Lincoln High can put 900 students in trailers to relieve overcrowding, the city zoning board ruled

Overcrowded Lincoln High can open next week with hundreds of students in trailer classrooms, the city’s zoning board of adjustment ruled Tuesday.

A neighbor representing the Mayfair Civic Association had hoped to prevent the modular classrooms — which the Philadelphia School District spent $11 million to purchase and attach to Lincoln — from being occupied.

Peter McDermott, who filed the challenge, said he believed the district needed a special exception to the zoning process that would require a hearing and community notification.

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Attorneys for the district and the city challenged that notion, saying that because the entire Lincoln High campus was already approved for educational use, any educational use on that parcel was acceptable.

The zoning board agreed, voting unanimously against McDermott’s challenge.

But, he said, a court challenge may be next.

“We’re going to explore the next available steps,” McDermott said after the hearing.

Lincoln, on Ryan Avenue in the Northeast, was built to hold a maximum of 1,700 students. Planners envisioned it at an ideal size of 1,200, but the district crammed almost 2,500 into its building last school year.

While many district schools are under-enrolled, most schools in the Northeast are booming, with immigrant students often fueling the surge. Lincoln and its next-door neighbor, the K-8 Northeast Community Propel Academy, were the most overcrowded schools in the city last academic year.

Lincoln’s overcrowding negatively affected student safety and learning conditions, those inside said — the school didn’t have enough classrooms or lockers, some students had to eat lunch at 9 a.m., and there were significant climate problems, with students routinely lingering in hallways and walking out of school during the middle of the day.

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The district’s solution was essentially a separate wing for Lincoln’s ninth graders — 22 classrooms, offices, and bathrooms in a modular unit connected to the main school with a newly built hallway so students do not have to go outside to use the gym or cafeteria.

McDermott and other neighbors say they were blindsided by the trailers, which he called an “abomination” at Tuesday’s hearing.

“I wouldn’t want to be in that classroom,” said McDermott, a former district teacher who lives near the school. “Please don’t refer to that as a service. Sticking kids in a trailer? It’s not a service to the city, and the students and the school district, putting kids in a trailer.”

McDermott objected that the trailers take away more than 75 parking spaces from the site; the district’s lawyer noted that current regulations say only that the site can have no more than 483 parking spaces. They do not specify a minimum number of spaces.

Though the zoning board voted on the narrow matter of whether the district needed a special exception for the trailers, there’s a deeper distrust between the community and the school system.

The “new” Lincoln opened in 2009, replacing a much larger building. Martin Bednarek, who lives adjacent to Lincoln and was at the time a member of the School Reform Commission, then the district’s governing body, said the idea was to build a smaller school.

Students over the building capacity were supposed to be enrolled in other district schools that had room for them, Bednarek said.

Neighbors are also angry that the district never made good on promises it made in 2019, when it built Propel Academy next to Lincoln. Officials promised they would tear down the old Meehan Middle School, on the other side of Lincoln, for instance.

Meehan was closed, but the building is still in use as swing space for schools that need it — it is currently housing Thomas Holme Elementary students as they wait for their new building to be completed. And given the Northeast overcrowding, officials say they will need the Meehan space going forward.

Oz Hill, the district’s deputy superintendent for operations, met with Mayfair neighbors earlier this month and has said he understands the community’s concerns.

“Clearly, we could have done a better job communicating as priorities shifted,” Hill said earlier this month. “We should have let them know, quite frankly, and going forward, we’re going to do a better job of engaging with the community.”

Bednarek, who attended Tuesday’s hearing, shook his head as he left an 18th-floor Center City meeting room.

“It’s disappointing,” he said.