Students and parents — joined by the Pa. House speaker — are fighting a plan to close Southwest Philly’s Motivation High

Confronted with the possible closure of their beloved school, the Motivation High community came prepared to fight back.

As community members entered their Southwest Philadelphia school’s auditorium Wednesday night, students waving signs and carrying blue-and-yellow pompoms handed out leaflets: on one side were Motivation’s stats — building condition, graduation rate, attendance, suspensions.

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On the other were stats for Bartram High, the school they would be assigned to attend if their school closes in 2027, as proposed under the Philadelphia School District facilities plan. The data for Motivation, a magnet, are stronger across the board, sometimes starkly so — Bartram is a neighborhood school with no admissions criteria, and its attendance and graduation rates are lower, and its suspensions higher.

Motivation has only 150 students enrolled this year. The school system cited low enrollment as one reason for the closure. But district officials have been clear: The recommendation was also driven by a desire to reinvigorate struggling neighborhood high schools.

“Why are we put in with Bartram to make Bartram look good, when we stand out on our own?” one Motivation student asked district staff pointedly.

The opposition from the Motivation community lays bare an issue at the crux of the school system’s plan: To reach its stated goal of advancing all students, the district says it must displace some. Often, that has pitted communities against one another.

Residents in a restless crowd at Motivation on Wednesday, including one of the state’s most powerful politicians, Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia), said they were not having it.

“It’s like you want us to water flowers that just weren’t growing from the beginning,” one parent told officials. “You want to uproot kids who have found their place. You can count my child right out of that plan. She ain’t going to Bartram.”

Motivation began as a Bartram program, housed in a separate building, for academically talented students. But in 2004, Motivation became its own school, eventually moving to the former Turner Middle School building at 59th and Baltimore.

» READ MORE: Changes to Philly’s special-admission process exacerbated low enrollment at some magnets. Now, the district is trying to close them.

Motivation thrived as the only criteria-based high school in Southwest Philadelphia. But like a number of smaller magnets, it was hit hard by 2021 changes to the district’s special admissions policy.

The district that year moved to a centralized lottery system, taking away from principals any discretion over who got admitted to the schools. It said it did so for equity reasons and to solve for demographic mismatches at some schools — though Motivation’s student body had been representative of its neighborhood and the city as a whole.

In the past, schools like Motivation filled most of their ninth-grade classes with students who met the district-set criteria, and also admitted students who were close but came with a strong recommendation from another school, or had compelling personal circumstances that explained why they missed meeting the magnet standards.

Those extra admissions ended with the district policy change, and Motivation’s enrollment plummeted. It was never a huge school, by design — topping out at 400 students prior to the pandemic.

It doesn’t seem fair, said Nehemiah Bumpers, a Motivation 10th grader.

“Why are you guys moving us for having low enrollment scores?” Bumpers said. “It’s the lottery system that drastically changed our enrollment.”

McClinton, who attended the Wednesday meeting, was similarly frustrated.

“When you talk about the enrollment being diminished, it’s because you changed the playbook for principal Teli,” McClinton said of veteran Motivation principal Rennu Teli-Johnson, whom the House speaker praised.

“She knows every one of these kids,” said McClinton, whose House district includes both Motivation and Bartram.

The school board has yet to vote on the proposal to close Motivation and 19 other schools. But the possible closure has roiled the student body.

This week, most Motivation students walked out of school, staging a protest over the district’s plan.

Zanaya Johnson-Green, an 11th grader, said students were beside themselves, even those who will graduate before the school is planned to be folded into Bartram in the fall of 2027.

“Motivation has given me so many opportunities, and I don’t want to see it go,” Johnson-Green said. “No one wants the school to close. This is having a bad effect on all of us.”

The district has, in recent years, invested millions in sprucing up the Motivation building, which if the school does close would become district “swing space” — a place where schools can move to accommodate building repairs or other overflow needs.

“Why spend all that money just to push us into Bartram and use this school as a swing space?” Bumpers asked.

But much of the energy at the meeting was spent talking about the safety at Bartram — with parents and students pressing the district on how they could guarantee staff and student welfare, and district officials saying they would use a planning year and community wisdom to address concerns.

“Disaster!” someone in the audience shouted when Associate Superintendent Tomás Hanna talked about his hope that those with worries would step up to the plate to help plan for a Bartram transition.

A Motivation student shook her head.

“Why do we have to reap what you sow when you stopped paying attention to neighborhood schools all those years? Why do we have to suffer the consequences, lose opportunities?” the student said.

Monica Allison, a Cobbs Creek neighbor and ward leader, made it clear that though she was fighting against the Bartram closure, wounds inflicted from prior school closures, dating back to John P. Turner Middle School and George Wharton Pepper Middle School, were also on people’s minds.

“You closed John P. Turner and you didn’t ask us,” Allison said. “Now we’re back with another closure. It’s ridiculous. You keep talking about elevating Bartram at the expense of other kids. The neighbors are really tired of this.”

John Young, a Motivation teacher for the last decade, said his students were living their civics lesson by protesting the district’s plan. The district is in a tough spot, he said — coping with the fallout of charter schools that took students from traditional public schools, dealing with its own decision to create greater high school choice.

But, Young said, “this decision is going to continue that trend of pushing our students to homeschool, pushing our students to charter schools. This decision is not going to solve the problem, it is going to hollow us out.”

A visibly upset McClinton spoke last on Wednesday night. The district must invest in both schools, she said — not just one.

The district officials she addressed all had good jobs, McClinton emphasized. They could afford to send their children to whatever kind of school they felt was best for them. Southwest Philadelphia parents might not be wealthy, but they deserve to make choices, too, the speaker said.

“It’s not fair that you’re pitting Black children in Bartram against Black children in Motivation,” McClinton said. “Not one of your children go to Motivation or Bartram. I don’t get millions of dollars in Harrisburg for you to waste it away to make this a swing space.”