City schools chief wants budgets redone

Philadelphia School Reform Commission Chairwoman Sandra Dungee Glenn has ordered the district's administration to redo budgets for each school, with the goal of keeping class sizes as low as possible and art and music, counselors, librarians and nurses intact.

Dungee Glenn, through a spokeswoman, announced the action this week, following complaints from Parents United for Public Education, the Home and School Council and other parent and community groups.

The announcement also followed an article in The Inquirer last week about the district's budget directive to principals to create "split classes," if necessary to meet class-size limits. Split classes have students from more than one grade and can lead to larger class sizes.

"The budgets did not reflect the SRC's priorities as they were outlined," said commission spokeswoman Heidi Gold.

Dungee Glenn had instructed staff to make revisions before the complaints from parents and before The Inquirer article, Gold said. But Dungee Glenn's directive did not become public until after the complaints emerged.

When Dungee Glenn became chairwoman of the commission last fall, she said art and music, counselors, librarians and nurses no longer would find themselves on school cut lists and that class sizes would be kept low, especially in the primary grades, whenever possible.

She called the priorities "basics" that had been neglected for too long.

When school budgets went out last week, principals and teachers were buzzing about cuts they would have to make.

Powel School in West Philadelphia, for example, was faced with losing several teachers, which would endanger the school's long-standing commitment to keeping class sizes low.

Cecilia Cummings, speaking on behalf of the school district's administration, said yesterday: "We're just going to continue to chip away at the budget in an extremely tight budget year to incrementally fund the commission's priorities in a manner that is fiscally responsible."

Parent advocates said they were pleased the commission ordered the budgets to be redone.

"We're very glad that the school district heard the concerns and understand how much of a priority it is," said Helen Gym, of Parents United for Public Education.

District officials last week said they really didn't intend to have split classes. It was a routine budgeting procedure and ultimately split classes would be removed, they said.

However, a district budget directive sent to principals ordered them to meet class-size limits in the teacher contract even if it means putting students in two different grades in the same room. The policy applied to students in grades one to four. It meant, for example, that if there were 36 first graders at a school, the principal would have to place six of them in a class with second graders rather than creating two classes of first graders or allowing one large class. The class-size limit in kindergarten and grades one to three is 30 students; it is 33 students in upper grades.

Parent groups and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers were skeptical of the district's explanation.

In their letter to Dungee Glenn, the groups wrote: "Quite frankly, the news that the district allocated teachers according to the class size maximum, resulting in split grades, has many of our schools outraged."

The group also said several schools were going to lose art and music teachers because of the budgeting.