board-of-education","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-philadelphia-school-board","tag-school-district-of-philadelphia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}