Philly’s school closure plan targets middle schools. Here’s why the district is moving away from them.

The Philadelphia School District is walking away from middle schools — mostly.

Of the 20 schools Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. has recommended to close, six are middle schools — AMY Northwest, Conwell and Stetson in Kensington, Harding in Frankford, Tilden in Southwest Philadelphia, and Wagner in West Oak Lane.

The district plans to expand elementary schools to take in those students in most cases, and Conwell, a magnet middle school, would send students to AMY at James Martin.

“Our research does not say that traditional middle school children in Philadelphia perform better academically than K-8 students,” Watlington said when he rolled out his tentative plan in January. “Nationally, and in Philadelphia, there’s a mixed bag.”

While the school district says the K-8 model reduces transitions for students and helps maximize resources, critics of the district’s plan say closing middle schools will uproot their children and abandon successful schools. Education experts, meanwhile, say educating middle-school aged students has long been a complex and controversial issue — and it’s a debate that Philadelphia district officials are reigniting with their sweeping facilities proposal.

Among the top complaints from critics of the plan: The pivot isn’t absolute. Though many middle schools are disappearing, Philadelphia will still have 13 standalone middle schools and secondary-middle schools if those six close. And some will even grow.

Middle grades students from Masterman, the popular, elite city magnet, would take over the closing Laura Wheeler Waring school building in Spring Garden “to expand access” to Masterman, officials said.

The district is also adding a new Academy at Palumbo Middle School to give students a feeder pattern into the South Philadelphia high school magnet. The new middle school will co-locate with Childs Elementary in Point Breeze.

And in the Northeast, where schools are bursting at the seams, two standalone middle schools — Castor Gardens and Baldi — will be untouched. So will a handful of others, including Roberto Clemente in North Philadelphia, Feltonville School of Arts and Sciences, Grover Washington in Olney, AMY at James Martin in Fishtown, and MYA and Science Leadership Academy Middle School in West Philadelphia.

Though officials said the facilities plan is not driven by finances, it’s clear that the underfunded school system needs to shrink its footprint.

With 70,000 empty seats citywide and an inequitable distribution of programs and opportunities, system officials say they need to make changes to do better for all kids.

“We can more efficiently distribute our limited resources in a K-8 model by operating 13 grade spans as opposed to six,” Watlington told City Council at a hearing Tuesday. “This is an efficiency issue.”

At present, the district has 13 different grade spans throughout its schools — from a single K-2 to K-4s, K-5s, K-8s, 5-8s, 6-8s and others. It’s proposing shrinking, mostly, to six different grade bands, and emphasizing K-8 or 5-12 as preferred models.

Officials say they’re also relying on feedback received in surveys taken and meetings held prior to the plan’s release. despite critics’ worry that the feedback was crafted to give the district the answers it wanted.

Hilderbrand Pelzer III, an associate superintendent, told a crowd of more than 100 people gathered at a Stetson Middle School meeting this month that in the surveys, families told the district they wanted to minimize transitions.

“Think of safety in the sense that young people should remain in one place longer, pre-K to 8,” Pelzer said. “Hence why we want to recommend some of our K-4s, K-5 schools grow to K-8. Now that may not be the answer you want to hear, but the voices that have informed that have allowed us to make that a recommendation.”

But critics of the district’s plan say they worry the feedback was crafted to give the district the answers they wanted. And the audience at Stetson that day pushed back: Minimizing transitions is not what they want. They want their middle school to stay at their current school.

“Why can’t you inform recommendations from people at Stetson?” one person shouted.

Wrestling with where middle-grades learners should attend school is nothing new, said Penny Bishop, dean of Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.

“We have been struggling to figure out how to provide appropriate schooling for this age group for well over a century,” Bishop said. “It’s a question with a long and thorny history” dating back to the 1800s, she said, with much back and forth.

Many of Philadelphia’s middle schools began as junior highs. Middle schools as a concept first surfaced in the United States in the 1960s and took off in the 1980s as part of an explicit attempt to create schools “designed based on the developmental needs of this particular age group, as opposed to saying, they’re short high schoolers or they’re tall elementary students,” Bishop said.

But tweens and early adolescents can be a tough age group to educate well, and middle schools got a bad rap among some, said Bishop. As school choice and shifting birth rates caused belt-tightening in some places, some districts began to shift grade configurations.

Boston recently shut its last standalone middle school as that district contracted amid enrollment losses, for instance.

Both Bishop and Katie Powell, director for middle level programs at the Association for Middle Level Education, said that research doesn’t support one kind of grade configuration or another.

“What matters most for middle school-age students is that we understand that they are going to need a different experience than their elementary counterparts in a K-8 building, and having a defined middle school, even within that K-8 school — that’s what tends to be most successful,” Powell said.

And, Bishop said, “a lot of this is tied up in the degree to which the leadership understands the developmental needs of the students.”

At a recent meeting at slated-to-close Wagner Middle School, Kim Newman, another Philadelphia associate superintendent, vowed that the district will spend time and resources planning thoughtful transitions as grade configurations change.

Adding middle grades to elementary schools hasn’t always been done well in the district, Newman said.

“In the past, what we’ve done is said, ‘Let’s just add some furniture and books, great,’ grow a grade each year, and that’s really not what children need,” said Newman.

She said she hopes receiving schools and closing middle schools will work together on what middle-grades learners need in the newly expanded elementary schools.

Claire Andrews has taught at Wagner Middle School for 40 years — years ago, it had 1,000 students but today, fewer than 300 are enrolled.

In the past, “we had opportunities for students, and as the years have gone on, they have just disappeared,” said Andrews. “Over the years, everything has just been pulled away.”

Andrews, like others in the city, raised questions of equity.

“Are they closing schools in the Northeast?” said Andrews.

Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, chair of City Council’s education committee, highlighted Philadelphia’s complicated middle school position at a Council hearing last week.

The district’s talking points around middle school sound good, he said. But he questioned decisions to expand middle grades at magnet schools, like Masterman and Carver High School of Engineering and Science, while closing a number of neighborhood middle schools.

“I want us to have nuanced dialogue around where we are and what we need to do,” said Thomas, who has spoken out against closing Conwell, of which he’s an alumnus. “And I also recognize that there’s pushback on every decision you made. I understand that we have to make tough decisions somewhere else, there is no real facilities plan, and we do need a plan. But the reality is that we’re still not sending the right message to people, and I think our position around middle school is problematic."

Watlington stressed the research around middle schools, and the surveys.

The superintendent said the district is committed to modernizing and expanding receiving schools, where needed, and was not just focused on the Northeast.

“We absolutely will not present a plan that just pushes resources in parts of the cities that’s growing fastest,” Watlington said. “I think this is as strategic a plan as we could create.”