‘You can vote no’: From a first grader to public officials, dozens tell Philly’s school board to reject 18 planned school closings
“Until you show a real response to these concerns, I will stand with my community and I will fight these closures with everything that I have,” City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier told the school board.
Layla Hernandez, a third grader, sat at the big table and looked at the members of the Philadelphia school board in front of her.
“I don’t see nothing wrong with our school,” said Layla, who attends Ludlow Elementary in North Philadelphia, one of 18 schools Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. has proposed closing permanently. “The only thing I see wrong is that y’all trying to close it down.”
As the school board weighs Watlington’s plan, nearly 100 members of the community made pitches Thursday night — by turns incredulous, emotional, angry — in hopes of swaying the board, which has not yet said when it will vote on the measure.
“Remember, you can vote no,” said Winston Hayes, a student at Lankenau High, a unique environmental school whose community has mounted a vigorous campaign opposing its closure.
From a first grader to politicians with Gov. Josh Shapiro’s and Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s ears, most speakers said they want no part of permanently shutting schools.
Royal Williamson, who couldn’t reach the microphone without sitting on his mom’s lap, said he loves his teacher at Moffet Elementary. (Moffet is not among the 18 closures outlined by Watlington, but the superintendent has said he wants to turn it into a middle school, a move Moffet community members say equals a closure.)
“I love my school, it is fun,” said Royal, 7. “I can read chapter books, I do math too. I do not want to go to another school, I love Moffet Elementary. Please do not close Moffet Elementary.”
State Rep. Morgan Cephas (D., Phila.) cast doubt on the district’s current blueprint.
“I’m here to express deep concern about a facilities plan that took years to create, when you’re giving families weeks to digest,” Cephas said. “Which is not equity, and not what we fight for.
And City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier said she had not yet received an acceptable answer to her concern that the closure plan would have a disproportionate impact on Black and brown students.
“You’re proposing to close schools like Parkway West and Paul Robeson, magnet schools that recruit, embrace, and support Black and brown students,” Gauthier said. “Meanwhile, you’re finding the budget to recommend investment in more elite schools in a more privileged neighborhood.”
Three schools in Gauthier’s West Philadelphia district are proposed for a closure — high schools Parkway West and Robeson, and Blankenburg Elementary.
“Until you show a real response to these concerns, I will stand with my community and I will fight these closures with everything that I have,” said Gauthier.
No decisions, and no date for a vote
No school board member indicated how they would eventually vote.
But board member Wanda Novalés said members of the public raised “many of the same questions that I am asking myself.”
Novalés underscored that the plan under consideration is “not the board’s plan — this is a plan that has been submitted to us for us to evaluate and vote on. We are listening. We have not made a final vote.”
Reginald Streater, the board president, acknowledged the pain the plan had already caused.
But no one on the board woke up one day thinking it would be a good idea to close a single school, Streater said. But if the historically underfunded district did not take steps to solve for the 70,000 empty seats it has, it would have $8 billion in deferred maintenance costs, and it has no means to pay that bill.
The board wouldn’t even “call the question for a plan that could lead to closures if we didn’t feel we were between a rock and a hard place,” Streater said.