Dive Brief:
- The School District of Philadelphia released a sweeping facilities plan in January that suggests closing 20 schools by the 2032-33 school year. The proposal also includes maintaining 122 buildings, modernizing 159 sites, and co-locating six other academic programs into a single building.
- The district said four themes guided leaders as they analyzed facilities data and engaged with local stakeholders to develop the proposal: strengthening pre-K-8 programming through better use of space, reinvesting in neighborhood high schools, reducing unnecessary school transitions for students, and expanding student access to grade 5-12 schools as well as CTE schools.
- The district’s 10-year plan is expected to cost $2.8 billion, of which $1 billion will come from the school system’s own budget and $1.8 billion is expected to come from public and philanthropic funding. The district will present its recommendations to the school board in February.
Dive Insight:
The School District of Philadelphia’s plan states that a key goal is to address underenrollment and overenrollment at many of its “aging and unequal facilities.”
The district has seen a slight enrollment increase from 197,288 to 198,405 between the 2022-23 and 2025-26 school years. That includes students in all of the district’s traditional, charter, alternative and cyber charter schools.
However, the district noted in an April announcement that its enrollment decreased 12% — or by 15,546 students — between the 2014-15 and 2024-25 school years. That dip comes as the School District of Philadelphia’s alternative school enrollment rose by 3.1%, its charter school enrollment decreased by 0.5% and its cyber charter school enrollment jumped over 2,500% with 13,705 more students in the same 10-year period.
In developing its proposal, the district engaged the community through 47 public listening sessions, 35 data verification sessions with school principals, and two districtwide surveys that collected more than 13,000 responses in total, said Superintendent Tony Watlington in a Jan. 22 letter to the school community. The district plans to hold more community discussions in February before the plan is presented to the board.
“Though we acknowledge that some of the decisions we have to make will be difficult, I believe that we have developed a plan that incorporates deep, public feedback and will help us increase access to high-quality academic and extracurricular programs across neighborhoods and accelerate our journey to become the fastest-improving, large urban school district in the country,” Watlington said.
But the district’s teachers union has already begun to push back on the facilities plan.
Arthur Steinberg, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said in a Jan. 22 statement that the long-delayed school closure and consolidation plan was released after months of “false starts and poorly advertised and attended ‘community meetings.’”
Steinberg added that the district’s proposal lacks “the transparency they promised,” and that several of the proposed school closures and consolidations “make no sense based on the data we have, and equally as important, based on the experiences of our members in those buildings.”
The School District of Philadelphia is familiar with navigating difficult school closures.
The district closed six schools in 2012 and another 24 the following year. The changes were made as the district faced a $1.35 billion deficit and declining enrollment. Thousands protested those closure plans before the decision was finalized. The protests also led to 19 people getting arrested.
The closure plans at that time, however, were made by the School Reform Commission formed by the state and Philadelphia mayor. The temporary commission was created in 2001 and later dissolved in 2017.
Watlington’s administration “has repeatedly acknowledged the deep trauma still felt by communities that were lied to and railroaded during the mass closure of public schools more than a decade ago,” Steinberg said. “They promised to do far better. What we have today might be better than last time — we are no longer dealing with the SRC, most obviously — but our students and communities deserve the best.”
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