On Jim Kenney’s watch, the Philly school district returned to local control and got more money

On playgrounds and in classrooms, at news conferences and community events, Mayor Jim Kenney said it every chance he got over the last eight years: Improving Philadelphia’s educational system is the way to make the city better.

“Public education is a central pillar of our fight against generational poverty,” the mayor said last week at the final biannual Philadelphia School District hearing before City Council. “It’s the only way we can achieve lasting prosperity and equity in our city.”

One of his most significant plans of action: He announced in late 2017 that the city would seize back control of its own school system, ending 18 years of state oversight and pivoting to local control with a school board comprising nine members chosen by him. Along with establishing free prekindergarten for the city’s youngest learners, returning the Philadelphia School District to local control tops the list of Kenney’s educational accomplishments.

“Again and again, we’ve told the people of Philadelphia that the state of their schools are someone else’s responsibility,” Kenney told a cheering audience who packed City Council chambers in November 2017. “That ends today. When the SRC dissolves itself, and we return to a school board appointed by the mayor, you can hold me and future mayors accountable for the success or failure of our schools.”

» READ MORE: What will 2024 bring for Philly schools? We talk with the school board president and VP.

Though education activists had been angling for local control since the 2001 state takeover, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that it would return imminently, said Donna Cooper, executive director of the child-welfare nonprofit Children First.

Kenney and his administration “took it on, and there were people who were against it, and they knew it was very risky because it put them right in the belly of the beast — it was a big, structural change,” said Cooper, who’s also chair of Mayor-elect Cherelle Parker’s education transition subcommittee. “Making a major change in governance is not easy. There’s very little upside, so kudos to them.”

State Sen. Vincent Hughes, a West Philadelphia Democrat and the minority chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, said local control has allowed the city to better advocate for resources from Harrisburg. (And they will need them — the district just announced a projected $407 million deficit for fiscal 2025.)

”The problems that the School District of Philadelphia has confronted start with discriminatory and inadequate funding,” Hughes said. “So the School Reform Commission, in all of its iterations, just exacerbated that.”

Hughes credited Kenney for advocating for local control, saying two decades of state control over city schools was “disrespectful.”

”The mayor has been just genuinely and unequivocally committed to the students and the education infrastructure in the city,” he said. “There’s been no hesitation on that.”

Here are two other of his most significant educational accomplishments, as well as one missed opportunity.

In a school system that has been underfunded for generations and lacks the ability to raise its own revenue, lack of finances historically has been a perpetual issue.

Kenney said in an interview last month that one of the accomplishments he’s most proud of is the city’s “unprecedented” investment in the school district on his watch.

”I had the SRC and Harrisburg reducing the amount of money coming here, and we increased it by $1.5 billion in new money,” the mayor said.

Kenney again stressed his administration saw the infusion of cash to the district as a matter of public safety and poverty reduction.

”The only true way out of poverty is education,” he said. “The kids who are running the street with guns in their waistbands and in jail did not either have or take advantage of the education system to get them out.”

The Kenney years also brought closer collaboration between the district and city departments.

Though the relationship wasn’t always perfect — the district sued the city this year over its attempts to exert environmental controls that could lead to city officials, not the school board, determining whether schools could open — in some ways, it flourished.

“The City Council, the school district, the Board of Education, the Office of Children and Families, and all the other departments are working together to reimagine our partnership across institutions together. We have expanded out-of-school time programming, integrated behavioral health supports for students, established community schools,” Kenney told Council at the school district hearing last week.

When the pandemic hit, the city and district mobilized to provide thousands of city children with free meals, to establish city rec centers as remote learning sites and, in partnership with Comcast, to offer free internet so children from low-income families could participate in online classes.

“Three years later, schools are on the road to full recovery and after an unprecedented disruption to learning, our schools are on the road to progress again,” Kenney said last week.

Principals and teachers cite mental health workers paid by the city but working inside district schools, for instance, as crucial to students’ well-being. The school board and city also came together, after smoothing over some differences, to reach an agreement to reopen the district-owned Sayre Pool with Parks and Recreation staff and resources.

“What happens when the city and the school district partner? We can do anything,” school board president Reginald Streater said.

If there was one missed opportunity for the Kenney administration regarding education, it’s around facilities, Cooper said. The district has more than $5 billion in unmet capital needs, with a load of environmental problems in its old buildings, some of which should be torn down, according to the district’s own data.

Kenney’s “deep relationships with the unions” could have sparked something, Cooper said. “He had sort of bandwidth to work with the corporate sector and the political sector around some incremental improvement in the facilities condition. I think there might have been a little bit of an opportunity for a guy with such close relationships to the building trades to take a more hands-on role on facilities.”

While the district did make some progress on facilities, Cooper said, the needs remain great. But, Cooper said, she gets why more didn’t happen.

“The minute he does, a lot becomes his problem,” Cooper said — if Kenney wades in to help restore school buildings, what about fire stations? What about libraries? What about other city-owned facilities? “I get the push and pull on this.”