Girard College seeks OK to end boarding, high school

The board that oversees Girard College asked Philadelphia Orphan's Court on Monday for permission to suspend the boarding and high school programs in the fall of 2014 to help restore its ailing finances.

In its petition, the board asked the court to modify the will of Stephen Girard, the merchant banker whose 1831 bequest established the boarding school for poor children on a 43-acre campus in Fairmount.

The filing comes nearly eight weeks after the Board of Directors of City Trusts announced that dramatic change was necessary to avert financial ruin. Unless the changes are permitted, the board said, the funds that support Girard could be depleted within 25 years and the school forced to close.

"We have to reduce spending at Girard so that the trust can be replenished and grow," Kevin Feeley, a board spokesman, said Monday. "At some time in the future we want to go back to a full first-12th school with boarding again."

On the final day of classes last month, 2,000 students, alumni, union members, parents, and staff gathered outside the school's gates on South College Avenue to protest the proposed changes. Many vowed to challenge the petition.

"I'm very much opposed," Kareemah Atkins, a 1999 Girard graduate, said Monday. "A lot of kids come from different places, New Jersey and New York."

Atkins, who lives in North Philadelphia, said she was perplexed by the decision to take such drastic steps now when Girard will not run out of money for 25 years.

"Why is it such an urgency to make these changes?" she asked. "It doesn't make sense to evict these kids if we have 25 years."

Jared Freedman, a staffer with the American Federation of Teachers, which represents Girard's instructors, agreed.

"If they do have a shortage, I can assure them they can make it up in 25 years," he said.

Freedman said three unions that represent Girard employees are part of a coalition of alumni, parents, students, and community activists that is trying to determine if they have the legal standing to fight the petition in Orphan's Court.

Girard spent $42,500 per student to provide a college-preparatory education and 24-hour care five days a week for the 405 students who attended in the academic year just ended. The school suspended its weekend boarding program a few years ago to cut costs.

Continuing to run the five-day residential and high school programs "has become impracticable," the board's petition said.

Accompanied by voluminous exhibits, the 11-page document asks the court to allow Girard to close its boarding program and suspend its eighth-through-11th academic program at the start of the 2014-15 school year.

Girard said it would operate a day program for 12th graders in 2014-15 and then suspend that program as well.

The plan calls for an extended-day program with more rigorous academics for 425 students in first through eighth grades in September 2014.

Girard's current residential program with high school classes will continue to operate in the next academic year.

The proposed changes could affect more than a third of the students and nearly half the 180 staff members, as the school would scale back operations to a handful of elementary school buildings at the lower end of the campus and mothballs other aging structures.

Although the board is drafting financial benchmarks for restoring both the residential and high school programs, the petition does not set a specific end date. The petition asks for the temporary changes "until further order of the court." Because Girard is a public charity, the state Attorney General's Office was sent a copy of the Orphan's Court petition.

By law, Feeley said, the state has 20 days to review the petition and file any objections. "Today is Day One," he said.

Over the years the courts have approved several changes to Girard's will, which called for establishing a school to "educate poor, white, male orphans."

It took two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court and seven months of around-the-clock picketing by civil-rights protesters before the school was integrated in 1965.

Another lawsuit nine years later led to the admission of girls. And the definition of orphans was expanded to "functional orphans" to include children from single-parent homes.