COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE Room 400, City Hall Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Tuesday, April 30, 2024 10:12 a.m. PRESENT: COUNCIL PRESIDENT KENYATTA JOHNSON COUNCILMEMBER NINA AHMAD COUNCILMEMBER CINDY BASS COUNCILMEMBER KENDRA BROOKS COUNCILMEMBER MICHAEL DRISCOLL COUNCILMEMBER JAMIE GAUTHIER COUNCILMEMBER KATHERINE GILMORE RICHARDSON COUNCILMEMBER JIM HARRITY COUNCILMEMBER CURTIS JONES, JR. COUNCILMEMBER RUE LANDAU COUNCILMEMBER QUETCY LOZADA COUNCILMEMBER NICOLAS O'ROURKE COUNCILMEMBER ANTHONY PHILLIPS COUNCILMEMBER MARK SQUILLA COUNCILMEMBER ISAIAH THOMAS COUNCILMEMBER JEFFERY YOUNG, JR. BILLS 240179, 240180, 240181, and 240182 RESOLUTIONS 240193 and 181014 - - 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC.
Y'all keep forgetting I'm Baptist. Good morning, everyone. (Good morning.)
That's much better. This is the public hearing and public meeting of the Committee of the Whole regarding Bills No. 240179, 240180, 240181, 240182, and Resolutions No. 15 240193 and 181014. Ms. Loughead, will you please call the roll to take attendance.
Present. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Thank you. A quorum of the Committee is present and this hearing is now called to order. Ms. Loughead, will you please read the title of the bills and resolutions.
Bill No. 240179, an ordinance to adopt the Operating Budget for Fiscal Year 2025. Bill No. 240180, an ordinance 12 amending Chapter 19-1800 of The Philadelphia Code, entitled "School Tax Authorization," to provide for an increase in the tax that the Board of Education of the School District of Philadelphia is authorized to impose on real estate; and amending Chapter 19 19-1300, entitled "Real Estate Taxes," to establish an equivalent reduction in the tax rate for the City real estate tax; and making technical changes; all under certain terms and conditions. Bill No. 240181, an ordinance 25 to adopt a Fiscal Year 2025 Capital 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Budget. Bill No. 240182, an ordinance 4 to adopt a Capital Program for the six Fiscal Years 2025 through 2030 inclusive. Resolution No. 240193, providing for the approval by the Council of the City of Philadelphia of a Revised Five Year Financial Plan for the City of Philadelphia covering Fiscal Years 2025 through 2029, and incorporating revisions with respect to Fiscal Year 2024, which is to be submitted by the Mayor to the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority pursuant to an Intergovernmental Cooperation Agreement by and between the City and the Authority. Resolution No. 181014, calling for the Council Committee of the Whole to convene public meetings and public hearings pursuant to the Educational Supplement of the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter to review the administration, management, operations, and finances of 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. the School District and adopt plans to coordinate the activities of the Board of Education, the Mayor, and the City Council for the improvement and benefit of public education in Philadelphia.
Today we will continue the public hearing of the Committee of the Whole to consider the bills read by the Clerk that constitute proposed operating and capital spending measures for Fiscal Year 2025, a Capital Program, and a forward-looking Capital Plan for Fiscal Year 2025 through Fiscal Year 2030. Additionally, this meeting meets the requirement of the Educational Supplement of the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter to review the administration, management, operation, and finances of the School District of Philadelphia on a biannual basis. This morning we will hear testimony from the School District of Philadelphia, and in the afternoon we 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. will hear testimony from the Community College of Philadelphia. Ms. Loughead, will you please call the first witness to testify.
The first person to testify is the Honorable Cherelle L. Parker, Mayor of Philadelphia.
Good morning, Mr. President, members of Council. Thank you for having me this morning.
At this time, you don't have to state your name and your title, but go ahead and begin your testimony.
Thank you very much. Council President Johnson, Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson, Majority Whip Thomas, Education 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Chairperson Thomas, City Council, members of the Board of Education, our Superintendent, Dr. Tony Watlington, thank you all for having me. I want to thank all of the members who are present today for your commitment to our Philadelphia public school students. For the past several years, when Mayor Jim Kenney came to this body for the biannual meeting, he focused on the difficult and disruptive impact of COVID-19 on our students, how the City, the School District, and City Council worked together to overcome their differences and work together to respond to that COVID-19 crisis. Here we are, Mr. President, four years later, when schools across the country are still dealing with the effects of COVID, as students struggle academically, and truancy in a way that many of us couldn't have imagined has become more than a major issue. But as you hear, and you will hear from the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. School Board and Dr. Watlington today, Philadelphia's story is actually a good one. More students are coming to school regularly. Fewer students are dropping out, and student academic performance, it's rising. 4 billion. Philadelphia's success is not a mystery. It is the work of a very strong and effective Superintendent, dedicated teachers and staff, and an experienced Board willing to make tough decisions. It is my vision, Mr. President and members of Council, that all 197,000 students in Philadelphia, that all of them will receive a world-class education regardless of their neighborhood zip code or socioeconomic status, whether they are in traditional district, charter or alternative schools. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. As an aside, Mr. President, I've said to you from time to time that I haven't seen a Mayor who's publicly been willing to say there was no one who is going to get me to engage in the "us versus them" fight between what some people will consider traditional public school advocacy versus the charter school advocacy. I won't allow it, because all of those students attending those schools, they are our children. Ultimately for me, we need quality seats, better academic performance from all schools if our children are going to be successful and to compete in this 21st century global economy. My One Philly budget, it begins that process, Mr. President. We know that until the General Assembly finally begins to meet its obligation to fully fund our District in which all members of this body have in one way or another strongly advocated for, the City will have to increase our 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. support for the Philadelphia public schools, and I ask for your support for the millage rate shift that will add an additional $129 million in City funding to public education over the next five years. And, Mr. President, you know no 9 one had to mount a campaign to tell me that's what we should be proposing. When I talked about this on the trail, I talked about moving that millage from 55 to 58 percent. Then you get here on the second floor of City Council -- second floor of the Mayor's Office and you realize how much and what it is that you have to do, and that while we can't get to 58 immediately and deal with the plethora of other challenges, I want you to know I'm not shying away from the goal. I'm keeping myself laser focused on the goal, but in this budget, we propose increasing that millage one percent. I just wanted you, 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Mr. President and members of the Council, to know that I'm cognizant of us trying to get there in a very methodical, intentional but fiscally responsible manner. This budget, Mr. President, that $129 million in City funding that we proposed in that One Philly budget, it continues our commitment to PHL pre-K.
I want to thank members of Council, including Education Committee Chairperson Isaiah Thomas, our state legislators, including State Senator Vincent Hughes, and Jerry Jordan and the PFT for their focus on the poor condition of many of our school buildings. This collective work has resulted in the creation of not one but two state grant programs, new state grant programs, that for the first time in ten years will provide state dollars to new renovation and environmental hazard remediation. This is an example of how the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. intergovernmental approach can raise up an issue and spur concrete results. I see Chairman Harris and Speaker McClinton right now doing -- and we sat next to each other when the Governor gave his budget address, and we saw them rise to the occasion when the Governor talked about his additional investment in public education. And, Mr. President and members of Council, I could not have been more proud to know that Hughes and McClinton and Harris are on the front line advocating for us in Harrisburg. I want you to know that all of this, this collective work, it has resulted in the creation of those two programs, but this is also an urgent problem, and you will be hearing more from me soon on how we can work together to address it. I know that there's some people who thought, Mr. President, that although I've been here for only a little over 100 days that I should have on day one 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. had the solution to address and solve permanently some of these challenges that have seemed insurmountable and intractable and they wanted a concrete plan on day one to say how are you going to fix what was, when I was in this body, a $5 billion cost. The last day that I saw said that that dollar amount now has actually even moved to $7 billion plus to rebuild and remediate our school. I know some people thought I should have had $7 billion in hand to figure out how to do it, but unfortunately that's not the reality when you get to the second floor. You realize that we need everybody in order to make it happen. And, Mr. President, the first sign of it was to introduce a budget that included more revenue. In addition to that, I want to note this: We need a school facilities plan, and I'm committing to you, Mr. President. I'm committing to you, Mr. Chairman. I'm committing to all of 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. the members of Council that we will have a concrete facilities plan as Mayor of this city working in partnership with our Superintendent, this legislative body, our School Board, the Pennsylvania General Assembly, our federal delegation. And, Mr. President, I'm going to try to do something that we haven't, I don't think, done as well as we should in the City of Philadelphia. We have not worked in a collaborative way to tap the philanthropic organizations that are in our city to say, we need you to all come together and figure out how do we row in the same direction and work to attack a problem that is a win-win for all of us. That's, Mr. President, very humbling, what I'm going to attempt to do as Mayor of this city. We can't do that without a Superintendent who's willing to think outside the box. He can't say that we have to sharpen the pencils the same way we've been sharpening them over the years 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. and us expecting that we're going to get a different outcome. I'm proud of Superintendent Watlington, Mr. President and members of Council. He has my wholehearted support, and I want to do everything that I can to give him the leeway, not micromanage the District, not think that I am the expert educational manager, because with all due respect, that is not what I do.
But I do want to make sure that we give every support and resource that is necessary for Superintendent Watlington to be successful and to present innovative ideas and figure out solutions to seemingly intractable, longstanding problems in the School District of Philadelphia. Next, the Board, Mr. President. Having a strong Board of Education, it is absolutely vital as we move to implement this vision. The Board must have the skills to lead, the wisdom to make good choices and to follow the law, and a 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. 100 percent commitment to the children and families the District serves. Our incoming School Board has five new members, a majority who will bring new ideas and new skills, but to be successful, the Board must balance change with continuity and new skills with experience. The nine members, Mr. President, that I selected to serve on the School Board and that you with eight of them have confirmed, I want you to know that in my mind, Mr. President, they form the best team from the 27 names that was sent to me by the Education Nominating Panel, Mr. President. I didn't usurp a process. I didn't try to do something other than what the law requests that the Mayor does. I put a diverse panel together, more diverse than any panel that's ever been put together in this city, to show that traditional public and charter advocates will be a part of choosing who would be considered 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. as a nominee. And, Mr. President, when that nominating panel, led by Otis Bullock, did its job and sent me those 27 names, Mr. President, I did the best that I could to ensure that I was sending the nine that reflected my vision. There are some people, Mr. President, who, especially after what occurred yesterday, that are going to do everything in their power to get that or fuel, fuel that "us versus them" narrative, the same way that they would attempt to do between traditional publics and charter schools. Are we always going to agree absolutely on everything? No, we're not, Mr. President. But I want the record to reflect that I've been a part of this building in some way, shape or form since 1990 when I was 17 years old. I respect this institution. I respect the body. There is no one person or individual that's bigger than this institution. I followed the rules. I 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. respect you, Mr. President, and I've said to you publicly and I want to say it to you now in front of this body that you lead. I understand that the Parker Administration's agenda, it can be torpedoed, Mr. President, by your leadership. I know what happens, and I've lived it and I've seen what happens when a Council President and the Mayor decide that they're going to be oil and water. And guess what? I see it in neighborhoods where we move across the City. Where the politics and the politicians have worked extremely hard and together, you see advancement, you see stabilization and houses. Quite frankly, you see great investments in the neighborhood public schools, in the commercial corridors. In areas, Mr. President, where the politics haven't worked so well because of that oil and water, you can see the results of that. Members of Council who are here 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. today, I respect each and every one of you. We may not always agree, but there is no one, Mr. President, who can tell you that they don't respect this legislative body or that one that's a couple miles away. I've been one of and I've 9 been one of 203, and I know what it's 10 like to be a part of a team. But I'm in 11 a different place now, Mr. President. 12 I'm seeing things through a different 13 lens that I've never saw before. It's 14 new to me, Mr. President. I'm never the 15 smartest person in the room. I don't 16 know everything, Mr. President. We've 17 got to work together.
But I want you and the people of this city to know that I'm doing the best I can with what little I have to make good on my promise to make Philadelphia the safest, cleanest, greenest big city in the nation, with access to economic opportunity for all, and take a government to the people that they can see, touch, and feel their tax 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. dollars at work. Mr. President, I thank you so much for the time that you've given me today, sir, to share my perspectives. To members of Council, my hope is to each of you, we have so much work to do, so much work to do. The press is going to fuel it. People are going to post it. They're going to do everything they can to talk about when you trump, when you trump, when you win, when you win. Let's make sure that the people win. We can agree to disagree and we'll have some fights, but don't let that be the north star that determines how we move the City of Philadelphia. I can't do it without you, and you can't do it without me. We're interdependent on each other in order to move Philadelphia forward. And, Mr. President, if I seem a little bit more passionate today than I normally am, I only got a couple hours 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. last night. Y'all know what that means. A half an hour here, wake up, half an hour there, wake up. You want me to tell you why? Because the phone, the calls, the posts, everybody trying to find a way to benefit from driving a wedge between this President, this leadership, this Council, and this Administration either, A, because they make money on us being divided, and I can give you a list of them who get extremely wealthy when we don't agree, and/or they just want to see a fight, Mr. President. I don't want a fight. I want to get things done. I want partners. I need you. Okay? And I just want to be clear about it. Now, Mr. President, don't laugh at me. Am I supposed to sit for questions or do I leave? Because I forgot. I have your permission, Mr. President?
4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Yes, you have my permission.
Members of Council, thank you so much for your time today. - - - (Applause.) - - -
Will the Clerk please call the next person for public testimony.
The next person to testify is Reginald Streater, School Board President. (Witness approached witness table.)
Good morning. Good morning, Council President, and thank you, Mayor Parker Administration, Council President, Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson, Minority Leader Kendra Brooks, Chair of the Education Committee, Isaiah Thomas, 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. and all members of the City Council for hosting the Board of Education, Mr. President, the School District of Philadelphia, Dr. Watlington and his cabinet, and myself today. We are here to discuss our progress in the FY25 budget. I am joined by my esteemed colleagues, and this will be, some of them, their last act as Board members, this being the last day of their terms, current Board members Danzy, Egea-Hinton, Salley, Thompson, and Wilkerson. These volunteers are staunch advocates for public education, consistently championing a student-centered approach. Their dedication reminds us of our core mission to educate the whole child. I am deeply grateful for their sacrifices and I -- all made in the pursuit of better futures for our children. Mr. President, City Council, before I proceed, I'd like to acknowledge 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. our key partners in public education within the School District of Philadelphia and this Board. Our unions, CASA, the PFT, Unite 64 -- 634, excuse me, and 32BJ SEIU have been instrumental and remain key. Additional thanks go out to Education Law Center, Children First, Public Law Center, and many others who advocate tirelessly for public education in our city. I would like to use my brief time today to discuss three key topics, including, one, reflecting on the first six years of local control; two, the Board's goals and guardrails; and, three, the path forward. In reflecting, this Board is proud of the momentum we built over the last six years towards becoming the fastest improving large urban school district in the nation. The Council of the Great City Schools, by way of Dr. Ray Hart, has remarked positively on our 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. " Indeed, we as a city have received national recognition for the work that the Board -- this Board has done. We all know that educating the whole child improves social and economic conditions, reducing unemployment, decreasing public assistance dependency, and increasing tax revenues. Since regaining local control in 2018, our focus on student learning has empowered our Superintendent and District to prioritize and measure 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. achievement effectively. Our engagement with the community and insights from our successful school boards -- of other successful school boards informed our vision for public education in Philadelphia. We've embraced a governance model centered on student needs, setting clear expectations, monitoring progress, and tailoring budgets and policies to support our students. I would like to raise five buckets of work this Board has prioritized since local control was returned to the School District. First, this Board established a committee structure in addition to its monthly action meetings. To date, the Board has held more than 70 committee meetings and currently have standing committees focused on Board policy and our goals and guardrails. Second, we have substantially increased our coordination with the City, 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. including during the pandemic and our shared coordinated response to gun violence. Three, the District's credit position and bond rating has continued to improve, including receiving investment-grade ratings for the first time since 1977, which Moody's credited to, one, annual development of five-year financial plans and, two, strong District leadership and governance, including the return to local control. Fourth, the Board has adopted or revised more than 130 policies and resolutions, which give clear direction to the Superintendent and their administration.
These include streamlined charter school sector policies, a policy on business diversity and the procurement of materials and contracted services, a resolution on welcoming schools to ensure students' learning environments are not disrupted by immigration enforcement actions, all 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Board governing bylaws to codify local control and Board policy. Fifth and finally, the Board has implemented new robust Board representative and Parent and Community Advisory Council initiatives, which further ensure the Board is engaged with the various constituencies we serve every day. While many are familiar with our adopted goals and guardrails, I want to take the opportunity to briefly raise them up again on the record. As you can see on the screen, we have three academic goals for the District centered around reading, math, and college and career. We also have four conditions that must exist in every school for us to be able to achieve these academic goals. We call these the guardrails, and they include, one, welcoming and supportive schools; two, enriching and well-rounded school experiences; three, partnering with the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. parents and family members; and, four, addressing racist practices. Today and in other venues, you often hear this Board talk about our student-centered approach. These goals and guardrails are fundamentally at the core of this approach. We focus on these seven things. Our decisions are nationally in the best interest of students. Mr. President, these goals and guardrails were adopted by the Board in December 2020, and then guided the nationwide search for Superintendent Watlington as well as his transition and entry plan. Today, Dr. Watlington is executing on these goals and guardrails through the District's Accelerate Philly strategic plan, which the proposed FY25 budget actually supports. It focuses on protecting schools' budgets, engaging partners, negotiating labor agreements, implementing the strategic plans, and 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. advocate for fiscal responsibility. Accelerate Philly also focuses on such things as a year-round school pilot, investing in safe paths, and completing a facilities master plan. And on that last point, we take the issues of facilities seriously, and we have worked to respond to Council's concern. We know this is a high-priority issue that will further be addressed with Dr. Watlington's remarks later this morning. We, the collective Board, have achieved significant milestones of student-centered governance, and we look forward to the new Board doubling down on the student-centered focus. We believe that the work of this current Board represents a collective effort and sets a strong foundation. Mr. President, however, these accomplishments are not ours alone. We've strengthened our partnerships to enhance education and promote 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. intergovernmental cooperation. In collaboration, Comcast provided tablets for all students, and the Neubauer Foundation supported our Ninth Grade Academy initiatives. Collaborating with Dr. Waller, Reverend Dr. Waller and Enon Tabernacle, we facilitated the relocation of Building students to Martin Luther 10 King Jr. due to some issues at the 11 school. 12 Additionally, we partnered with 13 Councilmember Gauthier and the previous 14 mayoral administration to agree on an MOU 15 that is poised to transform Sayre pool 16 into a public space with services for the 17 community and the District. Indeed, the 18 District and Board are primed for the 19 intergovernmental approach our Mayor has 20 called for. 21 In closing, I would like to take a moment to discuss and preview a path forward. First and foremost, we need to continue to support Dr. Watlington's leadership and his 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. implementation of the Accelerate Philly strategic plan.
This includes teacher retention strategies this Board has brought to Council's attention in the past, included but not limited to, subsidized teaching housing and parking for teachers around schools where there isn't access to parking. Our path forward also calls for continued advocacy for equitable and adequate funding. To achieve this, the Board commits to intentional and sustained engagement with local and state legislators, as evidenced by monthly meetings with City Council, monthly meetings with the Governor's Office, and at least biannual visits to Harrisburg, but also includes new approaches such as exploring new federal funding through Medicare coverage of student supports. And, finally, we will continue to build on our partnerships with the charter school sector and see to increase our touch points with these schools, 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. their leaders and their boards, and the families that they support. Over the last few years, the Charter Schools Office and its leadership has developed robust feedback periods to enhance two-way communication. We will continue to work closely with our City charters to help them be successful while respecting their independence. And, finally, as I conclude, the Board thanks this legislative body for its steadfast support. We look forward to today's discussion on collaboratively improving educational outcomes for our students. We are confident that our efforts have positioned the incoming Board to further advance our goals. The District now enjoys greater stability, has responsibly managed public funds, is nationally recognized for various achievements, and is making progress in academic performance. This sets the stage for the next Board to build upon our momentum and 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. fulfill Mayor Parker's vision on providing a world-class education for students of all ages and backgrounds regardless of their school. Thank you, and we remain your partners.
Thank you. The Chair calls up Dr. Watlington, Superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia. (Witness approached witness table.)
How you doing, Dr. Watlington? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: I'm doing well. Good morning, Mr. President. How are you?
I'm doing good. Always good to see you. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Likewise. President Johnson, Majority Leader Richardson, and Whip Thomas and 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Chair of the Education Committee Thomas, good morning.
Good morning. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: It's a pleasure to be with you this morning.
I just want to start off by just thanking you for your refreshing and renewed approach in terms of how we educate our young people here in the City of Philadelphia and just giving a chance to work with you within that capacity and beyond that capacity in terms of being out in the community. And so with that being said, you can start your testimony. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you, sir. It's a pleasure to serve in the great City of Philadelphia. Again, good morning, Mr. President, Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson, Whip Thomas, and all members 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. of Council. Good to see you this morning. This morning I'd like to give you an update on our academic recovery, the state of the District, an overview of the Fiscal Year '25 budget overview, a facilities update, and I'll share a couple of other updates relative to school selection, as well as our positions in staffing as we prepare for the upcoming school year, and then we'll conclude with next steps. I want to begin by talking about our core business, academic recovery, how are we doing, how are the children with regard to academic achievement, which is our core business. Additionally, we should always ask how our students are doing academically, because we want our funders to know what kind of return on investment you're getting for the resources that you are investing in the School District of Philadelphia. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. S. districts in academic recovery: takeaways from the school board meeting. " I do want to frame for you, Mr. Chairman -- Mr. President, a study Harvard and Stanford researchers did, the first -- completed the first study since schools were closed across the United States in March of 2023, March the 13th to be exact, in North Carolina. I remember it just like it was yesterday. And they wanted to ask this question: Since schools were closed for such an unprecedented amount of time in American history, how are our children doing in terms of reading and math? They completed a study that 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. included 30 states and 60 percent of the entire public school population in the United States. That's inclusive of traditional public schools, charter schools, which are public schools as well, 60 percent of the population. They look specifically at 3rd through 8th grade math and 3rd through 8th grade reading. Now, when we look at what's called the NAEP TUDA districts, there are large urban school districts 13 in the United States that take the NAEP 14 TUDA district -- the NAEP TUDA test, the 15 NAEP test, which is administered to 4th 16 graders and 8th graders every two years, 17 and the researchers wanted to compare 18 when we look at 2019 NAEP testing 19 compared to 2023 individual state tests, 20 including our PSSA test here in 21 Pennsylvania, which districts are 22 rebounding the faster. 23 Among the NAEP TUDA districts, 24 there are 26 of them across the country, 25 in order to be in the study you had to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. meet two criteria. Number one, the districts must have tested at least 95 percent of their students, and, number two, the districts could not have changed their test between 2019 and 2023. The study revealed that among the NAEP TUDA districts and the large urban districts overall, the School District of Philadelphia had the best, fastest-improving rebound performance in 3rd through 8th grade math. No. 2 in the study was the Los Angeles Unified School District and No. 3 was in Guilford County, North Carolina, followed by San Diego and Chicago. Even when you don't include the NAEP TUDA districts and you look at the 50 largest school districts in the country regardless of the level of poverty, the School District of Philadelphia still finishes the top three, along with Chicago and LA and Wake County, North Carolina, but No. 1 in terms of post-pandemic recovery in 3rd 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. through 8th grade math.
When we look at reading scores in grades 3 through 8, the District nationally among the large NAEP TUDA districts that had the best rebound performance was the Chicago Public Schools, and the School District of Philadelphia was No. 2 in the country with regard to rebound performance in 3rd through 8th grade reading. Unlike the math where no 13 district got to the point of exceeding their 2019 performance, you'll see that in 3rd through 8th grade reading, both Chicago Public Schools and the School District of Philadelphia made improvements not just in rebound, tops and rebounds, but also made some significant growth. Let me be really clear. We do not suggest that somehow we ought to ring the bell and say that we have delivered on our expectations. We're saying that we improved faster than our peer 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. districts. We're saying that we have a lot of work to do, and we are going to be innovative, we're going to dig in, and we're going to do the work, because we know our children in Philadelphia are smart and they can demonstrate their intelligence just like everybody else. For the people who say, well, you know, Superintendent Watlington, what do you say to the people who say, well, the scores are still too low? I say I absolutely agree. But the other side of that nickel is, we have to say let's commend our students, our teachers, our principals, our school staff for making progress, because success begets more success. I want to now provide, Mr. President, an overview of the Fiscal Year 2025 budget overview, and I want to begin with our budget priorities that we've established and shared with the Board of Education for their approval. The Fiscal Year '25 budget has 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. five priorities. Number one, we've been very careful to protect school budgets. S. Congress appropriated ARPA dollars, American Rescue Plan Act dollars, that were sent out to all of the 14,000-plus public school districts across the country. 2 billion since March of 2020. All of those dollars, Mr. President, will sunset in September of this year. That fact notwithstanding, we've budgeted in a way that we will not make cuts to key school positions this year. In fact, we're holding the line. In a few areas we'll actually increase our staffing to meet the needs of our students. I want to thank our Chief Financial Officer and the Board for good budgeting processes that allows us not to cut back on services or positions in the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. upcoming year, subject to how we're funded with the Mayor's budget and the Governor's budget. Priority No. 2 has been to engage partners throughout the City. You may have noticed this year that the runway was longer in terms of how we began to build a budget and the Superintendent and Board talked to our community. The Board of Education asked me upon becoming Superintendent to ensure that we had a longer budget development process so that we could be more transparent, both with our funders, City Council, certainly with the Mayor's Office, with our parents, our students, principals, our school staffs, and our community. So we've held over 50 engagement sessions getting feedback on the budget. We've given our state coders an opportunity to complete a survey to tell us what they think about our budgeting priorities. In fact, 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. 68 percent of the people who completed those surveys indicated that they strongly felt that we ought to end the process of leveling, and that's feedback that we've heard both from Council as well as from our stakeholders who participated in the budget development process, and I'm glad that we were able to hear the voices of all of you. Priority 3 is to negotiate mutually benefit labor agreements. Two key labor agreements that will be up for renewal this year, the Philadelphia Federation of Teacher and the Commonwealth Association of School Administrators.
So we look forward to working with President Jerry Jordan up until the date that he retires and Art Steinberg, President Steinberg, after that, as well as Dr. Robin Cooper and with the CASA union negotiation. Priority 4, Mr. President, involves really driving faster improvement under the strategic plan 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. entitled Accelerate Philly. Accelerate Philly is designed to identify specific strategies, research-based, evidence-based strategies, that we know if we push really hard and we deliver well, that we will continue to move closer to accomplishing the Board's goals and guardrails. And area 5, priority 5, is to enact some fiscally responsibility measures and while we advocate for additional funding to prevent a structural deficit. I'm going to talk a little bit later about some of the specific fiscal responsibility measures we've taken to tighten our belt, to invest in modified zero-based budgeting, and to commit to stop funding things that we believe we don't have data that says that work, to de-fund things that don't work or that don't drive improved outcomes. So those are a quick overview of the five priorities for this budget. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. On this slide, Mr. President, Councilmembers, I want to share an overview of Accelerate Philly, our five key priority areas in the strategic plan, and I'd like to tell you a couple of high priority strategies that we will be investing resources in in Fiscal Year 2024-2025. Our first priority area is improve safety and well-being. It's no 12 secret this is our number one priority in the School District, more important than any other priority in terms of our foundation to drive on. And when we think about improving safety, we're talking about three areas - physical safety, social and emotional safety, as well as environmental safety. So in this budget, we will focus intently on facility improvements and facility upgrades as well as school safety, including physical, social and emotional, and environmental. And priority area 2, we want to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. partner with -- we want to drive faster improvement in partnering with our families and communities. We believe our families and caregivers are our children's first teachers, and we know that we need to work with our parents and caregivers as equal -- not just partners but as equal partners in this work. Two major priorities in the upcoming year that we will drive faster improvement on because of our investments, number one is Let's Talk two-way communications tool. Under the leadership of Chief of Communications and Customer Service, Alex Coppadge, we've piloted this tool in the Superintendent's Office this school year. It allows us to know, one, is every phone call and e-mail returned in a timely manner. Number two, it gives our constituents an opportunity to give us a feedback score on our professionalism, our responsiveness on a scale from zero to ten, with ten being the highest. And 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. we're going to roll that out and we're going to move that to more offices and into schools. We had a chance to speak with our Principals Advisory Committee about this yesterday. And, number two, in the upcoming year, we are going to move forward with our plans to relaunch Parent University, which we've heard from a number of parents and caregivers across the City during the listening and learning tour that they felt was very, very helpful, because we not only focus on helping our children but we also focus on connecting with their parents and providing supports and resources to parents and caregivers. And priority area 3, accelerate academic achievement, which is our core business. Last year we purchased a standardized best-in-class math curriculum called Illustrative Math. Our kids in Philadelphia are now using the same math curriculum that many of the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. children in Singapore use.
As you well know, Singapore is one of those countries that has some of the highest math performance in the country. Outside of having a highly qualified, well supported, stable teacher and a highly qualified, well supported, stable principal over time, the best thing that we can invest in to improve student achievement is what our kids learn in the classroom. If I didn't hear or learn anything else from my mentor, Dr. Constance E. Clayton, it was that the curriculum is key. It must be standardized among all schools in Philadelphia, and we've got to make sure our kids have access to high quality, rigorous, grade-level instruction, and we can't leave teachers to having to surf the internet and Pinterest and other places to find the materials to read in an age where we don't use traditional textbooks anymore. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Secondly, we're focusing on career and technical education job training and partnerships. That includes some traditional CTE areas as well as some new areas that we know that will be important based on where the economy is going over the next to 30 years in the 9 Philadelphia region. 10 Third, we are going to move on 11 the Mayor's priority regulated to 12 extended-year/year-round schools. m. to make sure that what we are 17 providing for our children complements 18 what they're learning in the classroom. 19 We're going to do this in a very 20 intentional manner. And over time we will move forward with a set number of schools where we will have a pilot, some pilots, for an extended day and extended year. The purpose of that is to ensure that our kids don't experience that 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. summer slide, and also we want to give -- some children just need more time. It's no secret that the traditional calendar school year in the United States is 180 days. There's some -- there are children in Japan that go to school 240 days. I'm aware that in some parts of France kids go to school Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday and they're not in school on Wednesday. We know that some kids -- a lot of our kids, we've got to eliminate the summer slide and we've got to provide more time to master the grade-level standards, but we want to do this in a way according to this notion: Nothing for us without us, Mr. President. So we want to be partners with our parents to explain this, to take our time to talk about it, to be deliberate about building buy-in so that families and communities and schools don't feel like this is something that's done to them but with them. And we will 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. prioritize high-impact tutoring where we bring trained adults into the classroom with our teachers during the school day. In priority area 4, we will focus on recruiting and retaining diverse and highly effective educators. We've named a strategy in our strategic plan, and it's the right thing to do, that we will recruit and retain more Black and Latino male educators, because we know that representation matters. We know that talent is equally distributed in the population, and we believe that our school staffs ought to reflect our student bodies. And so we're committed to that, as well as recruitment and retention of more teachers and principals across the board. Across the United States, Mr. President, the research is telling us that there's a 50 percent decline in individuals who are choosing to become a teacher or to go to a public or a private university to get a teaching license. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. The statistics are even more startling in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Over the past eight to ten years, there's been a 71 percent decline in the number of individuals who are graduating from our public and private universities in the Commonwealth. And so we're so excited when we see initiatives like Senator Vincent Hughes championing this notion that we ought to pay our student teachers.
We're so pleased that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is beginning to relax the rules and say that if you teach in another state, we'll honor that reciprocity. I can tell you for the past two decades in the state in the South where I worked, if you were a teacher of record in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, we cleared out all the red tape. You come straight to North Carolina, we will hire you within 48 hours. As long as you've got a clean criminal record, come on 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. down. That wasn't the case in Pennsylvania for many years, so we're having to play some catchup, and we compliment our legislators and the Governor for the work to begin to offer more reciprocity to teachers in other states. In priority area 5 -- and the reason why teachers are so important, more than tutoring, more than technology investments, more than class size reduction, more than anything else we can spend money on in the School District of Philadelphia, the number one thing that matters the most if we want kids to grow academically is a highly qualified, well supported, and stable teacher over time in a school. So when you get a really high poverty school where there's this in and out turnover of teachers, it's really difficult to get some significant traction. So we have to find ways, as the Mayor said, to be innovative to get 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. those highly qualified, stable, well supported teachers to stay in a school, and we'll be talking with the Board about some incentive models in that regard. In priority area 5, deliver efficient, high quality, and cost-effective operations. We want to be good stewards of federal, state, and local tax dollars. This Board of Education has been, I would say, excellent stewards of those tax dollars. And so one of the things we're driving on is not only has the Board of Education set up a very robust evaluation for the Superintendent that is largely driven on are our children getting better academically relative to the goals and guardrails, and rightfully so, we are in the District, we're developing a Central Office performance evaluation system that will apply to the entire School District staff, and we're also developing a project management culture so that we can execute really well on a number of 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. priorities. I do want to take a moment since safety and well-being of our students and staff is our number one priority, Mr. President, I did want to just note four key areas that we're investing resources in specifically to school safety. We're installing new weapons detection technology. We're continuing the safe paths programs. As you recall, former Chief of Safety, Kevin Bethel, now Commissioner Bethel, led that work that resulted in an increase from seven safe path programs to well over 20. Our Chief of School Safety, current Chief of School Safety, Craig Johnson, is here with us today, and he's continuing that work, and he continues to work very closely with Commissioner Bethel. I don't think a day goes by that they are not in communication with each other. We are also installing new security cameras, 150 across the School 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. District, and we're expanding youth violence reduction initiatives and investing in how we help our children develop better relationships such that if they see something, they're more likely to say something. It's not just about the hardware, police officers, and equipment, although those are really, really important. We've got to build those relationships as well so that our children feel comfortable talking to somebody. At this time, I'd like to provide an overview of the 2025 lump sum budget. Councilmembers, you've seen this slide as we've done individual meetings. You'll notice that it's the five-year overview from 2025 to 2029. The dark blue bar represents revenues and -- our revenues. The lighter blue bar represents expenditures.
You can notice that as we go over the next five years, expenditures begin to outpace revenues 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. effective in Fiscal Year '25. The green line shows our annual surplus, our deficit. You can see that line going below the baseline after next year as we approach next year, and you can see that the orange line shows our fund balance, which is solvent for this year and next year, and then after the following year, you'll see we have depleted our fund balance. What this says to us is that it's really, really important that in Fiscal Year '25 that legislators in Harrisburg fund the Governor's proposal. It will result in $247 million for the School District of Philadelphia. And if and when the City Council, Mr. President, funds the Mayor's proposed budget, it will result in a record $129 million in new dollars for the School District of Philadelphia. And so the trend suggests that it's really important that the funding be addressed. I do want to note, 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Mr. President, that we are not here with hands out just saying give us more money, pour money into things that don't return -- where there's no return on investment. We are laser focused on having a return on investment for every dollar that you invest in the School District. This is a good point to note, that we made improvements in out of 12 tested areas last year. Teacher 13 attendance is up. Student attendance 14 rates are up. The four-year cohort 15 dropout -- the four-year cohort 16 graduation rate is up, and our dropout 17 rate is down. This year we have more than reduced -- on average, we have some 4,000 children that drop out of school typically in a year in Philadelphia. That number has been cut by 1,200 students this year. I want to implore upon the Council, we are getting a return on investment for the dollars that you're 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. investing in the School District, and we will get better. These are the fiscal responsibilities measures, Mr. President and members of Council, that we're taking, and I'll invite you to watch to follow me in a clockwise pattern starting with Item No. 1. One of the things that we are doing to be the best stewards possible of tax dollars is, we're seeking private and foundation funding. I heard Mayor Parker talk about that being a priority in the School District. So we're glad to be in the early stage of some of this work. We're working very closely under the leadership of President Kathryn Epps Roberson, President of the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, to seek private and foundation funding to help drive some of the key areas of Accelerate Philly. The Fund for the School District of Philadelphia has pledged to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. raise some $40 million. To date, the Fund has raised -- since Accelerate Philly launched last school year, the Fund has already raised some $5 to $6 million already, and we thank them for that. Number two, we have begun data-driven program evaluations. Our Chief of Evaluation, Research and Accountability, Dr. Tonya Wolford, is with us today, and through that office, we're taking a hard look at everything in the District to determine what are the things that we have data that say work and what are the things that we have -- where the data just doesn't show an appreciable improvement. We're taking a hard look at everything. For example, with the curriculum, we believe that having various curricula across schools, as Dr. Clayton advised me and counseled me on, would not drive the kind of improvement that we need in the School 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. District. So at no cost to the City Council or the state, we used federal dollars. We sunsetted what we're spending on other curricula and we invested in a state-of-the-art, best-in-class math curriculum last year using federal ARPA dollars. In the next -- in the upcoming year, we will invest federal dollars.
We've purchased English language arts curriculum, and before the dollars sunset in September of 2024, we are going to use those existing federal dollars to purchase best-in-class science curriculum. That won't launch until the following year. Item No. 3, we've analyzed Central Office budgets and we've begun a modified zero-based budgeting process. As we have come to the Central Office budgets, there are two things that I want to note. Number one, we do not have a bloated Central Office in the School District of Philadelphia. The School District of Philadelphia is one of the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. most lean central offices among any public school district of its size across the country. How do we know that? The Council for Great City Schools completed an audit of our Central Office functions in our Central Office in 2022, and what they found is we have a much smaller ratio of staff -- a much bigger ratio of Central Office employees relative to the number of students in the School District. So it's very lean. Even though we have a lean Central Office budget, we still cut some vacant positions so that we could find or identify $8-plus million in the budget so that we could send those dollars to the schools to eliminate the leveling process beginning this fall. But I do want to note, we still have a very lean Central Office. We've also began a zero-based -- modified zero-based budgeting process. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC.
The audit that was done, it was done by what organization, just for the record? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, sir, Mr. President. The Council for Great City Schools. They're located in Washington, DC, and they represent 77 or so of the large urban school districts. They do advocacy with Congress and they provide support for those districts.
Would that audit be considered a forensic audit? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: It was a high level audit. I'm not sure if they would consider it forensic, but it was a high level audit to get under the staffing of the District and to compare it to benchmark districts across the City.
Thank you very much. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: The other thing we're doing is modified 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. zero-based budgeting. We're not doing 100 percent zero-based budgeting because, quite frankly, given the size and scope, it's like turning a supertanker around in the middle of the Delaware River. It takes some time to get through everything, and so -- but we've started in a couple of our Central Office departments, and we're looking at all the programs and contracts that we bring to the Board of Education. And the Board actually has a process by which before they consider action items, they require me and my staff to explain what's been the return on investment, why should we invest more resources in this, and quite frankly, there are some things that we're discontinuing and doing something different with. Area 4, we're identifying some other cost savings. Let me just share two of those that will be very real world and easy to understand. We've worked very strategically 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. under our Chief Operations Officer -- Operating Officer's leadership, Colonel Oz Hill, to acquire more energy savings. And as we get those energy savings, our approach has been to send those dollars to the school, not to keep them at the Central Office. One other very practical thing we've done over the past two years is, we discontinued our contract with the Pennsylvania Convention Center to host our principal meetings. Instead we took some of those resources and we put them into Strawberry Mansion High School to make a couple of upgrades so we can use our own facilities for all of our principal meetings, and we'll continue to do that. And we're hopeful that as we bring 250 principals and climate managers and others to Strawberry Mansion and to other schools in our communities, when we have to have lunch, we bring more people in, they eat there, we invest there, we spend more resources there, and it will 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. also help invest in more of our school communities. And then the last area item, area 5 fiscal responsibility measure, 5, is we've made some changes to our accounting processes and how we strategically align funds. Won't spend a lot of time going into the detail about that now, but should you have questions, our CFO, Mike Herbstman, is here with us today as well. On this slide, Mr. 2 billion in ARPA funding that we got from Congress, will go away in September of this year. However, because of good budgeting, we've been able to not make cuts and layoffs and that there's some 350 positions that will remain in the School District, and they include 129 assistant principals, 110 teachers, 35 climate managers, 24 counselors, 46 school climate staff, and 25 15 other school-based staff. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. It's been an honor and pleasure to work with two of our union presidents, particularly President Jerry Jordan and President Dr. Robin Cooper, and I think that speaks to the intergovernmental and kind of collaboration that the Mayor was talking about, and we look forward to doing more of that. I spoke earlier about discontinuing leveling. We certainly appreciate the leadership of the Board, of Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson, and members of Council who gave us an opportunity to present before this body and Chair of the Education Committee, Thomas. As we promised, we took the time to really dig into and study the process of leveling. Leveling is the process of moving teachers within the first 21 days of school, which historically has been a part -- a guideline of our contract with the PFT, but it was disruptive. The survey indicated that 68 percent of 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. stakeholders thought we should do something different, and we are. We will discontinue the process of leveling this upcoming school year.
So if we have a school in the first days that somehow is just short 8 of their projection or their enrollment 9 projections, we will -- if we have 10 schools that need more teachers because 11 they have an unexpected increase in 12 enrollment, we will not pull those 13 teachers from other schools where they've 14 not increased or they've had a slight 15 decrease, because we know it's 16 disruptive. 17 How are we going to do this? 8 million from Central 20 Office budget cuts and energy savings that we are going to move to the schools. Number two, we are forming a summer scheduling work group under the leadership of our Deputy Superintendent for Academics, Dr. Jermaine Dawson. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Dr. Dawson will bring a very robust group of people together during the summer. They'll represent the Academics Division, our Special Education team, Multilingual Services, the Talent Office, Research Office, and our Budget Finance Office, and what they'll do is, they will carefully monitor our enrollment, because things shift from the time we leave school at the end of the school year and in the fall or late summer when our students return. They are going to also, under Dr. Dawson's leadership, work very closely with the City of Philadelphia and with others to engage with our parents and caregivers and our students. We want to get out in the community, get out throughout the City to touch and see our children, our young people, and if they are moving because they're home insecure or they're couch surfing, we'll know it in realtime, because we're going to keep those contacts with them. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. So it will not come to any surprise to us in the fall when we come back to school if there's some kids who have moved to different school communities, because we do have a number of children who are transient in the School District. So as Clayton Constance would say, Dr. Constance Clayton would say, we have to build a school system, not a system of schools. So this is part of our school system initiative. And the other thing we're going to do under the leadership of our Deputy Superintendent for Talent, Strategy and Culture, Jeremy Grant-Skinner, is we're working to try to build a pool of teachers, not just any teachers but we are doing our best to get highly qualified teachers in a pool, notwithstanding the 71 percent decline in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. So we're reaching out to try to get these teachers from Pennsylvania, and because of our geography, we're going down to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Delaware, going across the river to New Jersey to recruit a pool of highly qualified teachers so that if there are some schools that have an increase in enrollment, we hope to have a shovel-ready pool of teachers at the beginning of the year that we can deliver to those schools. Now, if the teacher shortage is still so acute that we can't have all the teachers we need, we will certainly provide those principals with a hiring permit so that they can either hire their own teacher in a timely manner and, if needed, if push comes to shove, we will provide those principals with some flexibility to use those dollars for high-impact tutoring and other items that might be of benefit based on how they think will best support their schools. Mr. President, pleased to bring an update on facilities. On the next slide we're going to begin with a capital improvement plan update. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC.
The plan? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: We're going to get right into the plan, yes, sir. The plan will come right after this, yes, sir. This is the precursor to the plan, yes, sir.
All right. Thank you, sir. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, Mr. President. So, in fact, Mr. President, in an upcoming slide, I want to share with you an eight-phase plan to get us to a place where our facilities are brought up to standards.
You have an eight-phase plan we're about to see now that's coming before the plan the Administration is going to provide as well, correct? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: They will be tag-teamed in tandem together. We're going to work, and we're 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. looking forward to that work with the Mayor.
Absolutely. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Absolutely. The first thing I want to note for the Council, Mr. 72 billion in the ten years preceding 2023. I say that because I think sometimes, nobody's fault, but I think sometimes it gets lost some of the significant improvements that are being made in the District. They are not enough, but there's been significant improvements made between 2013 and 2023. If you'll go to the next slide, I want to detail those for you. For example, five new school buildings were built - TM Peirce, Solis Cohen, Northeast Community Propel Academy, Powel SLA Middle, and West Philadelphia High School. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Ten major school additions were completed. Forty-six classroom modernization projects were completed, significant lead paint assessments in 194 facilities and 169 lead-safe schools. Work processes were completed. Seventeen hundred state-of-the-art hydration stations were installed so that kids can have access to filtered, healthy drinking water. Humidity sensors and monitors were placed in 31 schools to prevent mold, and there's been a host of other deferred maintenance, system upgrades, and structural and energy efficiency and site improvement work. 72 billion in facility improvements. 3 billion, and that will include the construction of three new schools - Cassidy, which opens later this year, Holme, and AMY James Martin. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Major renovations are underway to the tune of $544 million, HVAC improvements to the tune of 435 million, $314 million in exterior renovations, energy improvements to the tune of $214 million, $305 million in electrical upgrade improvements, which is really important because some of our schools, we can't just go throw an air conditioner in the window because the electrical circuits are such that we have to replace them. You see $141 million in site improvements, 51 million in security equipment, minor renovations to the tune of 48 million, and other plans to the tune of 275 million. On the next slide, Mr. President, we're going to get right into your point about the facilities planning and the work we'll do in tandem under the leadership of Mayor Parker, and she spoke to that vision this morning. Let me begin with the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. historical context, and I want to get right into the issue of school closures and lessons learned in the District. Some of these similar lessons the folks in Chicago learned. 35 billion budget deficit. These are the lessons we learned, and this is not Tony Watlington's view. This is a review of the Research for Action research. This is a review -- this is based on a review of a University of Pennsylvania study conducted by Matthew Steinberg and James MacDonald in 2019. Now, what they found as they studied the school closures is typically when districts close schools, you can think about it from the perspective how do you most efficiently operate the district if you have more schools than you have the student population to support, which is a very legitimate way of looking at it. However, if you only 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. treat that issue, it's very likely that you can cause more harm to the children in terms of their achievement. If you, on the other side of that nickel, think about how do we think about school buildings and how we most effectively use our resources in a way that it's not just about saving dollars but some or all of that savings or at least some of it go into providing more direct services to the least of these, to the children who are most underperforming, what the researchers found is that the School District of Philadelphia indeed saved $24 million annually. Most of that savings was realized from eliminating school-based personnel.
The average test scores actually decreased for the students who were displaced with school closures, and test scores actually decreased for students in the schools where schools received the displaced students. I think 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. that's really important for us to take -- to be thoughtful about so that we can move forward with our plan in a way that we use our resources to both be better stewards to make the dollar go further, but at the and of the day, we want to also increase student achievement and student attendance. The researchers also found that students' absences actually increased significantly for the displaced students. Two years ago, 57 percent of our students were attending school 90 percent of the month, 57 percent. Last year, the percentage of our students who were in school, I mean, at least 90 percent of the year increased from 57 percent to 60 percent. Significant improvement. Still not enough. Now, the difference between student attendance in the School District of Philadelphia, which is 60 percent of our kids are now attending at 90 percent, which is the gold standard if we want to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. improve achievement, if you compare that to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, our kids who are now at 60 percent regular student attendance, meaning they're attending the school 90 percent of the month. The percentage -- for the average for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is 82 percent. So the first thing we've got to do as we focus on highly qualified, well supported teachers and principals, we've got to change that attendance gap between 60 percent and 82 percent. We got to close that gap, because otherwise we'll be comparing apples to oranges instead of apples to apples. So we've got to make the investments and we've got to have laser focused in front of us that at the end of the day, we can do this work, this facilities work, but we've got to do it in a way that our charge is to improve student outcomes, especially the least of these, because we can't just divest more 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. resources for the poorest, underserved children. And I think they've learned a hard lesson even in the Chicago Public Schools, because they've studied what happened in Chicago too. Chicago closed more schools than any city in the nation back in, I think it was, 2013 or so with 49 school closures. So the applications of the lessons learned are this: Number one, as we go down this road, we want to prioritize student learning as our north star, in alignment with the Board's goals and guardrails. Number two, we believe we need to have comprehensive data, and I'll talk more about that on the next slide, so we treat the problems and not just the symptoms. Third, we know we need to have a transparent community engagement process so that the community is up to speed and regularly updated on our thinking and our work, and we're going to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. do that work under the Mayor's leadership. And we know that we must focus on repurposing some buildings to better support our communities. So we do not think that everything that's in place now ought to look the exact same. Absolutely not. In fact, we believe that we can drive faster improvement when we take a look at how to best utilize our facilities, and we're also doing some work to begin to look at a common minimum school size that will help us to drive faster improvement. Mr. President, this next slide is just a quick high-level overview of the eight phases of our facilities plan. It's an eight-phase process. Phase I began in June of 2022, and it took us a year to complete, nearly a year. Phase I was to develop Accelerate Philly, our strategic plan. We wanted to develop a strategic plan first, not because we don't have a sense of urgency. I promise you, we are moving 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. with a sense of urgency, because we know we cannot kick this can down the road.
This administration is committed to work under the Board of Education and the Mayor's leadership to having a plan that makes hard decisions about how we upgrade our school facilities, and we will get it done and this administration won't kick it down the road. But we needed a strategic plan so we first knew what is our strategy for improving student achievement, because new buildings by themselves do not improve student achievement. I want to be really clear. New buildings by themselves do not improve student achievement. You've got plenty of new schools with poor achievement every day across the United States.
We witnessed that with the School of the Future, Microsoft, in West Philly, but just as equally, closing schools because of asbestos and lead also doesn't do good 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. for the morale of students when they have to go to another school because their school has been shut down or half of the school is shut down. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, sir. Absolutely true, sir. Phase II, Mr. President, we developed a request for proposals in June of 2023. We issued a request for proposals to secure a data strategy vendor. Why did we need a data strategy vendor? Council, you may be familiar with the Parsons report from 2017, and there's been some conversations since the issuance of the Parsons report. The Parsons report just looked -- it was appropriate for its time. It looked at our buildings and gave all of our buildings a facility conditions index score. It looked at a number of things in our buildings. What the Parsons report did not do is, it did not look in a detailed way at our building systems. It did not dig 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. into the issue of environmental hazards, asbestos, lead paint and the like. It did not address ADA accessibility, American Disability Act disabilities. It did not speak to -- and I've read the report in its entirety. It did not speak to historic preservation rules, laws, guidance, et cetera. It did not speak to our demographics. It did not speak to our enrollment trends, where are we losing kids in the City, what parts of the City are growing, what parts of the City is the population remaining the same but kids are choosing other options to go other places. And it did not do a deep dive into safety and security issues. So we issued an RFP. We knew we needed more information, that the Parsons study was not enough to make really robust decisions if our north star is to improve student daily attendance, regular attendance, and improve academic achievement. So that RFP was out on the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. street, as they say, between June of '23 to September '23. Also while that RFP was out, we pulled together a group to develop what we call academic baseline standards, Phase III. Phase III was to tell us what does every school need to have. Phase IV involved developing a facility swing space. The swing space is complete now. What is not complete is in progress, but we're able to move kids faster when we have an asbestos environmental issue. And when we finish building out the swing space plan, Mr. President, we'll have 23,000 student seats set aside so that as we go down the road of potentially consolidating, rebuilding or repurposing schools, we'll have shovel-ready spaces to move children. Phase V, we developed a pilot data warehouse with 30 schools. Currently we're in Phase VI where we are developing a data warehouse 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. with all the information I talked about earlier in one data warehouse. We have an external vendor that's doing that. It's in progress. And Phase VIII involves launching a facilities plan project team. The planning is already underway in terms of bringing some internal and external stakeholders together. We're working closely under the Mayor's leadership, and we'll look forward to continuing to update Council on where that's going. Now, as we work -- I'll just say this very quickly, Mr. President: As we worked with Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Indianapolis and other cities, typically what they've shared is that from the time you bring all the internal/external public-private partners together with the data, it takes anywhere from 18 to months to do a full -- a really good, 23 robust plan and to execute on it. 24 We hear the Council very loud and clearly. We hear the Mayor loud and 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. clearly that we need to move with a fierce sense or urgency, and we intend to do that. I'm saying it will take to 5 24 months. I just want to level set.
6 I have two other quick updates, 7 Mr. President, and I'll be done, other 8 District updates. School selection. As 9 you know, we've been working hard to 10 improve the school selection, the lottery 11 process. Last year, the lottery process 12 and the fact that we talked directly with 13 principals resulted in some significant 14 improvements. We have 145 more people, 15 more students, who applied to our 16 criteria-based schools. We have an 17 increase of 5,322 eligible applications. 18 We have an increase of 356 applicants and an increase of well over 1,200 accepted offers in our criteria-based schools last year. I want to highlight what that looks like for individual schools. Hill Freedman, Lankenau, Motivation High School, the Philadelphia High School for 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Girls, Saul High School, and SLA Beeber all saw the 9th grade class grow. In fact, the Philadelphia High School for Girls has the greatest improvement in this group among the student enrollment. Now, what that will show, though -- this is based on the process for the upcoming school year. Now, what we know is that for some schools that have had a decline in enrollment; for example, the Philadelphia High School for Girls, if we continue on this trajectory over time, that school will grow bigger. The point of entry is in the 9th grade. So that's why I want to note that. And then finally on the next slide, Mr. President, I want to get to positions and staffing update. The final update, Mr. President, if we go to that final slide, I want you to see the staffing update and the positions filled as of April of 2024. 1 percent of counselors. We are knee deep in the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. hiring season. So we're going to stay focused on all of these positions. 2. 3 percent. We are adding some additional new positions there this year. 2 percent staffing. You can see in all areas that we're hiring faster, at a faster clip this year than we did last year, and we're committed to doing better as we go forward. And we're not just hiring people. We're trying to hire very highly qualified people. Mr. President, I thank you for this opportunity, and this concludes my testimony. Thank you, sir.
Thank you very much. I had to remember, this is that biannual meeting, not just a 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. typical budget hearing, and so we thank you for your thorough presentation. Just a couple of questions before I turn it over to my colleagues, but first I want to note for the record the presence of Councilmember Mark Squilla, Councilmember Mike Driscoll, Councilmember Kendra Brooks, Councilmember Cindy Bass, and I did see Councilmember J. Young. Have you since you arrived as the Superintendent, have you engaged in a forensic audit? Just from an overview, let me take a look at this institution I'm inheriting and get a forensic audit, just to look at everything in terms of how we're operating from a fiscal standpoint, seeing where all the dollars and cents are going. I know you talked about savings in some areas versus being fiscally responsible in other areas. Have you taken that approach or will you consider or welcome a forensic audit? 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you, Mr. President. The rules require us to have a board -- to have an audit of the School District's finances every year and of every school in the District. We always have the option to go and do a deeper dive forensic audit. I have not commissioned an additional forensic audit of the District to date.
Okay. Would you welcome one? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: A forensic audit is always a good idea. Absolutely.
Thank you. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: We've begun by getting the Council for Great City Schools to come in and do three audits for us. They did a curriculum audit just before Dr. Hite left, as a matter of fact. Since I've been here, we've asked them to do an audit of our staffing, Central Office 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. staffing, and they've also conducted a pretty detailed, at the forensics level, audit of our Transportation Department. We are waiting the findings from that audit as we speak.
All right. Thank you very much. Also, you talked about, which I was actually happy to see, you went into buying new curriculum, right, around math, science, and I'm glad you're going in the direction of addressing the issue of academic achievement, right? When we think about the school-to-career pipeline, when I think about -- I have a nine-year-old, seven-year-old. At the end of the day, it's about academic achievement. Like that's my expectations for them every single day. And so I am happy that -- in the past, that wasn't always the actual focus, at the end of the day, how are young people doing from an academic achievement standpoint. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. How are we doing -- how are you measuring progress with the recent math and science curriculum that you purchased for 70 million? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you, Mr. President. The $70 million mark is to pay for -- is the cost for math, English language arts, and science curriculum. To date, we've only launched the math curriculum, because we don't want to overwhelm the system, teachers or students. So with Illustrative Math, we are evaluating it in several ways. Number one, I meet regularly with my Principals Advisory Council, Teachers Advisory Council, and Student Advisory Council and we get direct face-to-face feedback. Number two, we issue surveys, particularly the teachers who have the job of delivering the curriculum. To date, 83 percent of the teachers feel like they are equipped to deliver the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. curriculum that is making progress, that we're making progress under the curriculum. The negative they've told me is they just didn't have enough time to prepare. And so this year with the English language arts, we're doing training now and throughout the summer. And the third way we get feedback on how well it's going is that we do a Star Assessment throughout the year. It's led by our Evaluation, Research and Accountability Department, and to date, the Star Assessment, which are diagnostic assessments done throughout the year, right now it seems to suggest that we are moving in the right direction in terms of student achievement. The Star Assessment predicted for us last year that we would have some improvement in academics, and we expect this year to be no different, but we won't know for sure until we actually take the PSSA tests and the Keystone test 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. to know did it result in state testing improvement.
Talk about when you say we didn't want to overwhelm the system, so we started with one curriculum versus all three. What aspects of the system would be overwhelmed? What are we doing to overcome the system being overwhelmed so we're working with a sense of urgency? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes. Because teaching is the number one factor, if -- I had a teacher who sent me an e-mail, and every now and again I will sit down and meet with a teacher, and she says -- and I won't call her name, but she was a 20-year veteran, and she said to me, Dr. Watlington, work with us. If you ask us to do 100 things all at the same time and I've got to attend to discipline in my classroom and I've got to take care of my own family and on top of that I've got to grade all these papers and on top of that I've got to be 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. a counselor, we can't do everything at one time. Let us focus and do some things really well. And so in partnership with our teachers in particular, they asked us to give them a chance to learn these curriculum resources, and they didn't think they could do reading, math, and science all together at one time, because it's such a sea change. I think that -- that doesn't mean we're not still focusing on doing the best job we can with the current English language arts curriculum. I'm not saying that they're bad curricula. They're just not rated the best. It's kind of like when you buy a car with Consumer Reports, you can buy a good car, but you want the car with the best gas mileage and the best wear and tear ratio on your tires, I think.
Thank you. The Benz or the Range Rover, but that's a different conversation. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Let's talk about young people and safety. Is Karyn Lynch here with you today? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: I'm sorry?
Is Karyn Lynch here with you today? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: I'm not sure. I have not seen her this morning.
I know she usually deal with a lot of the trauma-informed issues I'm about to ask you right now. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Deputy Superintendent for Academics is here, if needed.
Gun violence, number one here in the City of Philadelphia, young people being shot and murdered every single day. We know that they're dealing with the issue of trauma, because after they see the shootings, if they have family members murdered, 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. they're still going to school. If they have friends being murdered, they're still going to school. So what is the District doing in terms of offering trauma-based support for these young people so they can actually focus and address the trauma that they're dealing with that's out of a school setting? And then the second part of my question is, I'm a strong advocate of what we call the boots-on-the-ground organizations, the organizations that are working with some of the safe passage programs that the District provides services for. Are we considering -- and I know we had the roundtable that I came and participated in -- bringing more of these neighborhood-based boots-on-the-ground organizations inside the school and support systems around the issue of gun violence for our teachers? Because at the end of the day, a lot of 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. these teachers, some probably never even could identify with the level of gun violence that they're seeing in the City right now, which frankly I can understand. However, bringing in people that have that lived experience and kind of understand how our young people are dealing with a variety of different issues in our neighborhoods. What type of support services are we providing for them? I'm an advocate of bringing PAAN back into the school, Philadelphia Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network, because they are the organization that actually does the intervention. They were in the schools at one particular point in time. And so I'm trying to see where the District is versus the Administration to, again, get more intervention organizations. And PAAN is just one, but you got Cure Violence. You have Ceasefire. How can they be a part of the District's plan to address trauma and the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. gun violence that young people are experiencing inside the school environment? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you, President. We're working with both some national and local professionals in that regard. Dr. Greg Ginwright is a professor, I think, at UCLA, he was doing some consultant work with the School District. One of the things we're trying to focus on more, though, is how we tap our local resources. I heard Mayor Parker say once that we ought to -- if we drew a three- to five-mile radius around every school, we ought to know exactly what the resources right there in the backyard and do a better job in connecting those resources. And so we absolutely as we relaunch Parent University next school year, that's a big piece of it. We think that we need to do a better job of launching partnership with 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. various faith-based organizations in the community, with grassroots organizations just like the ones you've talked about. And so we're very open to learning more about who some of these great providers are, including people with lived experiences in our city.
Now, you touched on the faith-based community, and I'm glad you mentioned that. I would like to facilitate a meeting with you with -- there's a coalition of brothers from the Muslim community, right? You know, about 85 percent of the students in the Philadelphia School District are Muslim, right? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, sir.
And them having a seat at the table in terms of how we're going about making sure that their issues and concerns are addressed as relates to them being Muslim going to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. school. Like, for instance, Jumarza (ph) Friday, right, but the young people are in school, right? I remember reaching out to Edwin Santana to kind of relay to you maybe there could be a possibility, right, that if there is a partnership -- and I know it's supposed to be separation from church and state, so to speak. However, when we look at the level of gun violence that's being impacted in the City of Philadelphia and working with the Muslim community and they recognize a significant amount of young people identify as Muslim that's involved in some of these neighborhood beefs, but one of the Imams at the table said, well, if you got about 85 percent of the students that identify as Muslim in the School District, if we're not at the table, right, trying to be helpful in addressing some of the gun violence neighborhood beefs, then we don't have a voice. And so I'm glad you said that 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. faith-based piece, and I'll do a follow-up with you, because it did come up at a meeting around how to address it from a faith-based standpoint. But also critically important is trying to see as many, again, those groups that have lived experience to be in the school setting. Obviously they pass the background check and all the things that need to be done. And that has been an issue where individuals -- we're not talking about job predators, though, but they may have a bleep on their record, retail theft or something along those lines, but they have a track record they changed their lives. Could they have that opportunity to still be able to come in and participate and try to help the school climate? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, sir. In fact, one of the strategies as we relaunch Parent University is a related strategy to actually pay what we call parent ambassadors. In another 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. district we used Title I dollars for that purpose, because it solicits parent and community involvement. And we've got to find ways to be more innovative and we don't just say, well, because you either have a criminal record or you've had some problem with the law, that somehow we don't find the way to connect parties together for the benefit of our community. We know there are some people in the community who have much better, much tighter, much stronger relationships than any superintendent, principal, teacher or police officer. And so we want to figure out through this Parent University how do we connect with those people who have that kind of relational capital on the ground. I do want to note, President Johnson, that one of the things our CFO is always focusing on is our request that we also, within the rules, within the letter and spirit of the law and Board 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. policy, that we find ways to work with local vendors and have dollars recycled in this great city. 7 percent increase in local vendor participation, and we certainly want that to be diverse groups across the City, including MBE -- M/WBE when we think about people who can provide those support services to schools. We also have an array of programs. I remember you asked about that last year, what are some of the social-emotional supports. They include things like Kooth. It's an online resource. Positive behavior intervention supports, responsive schools. Principals have been asking for more -- less Central Office dictating what resources that they can draw upon and more give them an array of options so they can customize based on what they feel like their schools need. I'm really pleased, because we 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. just had an action item approved by the Board of Education that gives principals a little bit more autonomy in that regard, to customize what's best for their schools.
Thank you. Before I relax the time to my colleagues, I also want to give a shout-out to Karyn Lynch, because so many years ago, we went to Graterford Prison to meet with the lifers. It's called the FACT program, Fathers and Children Together. And just based upon the partnership with her and her leadership, the program still exists where the individuals who are doing life have an opportunity to interact through social monitor what their children are attending the Philadelphia public school. The program still exists to this day based upon the leadership and the work that she's done, and that's the innovative way, again, thinking outside the box as a 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. way to address gun violence, because the other part of it is, we know broken families result in young people getting involved in all types of mischief. So this type of program allows that father to be in the life of their son and daughters, right? And keeping that family together goes toward keeping our neighborhoods wholesome, safe. And so I do want to acknowledge her for that particular program. I sent you a letter some time ago, March 25th, 2024, regarding the Philadelphia School District 3-5-7-9 policy regarding teacher absences. The letter talks about teacher absences for personal or family illnesses, but at the same time, feeling that they are penalized for taking time off. And so I just want to get an idea of what's the status of reevaluating that policy. I think there's a need based upon constituent calls to my office, but just want to get an idea from you all where 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. we're at and the status of it. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Absolutely. Mr. President, we are working -- we've been working and meeting with the PFT in particular. I've been meeting with my Teachers Advisory Council and Principals Advisory Council to get some context around the 3-5-7-9 procedure. It's been here for some time. We've been trying to make sure we understood why it was created in the first place. Equally important, how is it being applied in the District. I could report to you that it is not resulting in terminations or concerning disciplinary actions. I think as I've talked -- continue to talk with teachers and the PFT, there are folks who do not like it and will point out, well, the Superintendent doesn't have a 3-5-7-9 procedure. The Deputy Superintendents and the principal doesn't have a 3-5-7-9 procedure. Why do we have a 3-5-7-9 procedure. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. We will conclude our review within the next week to ten days, Mr. President, and we will have our findings and recommendations to the Board of Education shortly thereafter. After we provide that information to the Board, we'll be in a position to have a more detailed follow-up, but that's what I can tell you at this time. It's being pursued with a sense of urgency.
All right. Thank you very much. I do want to acknowledge you addressing the issue of leveling that was raised to another level based upon the leadership of our Majority Leader, Councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson. So thank you for addressing that particular issue. The Chair recognizes the Chair of Education, Councilmember Isaiah Thomas.
Good morning, Council President. Good 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. morning, colleagues. I want to start by first saying thank you to our Mayor for joining us at our meeting and for making what I feel like was some very passionate and important remarks as it relates to the schools in the City of Philadelphia. I also would like to thank Board President Streater as well as Superintendent Watlington and the entire leadership team here at the School District of Philadelphia. We spend a lot of time together. We appreciate the work that you do. We appreciate the transparency. I definitely want to give a special thank you to our CFO, who keeps us very informed as it relates to the fiscal stability of the City, Mr. Oz Hill, who probably catches a tough break more than anybody right now as it relates to facilities, but the innovative ideas and approaches that he's presented to us to try to address this issue from his 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. lens, as well as of course Mr. Craig Johnson, who keeps us very informed as it relates to incidents that take place in the District. I also want to take a moment to offer condolences to the CEO of ASPIRA Charter School. We found out this morning that the CEO passed away. So at some point as a legislative body, we want to offer proper respect to an educator who unfortunately lost his life last night as it relates to the work that's being done here in the City of Philadelphia. I want to start with some remarks and then I'll go to a few questions, and then I'll pass it on to other Councilmembers. So, first, as a teacher and as a coach and as somebody who truly cares about education, I love the work that we do. I love the fact that we care about our children, and the reality is at some point when I walk away from politics and 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. City Council, I'll probably end up returning to somebody's classroom, because this is the work that I love and this is what I care about. When I think about the state of education in the City of Philadelphia and I think about all of the problems that we have, schools, along with crime and some other issues is one of the reasons why people often leave our city. I say it often that, you know, gun violence is the problem that we talk about the most, but public education is the most complicated problem that we have that we have to find a way to fix in order to improve our city. As it relates to the work that we do in City Council, there are a lot of people who want accountability when they're not getting what they want as it relates to public education. It's very difficult to hold someone accountable for the failure of our children and the failure of our schools, so they often 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. turn to this legislative body to ask for accountability when things aren't happening. I want to be very honest. I was one of the Councilmembers and probably the most advocate Councilmember to only pass eight out of the Mayor's nine School Board members, because I felt very passionately about some systemic things that have been failing our schools and our children and our families long before you got here, Dr. Watlington, and you talked about some of them things today, long before you got here, Board President Streater, but there were some other folks who were in leadership as we deal with these issues. Dr. Watlington, you talked today about the improvement of numbers in the special admission schools, but I'm not sure if you know that right before you got here, the previous leadership changed the entire policy as it relates to how people got admitted into special 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. admission schools. This legislative body fought against that system and against that process, and our advocacy fell on deaf ears.
So now you inherited the problem that you now have as it relates to trying to fill seats in special admission schools, and as a legislative body, our goal was to hold somebody accountable for that bad decision. We also know that there was a decision made to change public comment as it relates to how people can comment at School Board meetings. That was something that was presented to us, and again we were looking to hold someone accountable for that decision that we didn't necessarily agree with. Council President talked about leveling and issues related to leveling. Happy to be in a position where that was actually addressed, but again another issue that we had to deal with where we're trying to hold someone accountable. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. We also looked at issues related to water and water fountains in schools. City Council had to pass a bill 5 to make sure young people had clean water, safe water in our schools. One of the most disappointing things we had to deal with was sports during COVID. I don't know if anybody remembers, but when COVID first hit, everybody was going to be able to participate in sports except for children who went to public schools. The public schools were the only group of people who were going to be put in a position where they weren't going to be able to participate in athletic activities, and it was the effort of this Council body that forced the hand to have our children participate in public sports -- I mean, in extracurricular activities and sports as it relates to public schools. Of course we know about some of the issues that we've seen with Ben Franklin High School and SLA and how 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. decisions cost the City and taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. And of course after all that, we have to deal with issues related to our facilities. And so now I'm going to jump into some stuff around there. One of my team members on Team Thomas is going to pass around some pictures as it relates to issues that we were dealing with with our facilities, and again listening to you, Dr. Watlington, this is another problem that you've essentially inherited. For those who don't know, the facilities crisis was so bad that former Councilmember Derek Green on September 17th introduced Bill No. 19 2108 -- I mean, 210685-AA. This bill was introduced into law to basically mandate that buildings in the City of Philadelphia be up to a certain par. Dr. Watlington, when you became the Superintendent, one of the things that we commended you for was your level 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. of transparency as it relates to issues dealing with asbestos and facilities. And so at some point, Dr. Watlington, I will be curious to hear based on your experience working in districts all across the country how bad is our facilities crisis compared to other places. We'll get to that in a little bit. After the bill was introduced, there was a lot of advocacy as it relates to decisions to be able to force the teachers to go back in schools. We can all remember the embarrassing pictures of the white fans that were given to schools as a way to deter some of the issues related to COVID, and it's unfortunate that our teachers essentially had to go through this unfortunate situation. When we were in the midst of this advocacy, the PFT put out a report related to the facilities crisis that we were dealing with, and according to the PFT report, there was years of neglect 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. that even led to the death of a worker as well as various sicknesses of teachers and members of the PFT because of asbestos in the schools. The District at the time -- and this is in 2021. The District had refused, again refused, to disclose information as it related to how bad our facilities was. This was according to the PFT.
The District also stopped communication with the PFT regarding any lead poisoning reports that had been required to be conducted -- I mean, to be removed from the schools. I could go on and on and on as it relates to issues that we've seen, from leveling to special admissions, but I think the most severe catastrophe that we've seen is the issues related to our facilities and to our schools. Dr. Watlington and team, while I commend you for the great work that you are doing and your advocacy and innovation as it relates to correcting 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. the current facilities crisis we have, we have to be clear and honest. You did not create this problem. You inherited this problem. We love what the Mayor had to say. We love that she's advocating for a plan around facilities, but we have to be clear and honest. The Mayor did not create this problem. The Mayor inherited this problem. So here we are right now in the midst of dealing with one of the worst facilities crisis that we've seen in our lifetime, and a big part of the reason that we have this problem is because the information had been covered up for years by the previous leadership regime. So with that being said, Dr. Watlington, I want you to put your experiences to the mic and talk to us about other places that you've worked as it relates to being here in the City of Philadelphia. Have you ever seen a facilities crisis as bad as what we're 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. facing right now? And how difficult was it for you when you first found out how bad these buildings were and you made the amazing decision to make that information transparent to all of us so we all could understand how bad our facilities are and we can work together to begin to figure out what do we do from here? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Chair Thomas, I will -- since you've invited me to speak from my personal perspective and life experience and across 30 years in public education, the way I'll answer that question is, I'm aware of other places that have some tough facility issues. I will say that for the districts that I worked in in a state in the South, number one, years 20 ago we stopped closing schools because of hot weather days. These were not Rockefeller-rich school districts. They are districts that qualified for low wealth funding, and somehow there was enough public-private intergovernmental 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. cooperation years ago we found the resources to air condition every single school among the 125 schools in a 73,000 student district years ago. 6 Now, fast forward, I think it's 7 a unique challenge that 47 percent of our 8 schools in the School District of 9 Philadelphia have adequate air 10 conditioners such that we can keep kids 11 in school on hot weather days. That's, 12 one, just a fact. 13 By way of comparison, I will 14 tell you that in the districts I've 15 worked in prior to coming here, I've 16 never had to close a school or never 17 experienced a school closure related to 18 an asbestos problem. Now, I am familiar 19 with schools closing because of a mold 20 problem in the place where I came from. And then I think to your question about what's the magnitude of the problem or crisis as you've deemed it, I will simply just quote the facts of the, as best as I understand them, from 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. the Parsons report that said among all the schools in the District's footprint, among the 300 buildings, there were 5 schools that the Parsons report 6 recommended should be either closed or 7 repurposed. 8 Those would be three facts I 9 could say. I do think that a lot of why 10 we're situated where we are is the 11 vestiges of historic underfunding. No 12 different than our house and our car, if 13 we don't get the resources to keep them 14 up, they won't be in good condition. 15
Thank 16 you, Superintendent Watlington. I do 17 want to open the floor for other 18 Councilmembers to be able to ask 19 questions of you. Again, I spent a lot 20 of time with you, Board President, and 21 the leadership here, so a lot of the information that was presented today we've discussed in depth as it relates to where we are. But I do want to be clear 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. before I call on Councilmember Jones to go to the next questions, I love our children. I care about our schools, and at the end of the day, if the job isn't getting done the right way, somebody needs to be held accountable. If that person is me and that's who the citizens of Philadelphia see that needs to be held accountable, then so be it. As it relates to this legislative body, we're going to be fully prepared to work with our Council President as well as the Mayor to move forward however they see fit, but I want to be very, very clear to you and to anyone that's listening. When we look at how we vote, who we vote for, and what we say is good enough, right, I just named about ten things that have happened over the last five years during our time in City Council that explains clearly why I specifically was not in favor of voting for all nine members of the School Board. Very clearly, what our issues are, what 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. we've been dealing with in trying to rectify and also wanting to commend you for actually addressing some of the concerns that have been communicated to you, as well as trying to brainstorm the problems you inherited. The problems you inherited, Dr. Watlington, in our mind, someone needs to be held accountable. However our Council President and Mayor decides to move forward, I am fully prepared to support that effort. With that being said, the Chair recognizes Councilmember Jones. And for the courtesy of my colleagues, after Councilmember Jones, we'll go to Councilmember Brooks and then Councilmember Gilmore Richardson.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for your passion and laser focus on education of our young people. But I want to also thank Superintendent Watlington for his laser focus on the improvement of the education 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. of our students, and in particular, I was -- you toured my alma mater, Overbrook, along with Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson and Isaiah Thomas, and I want to report to this body that we've constantly gone back to the well and thank your team, the development team, for looking at possibilities for renovating the 4th and 5th floor of Overbrook. And I don't just pick on Overbrook. I show how you are trying to put together that facilities plan that our Chairman wants. So that's number one. I want to thank you during the pandemic and your team before you got here, that one of the few highlights during that pandemic was the fact that our schools fed our kids, that our schools provided distance learning. There was no playbook in the library to pull from. You had to build the plane and fly it at the same time. I don't want you to think and 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. your team to think that those positive attributes don't be recognized by this body, because we were scared just like you were scared. We were unsure just like you were unsure, and that learning loss when distance learning happened, we're thankful that you guys are back on the case. When we lost a life at Roxborough or our other schools, it was my colleague always, my colleagues here and your staff that met us right at the schools. So you didn't run away from the problems that we face. You locked arms with us to face it. So I just want to balance some of those issues, and now I'll move on to my questions. Because he's right about being passionate about what's wrong, but I want to be as passionate about glimmers of hope that I see. First and foremost, I'm going to go back to my alma mater and say that -- it shocked me. Thirty percent of 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. those students are homeless. Thirty percent of the students that attend Overbrook High School are homeless. So I need to know in this budget how you provide guide rails and guardrails for them, and how does the Community Schools model -- which I like in my district where they are, it's at Gompers, but it's needed at Barry. It's needed at Overbrook. How do we get those extra resources to take care of things like homelessness? There is a large percentage of students at Overbrook that are on ankle monitors as a result of their involvement with the criminal -- tell me in this budget how we produce better outcomes for them. And I'll let you answer this question. How do we reduce the school-to-prison pipeline and increase the school-to-paycheck pipeline? I'll stop and allow you to respond. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: All right. Thank you, Councilmember Jones. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Relative to reducing the school-to-prison pipeline and increasing the school-to-paycheck pipeline, as you say, I think several things that we are doing, and we need to do more of it. Number one, we have to shine a big, bright spotlight on our dropout problem in the City. To your point about the number of students who are homeless, homeless kids and kids who are in the category of kids who are hard to love, it's very easy to let those kids -- let our kids just kind of slip away and disappear. Even when we see them, it's easy to kind of ignore it if we see them on the street. So we're shining a big, bright spotlight on student regular attendance, accounting for every kid, and we want to know where every single 7th through 12th grade kid is in this city. Two, toward that end, we've kind of reorganized the Central Office and brought aboard an assistant 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC.
superintendent for dropout prevention whose sole job is to find every single kid's record, get face to face with the small group of people to find out what are our children's story, because we just can't let kids disappear. On average, we have 4,000 kids who drop out every year. A good number of those kids are homeless. And unfortunately their parents and caregivers don't come to the Board meeting and say, look, I need some help. They don't show up in Chamber and say, I need some help. So we have to take the responsibility and the accountability structures to focus there. I'd also like to say I think that as we -- to President Johnson's point, as we work more closely with grassroots community organizations, faith-based partners, whether that's traditional christian, Muslim, et cetera, as we draw a line around every school and get closer face to face with those 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. grassroots organizations and faith-based partners and the people who know the communities better than we do, I think we can drive faster improvement and better communication. And, finally, I absolutely agree with you on the Community Schools model. When I think about -- the best example for me is that dental clinic that Temple University operates, a full-fledged dental clinic. We could go there ourselves, Councilmember, if we needed to and get state-of-the-art care. And I love the way they're doing that. I think -- is that at Kelly School? Yes, at Kelly. And we need more of that. And the facilities when we think about it, it gives us an opportunity to really think thoughtfully about how we use our facilities to drive more of that kind of Community Schools processes in terms of how we repurpose some of our buildings for the benefit of the children.
So I'm 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. encouraged by your facilities management team who has been working closely with us about saving Overbrook, but within Overbrook, that's a model for every school around the District. Edwin Santana, from the Fourth District by the way, has been a good liaison on troubleshooting. When we have these problems, he is one of the people I go to to make sure, well, who in that organization handles this particular aspect. Finally, that school-to-paycheck pipeline, you toured Randolph School with me as well, you and Board Director Streater, and we saw that the dropout rates were lower, the attendance rate was higher, student achievement was higher, because they had a purpose and a paycheck at the end of the pipeline. Within that tour, we saw the automotive people, students. They represent now one-third of Fleet Management's workforce. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. So to the degree that Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson is looking to fill all of those vacancies within the City, we need a concerted effort that if we can't find employees, we should work with you to grow them. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Absolutely.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Totally agree.
Thank you, Councilmember. Appreciate your advocacy, and great line of questioning. Just to switch it a little bit, the Chair now recognizes Councilmember Gilmore Richardson and then we'll do Councilmember Phillips and then Councilmember Brooks.
Great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much for your advocacy and for your leadership. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Thank you, Dr. Watlington, and to your entire team, to Dr. Dawson especially. I can't see past the chairs, but -- SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: He's here. He's here.
Okay. And to Dr. Gordon, who has joined us every Friday at the Philadelphia High School for Girls, also Michelle and Melanie and the entire team, of course Laureal and Sarah here, but your whole team. I've worked with so many of you, and I just want to start by expressing my thanks and my gratitude for your willingness to work with us. Board President Streater is here, so he knows about this advocacy. I see Lisa Salley, our Girls' High girl here as well. So I just wanted to start off by saying thank you, because you didn't have to do what you did, but you did, particularly around leveling. That was an issue that was so important. You know 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. I introduced legislation and we held hearings on that issue, and we heard from so many parents and families about how leveling does impact them, but particularly from the staff at the schools. And so I want to say thank you for listening to our advocacy and for finding revenue to address the issue. I am very appreciative. I think it's a game changer for Philadelphia, and I think we made the right decision. So I'll definitely start there. You know my issues, because I communicate with you all on a weekly basis, but there's some things that I have to put on the record for this hearing. So I will start where we left off at our last meeting, thanking you all for the town hall at the Philadelphia High School for Girls. I was unable to participate in person because we were still in Council Chambers. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. You talked about in some of the enrollment highlights some of the increases based on the change in the special admission policy but also the enrollment highlights. And for me I was struck that the 9th grade enrollment for this school year for Girls' High was at 88. My class was almost 400. But the 9th grade acceptances for the upcoming year is 186. Do the acceptances mean they will actually attend? Because a number of students get accepted to a number of schools. Have they actually chosen Girls' High, the 186, as the location or the school that they will attend? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: The way we know if students accept an acceptance is on that first day of school and an enrollment, and when we have an open house, if they show up and you see the whites of their eyes. All students and families have the opportunity to continue to shop, but 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. it's our job to really market, communicate, support school leadership. Chief Alex Coppadge has a very robust plan for helping schools to stay in contact with our young people, because it's just like when you're hiring somebody, you say, okay, you've got the job and you don't start until three weeks later. You need to call that person every day just to check in, see how you're doing, do you need anything, tell you what, let me take you to lunch next week just to give you a little bit more information about the job. We're taking that approach under Chief Coppadge's leadership.
That will be great. So if you can keep us up to date at the beginning of the school year on the enrollment. And I want to be clear, because this is such a specialized issue because of a number of specific factors that have deeply impacted Girls' High, but I care about all of our 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. schools, every single one of them, and I want to be clear that I'm the parent of young people who attend a neighborhood-based school that I fought for my children to attend, because it's not our closest school technically, but it's our closest local public school, and that's the school that I attended. So my children attend that school. So I care about all of our schools. All three of my children go to public school. Okay? And I want to be clear about that, because the advocacy that is centered around the Philadelphia High School for Girls does not stop the overall advocacy for all of our schools, and I just want to say that for the record. I wanted to just briefly thank you too for the principal search at Girls' High and the updates for the students and the alumni. You did confirm that there's no enrollment cap for Girls' High, because we had heard initially that 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Girls' High was only able to accept 200 students. So if they were capped at accepting 200 students, of course this number would not be more than 200. We want to get that number up higher, because their enrollment is so low, particularly in the 9th grade class. I will proceed at this moment from the Girls' High conversation only with the continued agreement that you all will work with us at Girls' High every step of the way, not only with the principal search but around the enrollment, around the facilities issues, and the concerns of the students. And I will tell you that Dr. Gordon has been a godsend for the young people, because they trust him. He has come every single Friday to address the numerous issues that were really bubbling over in the winter, and I've continued to attend once per month every single month, but we just need that continued commitment. Now, on the school finder 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. app -- you know, this has been something I've been talking about for a while. How are we better communicating with families to let them know about their options for attending their closest local public school? And I know there's been some issue and challenge not only around the catchment area piece but also around Google and the actual mapping when you insert your address, but that is of concern for me. You talked about marketing and ensuring that we are marketing our schools correctly. I get postcards from a ton of schools. I even get postcards from a school that's not even in Philadelphia, that's in another county for my children to attend. So how are we doing a better job around the school finder app and then marketing our closest local public schools to our families? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson, 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Mr. Chairman, with your permission, I'd like to ask our Chief of Communications, Alex Coppadge, if she'll come to the dais and just say a word about that, because she's leading a very robust communications campaign. We stole her from Mastery Charter Schools where she was leading communications, and we'll ask her to speak to that.
That will be great. And then, Dr. Watlington, in addition to that, if you could just give us an update on the catchment boundary plan and how we're looking to address that. (Witness approached witness table.) CHIEF COPPADGE: Good afternoon, Council, and thank you for the question, Councilmember Gilmore Richardson. Communications is critically important to Superintendent Watlington, starting initially just trying to make 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. three key improvements, like increasing our transparency, increasing our consistency with how regularly we deliver communications, and then our clarity. So that has been a focus throughout my tenure here and trying to ensure that we are just engaging our families more regularly, and we really saw that come through in the school selection process. And so one of the things that we focused on were the recommendations from Accenture and really boosting how we market our schools, our criteria-based schools, and make sure that families are aware of the opportunities that are available. So just to give you a quick idea of some of the things that we did, we hosted a marketing training for all of those criteria-based high school principals, developed marketing toolkits for all of the criteria-based high schools. So really teaching them how do they engage school communities and 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. recruit. Like one of the things you talked about was how Girls' High student population was nearly 400. How do we keep that and how do we make sure that those type of schools are still desirable locations and how do we make sure our families, our students know that that is a resource and available. So we wanted to teach our principals how do you recruit students. Gone are the days when people just come.
And I heard the bell, so I want to respect and honor the clock, but if you could just detail for us if there's a budget for schools to do like a postal mailing to families in their catchment area, is there a budget for advertising maybe on local billboards or in local newspapers for schools to really talk about the advantages for families to select those schools. CHIEF COPPADGE: So we have a 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. budget this year of $100,000 that we allocated towards -- this year it was criteria-based schools as well as our graduation campaign. In the upcoming school year, we plan to transition that to our enrollment campaign. In my past experience, I led communications for Mastery Schools, and that was our focus just because we didn't have the same access to a citywide group of students. We had to be very tactical with how we recruited. We had to do strategic marketing campaigns, the flyers that come to your house all the time. So we did that, and we're trying to bring that to the District. Previously communications had a limited budget, so we are trying to find free ways like that I mentioned, teaching our principals how to recruit, in addition to the increased funding that we could hopefully push out into our families.
4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Okay. Great. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Majority Richardson, if I may just add, one of the things that -- if that's okay, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, I can come back on the second round.
Dr. Watlington, is it okay? Can we -- SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, sir.
-- address this on the second round? Because there's a lot of members that want to get queued up. The Chair recognizes Councilmember Brooks, then Councilmember Phillips.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Dr. Watlington and the School District. So I appreciate the Mayor championing the intergovernmental 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. cooperation, and it's clear to me that fixing systemic issues in our School District, it takes us in Philadelphia, the legislators in Harrisburg, and our federal partners. I've been to Harrisburg to support many initiatives that would improve our School District for students, parents, and teachers, and I've heard back from parents and people within the School District that drawing down on federal grants is a challenging thing for the District. Can you explain what the process is for drawing down federal grants for the School District? Because I know there's significant federal funding opportunities that the School District would be eligible for to enhance energy efficiency in the school buildings, and is the District pursuing any of these opportunities and how can Council be of support? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Thank you, Councilmember. Really quick, if I could just note, on the website, our website, Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson, Chief Coppadge led an overhaul of the entire website, went and fixed links that were broken or had inaccurate information, and when parents contact my office, they now get a chance to give us a feedback score on whether or not they think we answered the question. We're going to launch that more publicly in the upcoming year, including the catchment area part of the website. Councilmember, I do want to note that in the School District, our grants department sits under the leadership of the Chief of Staff, and it's there because the Chief of Staff manages -- is the Superintendent's liaison to the Board of Education. She and her staff, Chief Galbally, Sarah Galbally, is the liaison, she and her staff, to City Council, to our state legislators, and also to our federal 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. officials, not limited to our elected congressional members in the House and Senate. They also are contacts to make sure that when there are grant opportunities that come from the Department of Education or some other department, the Department of Health and Human Services or HUD, that we get right in front of the line to apply. So we do have that system in place. We'll be glad to take any feedback of any places where we could have -- where we're hearing that there's red tape or we're not moving as fast as we need to. Chief Sarah Galbally is here, and if you have other questions, I'm happy to have her speak directly to that.
Yeah, because I would like to know like how can we be of support in moving some of the federal grant applications or if there's like any standstill or we weren't eligible or what were the barriers to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. prevent you guys from applying for any of the federal grant opportunities that may have come our way. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: There's usually a lot of things coming down from the federal government. A lot of times our congressional representatives will let us know. We have a direct Listserv that comes down. And so it's a matter of us being very thoughtful and mindful. Now, we always try to look at what are the grant dollars, federal grant dollars or even philanthropic dollars, that align to Accelerate Philly, and so that work sits all in the Chief of Staff's division.
If I could add something very briefly. Just another example of the way City Council can be helpful is Medicaid reimbursements. So some states have plans where they have -- they have done the requisite work to create a state plan amendment to allow 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. school districts to be reimbursed for services provided only to students with disabilities under IDEA. In some schools, some states have done it in a way where they're able to get reimbursements of some school-based services or for some students beyond those with IEPs who are enrolled in Medicaid. We've already reached out to the state. I believe they're looking into it as well, because it could be something else that we can all kind of rally around. Just as an example, Board member Wilkerson, through her work with the Council for Great City School, has spoken with Chicago, and it appears they've been able to put on an additional $100 million from this program. So, again, this is something that I think that -- even though we can't control it right here, but we can advocate up to the state and see how we 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. can be helpful to help the state move this along.
Okay. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: And if I may just add to President Streater's comment, I do want to note that one of the things that kind of sort of attracted me to the School District of Philadelphia, I do want to note for the record that member Joyce Wilkerson actually serves on the Executive Committee for the Council for Great City Schools. And so we are able to really tap that organization for early information, and we're often able to get ahead of other districts because we have someone who serves on that national body that routinely shares information with us.
Okay. My next question is about teacher vacancies. One of the biggest issues the School District and teachers are facing is teacher vacancies. The facts are 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. clear that Pennsylvania is in crisis of recruiting new teachers, and with that in mind, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers agreed to a one-year contract this year. Are you confident that the District has the finances necessary to meet the demands with the contract that would bring new teachers into Philadelphia, and how does the budget address the lack of staff? And I want to be very specific. I'm asking you to address the lack of speech and language pathologists, occupational therapists, teachers, and custodial staff. And can we anticipate a raise in salary and bonuses to attract and retain these staff in the next coming years? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, I am confident that we have the budgetary resources and that the Board, as it has been done before, will make good decisions upon the Superintendent's recommendations relative to the PFT and 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. CASA contract in the upcoming year. This Board has been very good stewards of the public tax dollars. I would not have come here to work as Superintendent if I thought I was going to walk into a place that was going to implode. Relative to the positions. Now, we're going to -- we are going to continue to struggle, quite frankly -- I want to manage the expectations -- with recruiting the following: math teachers, some science teachers, special education teachers, foreign language teachers, and speech-language pathologists. I know that's an area that's near and dear to you, Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson. And even this year, we've had some interruption in services because we just could not get speech-language pathologists hired. Part of the issue is pay when people can go to more lucrative. Part of the issue is people -- we hire people and if you don't treat them well, people 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. leave their immediate supervisors, no 3 matter how much you pay them. You've got to have good work culture. And the third thing, I think we have to talk up the City and talk about how this is a great place to live. And so how we present ourselves in the public really matters too for recruitment purposes, in my opinion.
How -- I know I heard the bell, but how competitive are our salaries for speech and language pathology and occupational therapists? Because to your point, they can go anywhere. Are we within range for fair salary rates for those positions? And to President Streater's point, are those the reasons why we should kind of buckle down? Because those are all Medicaid reimbursable positions that we can be drawing down more dollars to make sure that we're paying people equitably and want to take those jobs, when they can go to make $100 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. an hour in a hospital. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Absolutely. To your point, our Deputy Superintendent for Talent, Strategy and Culture is currently leading a salary study with a vendor, and I'd like to -- as we get the results back from the salary study, they'll make recommendations to us about what's market-appropriate salaries in this very, very, very, very competitive market that we're in. Once we get that salary study back, we'll then go back and make recommendations to President Streater and the Board and give the Board an opportunity to weigh in and give us direction about how we should go, and at that point, I think it would be appropriate for us to come back and update you about how we're moving in that regard.
Before I 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. recognize the next Councilmember, just a point of information. What is the national organization that you referenced earlier? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: The Council for Great City Schools.
So for us on our side, we have things like Local Progress, the League of Cities. I'm assuming that that's similar, right? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: It's similar, and the reason why it's so significant is some 40-plus years ago, the person who used to have oversight for that organization was Dr. Constance Clayton. She remade that organization. In fact, she fired the entire staff when she was Superintendent here. She told me the story and the former Executive Director told me the story. He was out of the country at the time for a funeral, but he will be here for the naming of the 440 building. She hired one person back. His 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. name is Mike Casserly. He served as Executive Director for nearly 40 years. He recently retired and now serves as Executive Director Emeritus, and a gentleman named Ray Hart, who came out of the Atlanta public schools, a researcher, leads that organization, but they routinely advise the White House and Congress on issues related to public schools. In fact, I remember them sitting down with President Obama doing a roundtable on education. It's called the Council for Great City Schools, represents 77 member districts.
Thank you. So I think I've heard of it before. Now, similar to some of the cohorts that we're a part of, do you pay to be a part of the coalition? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: We pay to be a constituent member for the Council for Great City Schools. It's about $40,000, which is a very minuscule amount for all the support and resources 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. we receive.
Makes sense. I mean, we do similar things here. So I just want to for the record note that any other Board member can sit on the Council. It doesn't have to be a specific person. It could be anybody who represents the School District of Philadelphia, because we're paying for a seat to be on the Board, correct? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: That's correct.
Okay. Thank you, sir. The Chair recognizes Councilmember Phillips.
Listen, I just want to thank Chairman Thomas. It's been a pleasure serving on the Education Committee as the Vice Chair of Education and seeing the work of Councilwoman Kendra Brooks on Education as well, amongst so many of our Education Committee members. So I just want to say 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. thank you all. The City of Philadelphia certainly has an issue when it comes to educating our young people, and safety is a priority, as you said, in the current budget. The Safe Path program aims to increase community safety by providing a positive, trusted adult presence for students as they travel to and from school, connected with adults with existing violence intervention efforts. Now, the program is modeled after the Safe Passage program which started in Chicago and resulted in 14 percent decrease in violence after Chicago schools implemented the program. Chicago School District established a Safe Passage program in 2009 with 35 schools. The program currently serves at 188 schools for the 2023-2024 school year. Dr. Watlington, this is actually really important for me, because I was bullied as a kid and I know what it feels like to go home and not feel safe. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Bullies exist throughout the City of Philadelphia, and what we're trying to do our best is to make sure bullying doesn't exist. I'm curious to learn from you how does the School District of Philadelphia intend to incorporate the expansion of the Safe Pass program into its budget to extend its reach beyond the additional schools? 12 SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you, Councilmember Phillips. As you may or may not know, we are -- we were fortunate to get some resources in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania to expand some of the Safe Pass programs. What I think people sometimes forget is when you think about the 500 public school districts in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the majority of those districts don't have to take resources out of their operating budget to go fund safe path programs, to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. go fund safety zones with police officers. The majority of those 500 school districts don't have to take dollars out of their operating budget to develop swing space plans and to pay to move kids to other school locations, then to move them back. What happens is, every time we take dollars out of the budget and we're almost robbing Peter to pay Paul, we get further and further away from what we're driving, improvement in the classroom. So to date, we've worked really strategically and hard under Commissioner Bethel's leadership and Chief Johnson's leadership to go after grants and other resources to expand the Safe Pass programs. I think the number -- Chief Johnson went from 7 to -- 25. 21 Chief Johnson, could you come 22 to the -- since safety is so important, perhaps you can just say a word about that and specific to Councilmember Phillips's question about how do we -4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. what's our plan for procuring more resources to expand. (Witness approached witness table.)
Good morning, Chairman. Good morning, Vice Chair. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon. Sorry. Yes. And so, yes, the Safe Pass program, we absolutely think it is essential. Currently right now it costs approximately $72,000 per location to run the Safe Path program. That's inclusive of four monitors and a lead. The schools that we cover 17 right now comes at a cost of 18 approximately $1.8 million per year. To 19 date, we have secured grant funding. 20 This initiative has been completely paid 21 for through grant funding, and we have 22 grant funding to take us through the next 23 school year. 24 We're going to continue to 25 aggressively look for additional grant 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. funding so that we can expand the program.
Thank you. I would love to see how we can take what Chicago did and put us in the hundreds, because I know we just have only 20-some-odd schools. This is really important as one of your priorities. The Superintendent presented academic data for NAEP, which measures growth, but, Superintendent, you said it was for grades to 8, but NAEP tests grades and 8 and not 3 through 8th grade. Why was NAEP presented and not academic achievement with PSSAs? Can you please share the academic gains or losses across grade bands? Also, because my time is limited and I want to make sure that every question comes up that I want to do, can you describe how your facilities planning process is taking into account the need for space for about 6,000 children currently not enrolled in pre-K 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. to attend pre-K programs? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes. To your first question about the relationship, NAEP tests are given in the 4th and 8th grade, whereas our PSSAs are given across grades 3 through 8. The researchers did a study to see what's the connection for 3 through 8 in the aggregate. That's the research we provided. But if we want to talk specifically about PSSA, Pennsylvania data, the District made progress in 13 out of tested areas. Almost across 16 the board, with the exception of algebra, 17 the number of children scoring at the below basic, the lowest level, improved across the board, with a significant improvement for Black and Latino students. So that's kind of where we stand on academic achievement. Now, the high school numbers are not as good. Quite frankly, we went the wrong direction in algebra 1. And so 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. I want to give the full, full story there. Second part of your question about 6,000 seats for pre-K students and what is its relationship to the -- what's it relationship to the facilities plan that's in progress.
Yes. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: I think I told you that last summer we pulled together a group to do baseline standards of what are the basic expectations that every school should meet and how do we allow the resources. One of those baseline standards aligns to having quality pre-K readily available near where families live. We can do it through multiple sources, but that's one impact of the academic baseline standards on the facilities planning work. We don't have the solution yet, but it is absolutely in our sights.
Thank you. I will submit other questions for 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. the record, but I'll come back for the second round. Thank you, Chairman Thomas.
Thank you, colleague. The Chair recognizes Councilmember Gauthier, followed by Councilmember Bass.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, Dr. Watlington. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Good afternoon.
I wanted to follow up on Councilmember Jones' line of questioning around youth and homelessness. According to data provided by HopePHL, a staggering 8,363 young people aged birth to years old 21 are identified as experiencing homelessness in Philadelphia. Sadly, youth from birth to age 3 experience the highest prevalence of homelessness, leading to elevated risk of health 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. problems, developmental delays, and social-emotional difficulties. Unsurprisingly, experiencing this level of trauma at such a crucial development state can lead to these same young people dropping out of school when they are older. All of these students are not in DHS custody. They may have a history of interaction with DHS but are not currently in DHS care. We know that 350 to 400 DHS youth are AWOL, and most of them are unhoused. So my questions are the following: Programs like Thrive offered through HopePHL have partnered with the School District to provide services to this vulnerable population. How are this and other partnerships being leveraged to not only support those experiencing homelessness but also to decrease its occurrence? How much money has the District allocated toward supporting this effort in the coming school year and how does that compare to prior years? And 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. knowing what happens during early developmental stages affects later learning abilities, is there anything being done or that we should be doing to support these young people before they even enter the school system? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you, Councilmember Gauthier. Appreciate your referencing the 8,360-plus young folks and people who are referred to as homeless. Several things. I want to begin by saying I'd like to follow up and get -- I don't want to give you a number -- trust my memory. I would like to follow up with a response to the hearing and get you the actual dollar impact in the budget related to this area next year. I can tell you that every penny we're spending, we know it's worth it, because the cost to Philadelphia and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for every dropout, according to a Neubauer Family Foundation study, is $405,000, and so 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. want to redirect those resources. We are -- in the Office of Strategic Partnerships, which reports to Chief of Staff Sarah Galbally, we are currently identifying every partnership that exists between the School District of Philadelphia and the community, so we can know what is the partnership, who is the contact person, what resources are we providing, what outcomes are we driving toward, and how are we doing. We don't have the full data to give us that feedback just yet, but we're happy to share that as we build out that comprehensive database. I can tell you that when I look at a partnership like Strawberry Mansion High School working with Ryan Boyer and members of the Building Trades and other groups, including Council, that provide some financial literacy training, our young people, 40 of them who did not necessarily have a good job future and weren't sure about their interest, 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. they're getting a credential in -- an OSHA credential. They're learning construction management, and they're learning about how to manage that money. So I think that's a gold standard example of a partnership. We should have lots of those going across the District. But as we build out that database of all the partnerships, we'll be able to give you some more defined quantitative data to answer your question.
It would be great to have a sense of how you're dealing with the issue of homeless youth in a full sense in this year's budget and how funding for that has -- the funding proposed for FY25, how that compares to prior years. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Absolutely.
I wanted to ask a few questions about the Sayre pool. Thank you so much, Board 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. President Streater, for referencing this as a model for how the City and the District can be working together to reopen pools for our community. I agree with you that it's a model. Last year we were grateful to get a vote from the School Board to put $11 million towards the renovation of this site. We were also very excited to have Council transfer -- I'm sorry. That means I get another few seconds. I wanted to talk about the Sayre pool a little bit. I too, like President Streater, think that this was a great model for how the City can be working with the School District to reopen shuttered pools. We were grateful for the School Board vote last year that allocated $11 million towards the renovation of the site. Council was excited to transfer $3 million to add in to the cost of having the site repaired. And so that's a great outcome for the community, but I wanted to get some 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. specifics on this project actually moving forward. So a few questions. First, can you tell me if the contractor to design and update the Sayre pool has been selected? Can you talk to me about the construction timeline and an anticipated timeline for the groundbreaking? And since the pool and the rec center share one building, can you help me to understand whether any of the repairs will impact the rec center and maybe cause closure or the inability to access certain parts of the center? And then, lastly, the community was -- the community fought for years for this, for years, and they really, really, really want to be at the table as the project moves forward and as we talk about things like programming and access. So can you please talk about how we can include these advocates who really got this win in the project moving forward? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: I 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. want to defer to President Streater first, because the Board took action on that. So pleased that the Board saw fit to take action on that, and I'll be glad to follow with any specifics.
First, I just want to say thank you for your advocacy as well. You were an instrumental partner in cooling some of the heads that needed to be cooled, being the advocate but also the mediator at some points. So I was excited to help push this over the line from the Board perspective. So thank you again. Again, like I said in my comments, I think this could be an example of the hard work that has to be done behind the scenes to create MOUs of understanding so that we can have the type of partnerships, intergovernmental approach that we would likely need with our facilities when that comes to fruition. But I just want to kind of put 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. that level of detail to it. I'm going to ask, I guess, Dr. Watlington if you want to... SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Absolutely. In terms of the operation side, the nuts and bolts of what's going on in the administration and steps, I'll ask Colonel Oz Hill, our Chief Operating Officer. He can speak specifically to that. Colonel Hill, are you here? (Witness approached witness table.) COLONEL HILL: Thank you very much for the question, Councilmember, and before I answer it directly, I'd like to express the gratitude of more than 3,500 employees in Operations Division for the support that this body has provided that has enabled us to make investments and improvements in our facilities. Thank you very much for that. With Sayre pool, on April 16th 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. we received five bid proposals for the work to begin. Interviews are being scheduled by our Selection Committee to make a final decision. We anticipate that Sayre pool will -- an action item on Sarah pool will go before the Board of Education at the June action item meeting.
And that's for the -- is that to approve the contractor? COLONEL HILL: Yes, ma'am. Additionally, as we are talking about pools, we are also updating the estimates on Pickett pool, and that should be finalized not later than the end of this week.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Before we move on, can we talk about construction timeline for Sayre and how we can engage the community. COLONEL HILL: We have met with several community organizations 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. soliciting input. Aqua Philly I believe is the organization. We've met with them. They've provided input around the Sayre pool and exactly what's required. Based on the selection of the contractor and the confirmation of the scope of work, a notice to proceed will be issued, and that notice to proceed will provide the definitive timeline for the work to be completed.
Can you give me your best estimate? COLONEL HILL: My best estimate is that for the beginning of school year '25 that that pool will be in operation.
Okay. That's amazing. That's great. And then on the community piece, I just wanted to clarify that I think Aqua Philly is one of the groups advocating around pools citywide, but for Sayre, we have a pretty specific working group of people in the community that has been fighting for this. So I would love 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. to talk to you offline about how we get those folks to the table. COLONEL HILL: Welcome the conversation, ma'am.
Thank you, colleague. Thank you for your line of questioning and, again, congratulations on Sayre pool. The Chair recognizes Councilmember Bass, followed by Councilmember Ahmad and Councilmember Young.
I have just a few questions. The first is -- and I'd like for your answers to be brief, because I'd really like to try to get through as many of my questions as possible, because it's been a minute. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Can you tell us what an extended day looks like and how you get staffing for that? I'm assuming you've had conversations with the PFT and with others. Are there incentives for staff? Can you talk about that very briefly? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Extended day looks like programming that kids have access to after the traditional school day ends that is fun, innovative, but they are learning something that relates to what they learned during the school day. Is that what you're referring to, Councilmember?
Yes. So let me -- so just to be clear, because I know that the Mayor is asking for year-round educational attainment, that it's going to continue. So it's no 21 longer, from my understanding, it's no 22 longer a September through June sort of operation. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: We've not -- it's a continuum. In fiscal 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. year -- in school year '24-'25, we're going to focus on building out the after-school program supports so that they're first class, they help, they're interesting and they're related and they complement what they're learning during the school day. I want to be clear, though, downstream we intend to pilot a model where the day is longer, more formalized longer day, and extend the year with some breaks during the year. The best example of that is the Harlem Children's Zone.
So when is downstream? How far away are we from that? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: School year '25-'26 we anticipate having some pilots.
'25-'26, okay. Because I was under the impression from the presentation that it was going to be happening like now. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. This upcoming school year we're focusing specifically on the after-school component, and the reason is, extended-day and year-round schools don't work by just telling -- by the District telling parents and children you're going to school longer or your configuration is going to change. We have to build the demand and create a demand, and they'll partnership support for it.
So is the after-school programming optional then? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: At present, after-school programming is optional. The key is if we make it exciting, interested, and we've got to take the time to hear what motivates young people, then when they're partners with it, they'll be better at it.
So if it's not optional -- so it is optional. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: At present.
So the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. idea is to make it exciting and then they'll want to participate, but assuming that not every child will want to participate no matter how exciting, how do you plan to incentivize young people to get them to come to these optional activities that -- they just may want to get out and run free. You know, like they've been in a school building since 8:00 a.m. It's 3 o'clock, I'm ready to get out of here. How do you keep them for this very important programming? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: We do the same thing that happens whenever a judge tells a Tony Watlington or Reginald Streater -- maybe we should use our names, but if a judge says, look, you're in front of my courtroom, and I'm telling you you need to be in school every day. There are plenty of cases where judges tell kids they have to be in school. That doesn't mean they're connected. It doesn't mean they're interested. It just means they're not on the street. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. And so part of what we have to do is do the work to have programs where we're doing coding and STEM work and other extracurricular activities that appeal to their interest, to include athletics, sports, extracurricular activities, arts, chess.
Got it. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: And a wide range of supports.
Okay. So 2025-2026 we can look for the extended school day? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Absolutely, yes.
Okay. So that will be Monday through Friday, 8:00 to? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: We've not made those -- we've not finalized those decisions. I can tell you that one of the best models in the country of an extended-year/year-round kind of calendar is at the Harlem 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Children's Zone. I can tell you that Black and Hispanic and Latino students there have pretty much closed the gap in performance, and they go to school from 8:00 to 6:00.
So what are the hours? 8:00 to 6:00? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: 8:00 to 6:00. And generally up to half of the kids are there on Saturdays.
Okay. And that is throughout the duration of the entire year or is that just for certain months? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: They don't go to school every week of every month throughout the year. There are some intercession breaks built in between, and they do that in a way that gives kids some opportunity to have some -- they could do some extra tutoring time, they could have some time to just have some time off, but the main thing that it does is, it prevents the summer 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. slide.
Okay. So let me ask you a question. If you would, talk to me about District growth in population. So most of the City's growth is east of Broad Street. And so most of the overpopulation in schools is obviously east of Broad Street, particularly I think in Northeast, maybe some parts of South Philadelphia. And meanwhile there's a lot of schools, including in my district, that are severely underpopulated. And so because of that, the resources instead of having it a little more evenly keeled so that you can put resources on the east side and on the west side of Broad Street, like how are we going about that? Because right now it feels to me that the resources, the spending is primarily east of Broad, and for those of us west of Broad, it's kind of like, well, that's where the population growth is, but what are we doing to make that a little bit 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. even keel so, number one, kids aren't in overpopulated schools and not getting what they need, but, number two, the ones on the west side who are in underpopulated schools aren't getting the investment from the District that they should be getting because it's going to where the overpopulation is? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Councilmember, one of the biggest equity issues of our time is how do we address that phenomenon in a way that by the way we do things, we encourage more out-migration from some neighborhoods and we encourage more migration to other neighborhoods. We have to get kids the supports that they need. Now, what we will work on in this facilities planning process is the fact that we can drive faster and better supports for the kids that you're referring to if we take a look during this process at a minimum school size, because you can drive faster, better 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. resources to support the kids who need them the most. That's one way. The other way is that we budget in a way that we know some kids and some schools, some communities need more resources. It's the difference between equality and equity. And so we do have an equity formula in terms of how we staff and provide some resources. It's still not enough due to the historic underfunding.
Is there any possibility of moving kids, of chartering buses so that you're not -- so that like if you've got a school and you've got an overpopulation, that you can charter a bus to go from that school to a school that's underpopulated in another part of town rather than incentive? Because the incentive may mean that I as a parent have to figure out how to get my kid there or it may mean that my child may be relying on public transportation, which can be 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. dangerous, you know, going into different neighborhoods. You know, if you're not from one part of town, you shouldn't be going to that part without some sort of mode of transportation to get there and to get back safely to your own neighborhood. Are those kinds of conversations happening or considered? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Absolutely. Some of the innovative thinking we'll be doing as a part of this process is taking a hard look at our transportation services and how we provide transportation, how we work with public transportation sector, and what we might consider to do differently in the School District and the City. And I'll also note that there's always -- there's lots of opportunities, not limited to that. We can also look at co-location from time to time where it's appropriate, but I think that when you have a number of really small under-enrolled schools to continue to do 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. the same thing and expect a different result is just probably not going to be a good way to approach that. So we're open to a lot of different opportunities. President Streater.
If I could add briefly, under the Board, the Board has a policy where if a school is under-enrolled by 90 percent, students from outside the catchment can go to the school. So this is my plug for anybody who is listening. There's some great schools in your district. Linglebach, for example. Like there's some great schools that might be under-enrolled where there's a great experience there, but students from other parts of the City have access now under the Board's policy around out-of-school catchment enrollment for neighborhood schools. So just wanted to put that out there.
Okay. And I know the bell has rung and I want to honor the time, but I do want to make 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. just one quick statement, not a question, and, that is, that I've asked the District several times now about incidents, when they occur in the Eighth District, to be informed, and I haven't had that courtesy. And I've asked a number of times, and it's becoming a little bit like what is going on here. When Evelyn Sample-Oates was government relations for the Philadelphia School District, it never happened. It never happened. Dr. Watlington, you know because I pulled you aside and gently had this conversation with you before. But I'm very serious about being informed about what's happening in my district, because when someone calls me and says, I heard that there was a shooting at this school, I need to be able to say directly, I spoke with the School District and they said it wasn't true, they said it was true, they said that someone was injured, they said no 25 one was injured. I need to be able to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. say I got it straight from the horse's mouth as to what happened in realtime. And so I think that the sort of going around me as a District member -- because they're not calling anybody else in here, right? In the Eighth District, they're going to call me, and everybody has got my cell phone number. So they're going to be in touch with me directly and they want to know what happened at XYZ school, and I have to be accountable, and I rely on you so that I can be accountable. So I'm asking -- as it was in the past, like I said, when Evelyn Sample-Oates was sort of like in charge of this sort of operation, that that would return to be the policy of the District. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Duly noted. We'll do a better job of that, Councilmember.
Thank you very much. Thank you. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you. The Chair recognizes Councilmember Ahmad.
Thank you, Chair. Good afternoon. Thank you for being here. It's been a long morning, afternoon, lots of really good information about progress. You know, you spoke about your five priorities, safety being number one, and I think the academic achievement was number three, and I'm sort of intersecting those two and looking at how student progress, achievement is impacted by number of teachers in the classroom, so the ratio of student to teacher. Research has shown, and I'm sure you know this, the smaller that ratio is, one to 17 -- right now I think it's one to 30 for elementary school and one to 33 for middle and upper grades. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. When we think about safety, when we think about knowing your student and knowing what life circumstances they're going through, if they're going to be imminently homeless or there's trouble in their home or whatever the circumstances that impact a child and their learning potential and capacity is about that knowledge, is about having the teacher being the first line of defense to keep them safe in the classroom and make sure they learn. So I wanted to -- you gave us the example of your school district before, how they did a public-private partnership to do air conditioning. Can we look at different ways to really put some resource into this, because this can be drawing from anti-gun violence money, this can be drawing from Medicaid money, this is a determinant of health. There's so many different ways to package this. I wanted to know what your thoughts were on that, and where are we going in terms 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. of real attention to our learning styles in the classroom when you have just one teacher and not much support? Thank you. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you, Councilmember Ahmad. I'll say two things. One, related to class size, you're absolutely right. There's been a number of national studies, particularly in the kindergarten through 3rd grade range, that say if you bring the class size down to one to or less and you've 13 got highly qualified, well supported 14 curriculum, teachers and you're teaching 15 the science of reading curriculum, you can improve literacy much faster. And our current numbers that we operate under are much higher than that, so we need to be able to address that. Relative to my experience with public-private partnership with regard to air conditioning, one of the things that's different in another state where I've spent the most of my time is that we're able to make the case to the public 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. that if you want these upgrades, we would put initiatives on the ballot where there's a quarter cent sales tax, et cetera, even in the districts -- in North Carolina, school boards -- none of the school boards have taxing authority, just like here, but we were able to put measures on the ballot and say -- and people voted with their -- used their voting prerogative to fund bond campaigns. Now, granted, the other difference in the state that I came from -- although the State Supreme Court ruled that the way we support the most disadvantaged schools was unconstitutional too. In that state, the state still takes on a much greater percentage of the local school district funding than Pennsylvania does. When you look across the country, Pennsylvania has one of the lowest state-funded percentages relative to how school districts are funded, and 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. we make up so much based off local revenue. That wasn't necessarily the case in another school district where the state just paid more. But anyway, that would be my thoughts about that.
So there's different sources of revenue to support something like this. We have a $14 billion surplus at the state level, right? So I think it behooves us now to have a plan to say how are we going to address this ratio, how are we going to do it now. We are a first world country, and yet we have our children graduating not reading at grade level or doing math at grade level. To me, that's criminal, and I think we need to put everything we have, every resource, every available avenue to make sure we take care of our young people, who are our future, and to make that an urgent matter. I didn't see anything in here speaking to that. I've spoken to people before 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. about class size. They say, oh, yeah, that's like an idealistic thought. I'm like, why can't we take that idealism and put it into action when it is our children's lives at stake? So I really implore you, the School Board to make this a priority, to work with us to see how we advocate for it, how we get our communities and our families to realize this can be done. It's not like rocket science. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: One of the lessons we learned from the pandemic, when Congress appropriated those dollars to all these 14,000 school districts, a number of school districts immediately allocated the dollars to address learning loss. They said, we're going to create more teacher positions. Many of those districts were unsuccessful because even if you create more teaching positions to bring class size down across the board, in a lot of districts the teacher supply is not there. And so what 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. you end up doing is, you hire less than highly qualified teachers, and then the public says, wait a minute, we gave you more money, you hired more teachers, why didn't the test scores go up. Because we didn't follow the research. The most important factor is a highly qualified, well supported teacher. Now, to the extent that we rebuild a type line, it would make sense to bring class sizes down. Generally we're not seeing a lot of research that lower class sizes at the secondary level is improving academic achievement. The key is in K-3, and you've got to be teaching the science of reading and you've got to have a highly qualified, well supported, stable teacher, not the rookies and not people who came into the profession from somewhere else and didn't get a good teacher education program.
And you're having a whole new set of curriculum now. So this is going to be 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. very critical that we don't see a slide, right, as the teacher is ramping up to this. So whatever you need, I think we should be doing, but you have to tell us what it is you're needing and have a real plan, a strategic plan, around how we make this achievement gap disappear, because we can't get our students into jobs that need them to read and write and do math, you know. That's just every job. So I just implore you to think about how -- what is the best way we prepare our children to be ready for this 21st century, because we seem to be in the 19th. So thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you.
That's great timing, Councilmember. The Chair recognizes Councilmember Young.
Thank 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon. Just to put some things into perspective, right? So the City of Boston has a population of over 600,000 people with a budget of -- a projected Fiscal Year '25 budget of 4.64 billion. So that covers the city operational services and their education budget, right? And so the School District serves a population of over just about 200,000 with the same budget. And so I'm just trying to get at -- and the School District has one goal, one service, and that is to provide education. They don't have to worry about cleaning streets. They don't have to worry about providing other services. The number one job of the School District is to educate our children. And I'm a little disappointed to see that the priorities -- the priority area accelerate academic achievement is No. 3 instead of No. 1. So I'm disappointed in that. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Dr. Watlington, you mentioned that the Central Office has a modified zero-based budgeting method which has led to savings, right? And that's great. However, I'm a little disappointed and disheartened by your response regarding why this budgeting method is not broader. You mentioned something along the lines that it's like trying to turn a barge in the Delaware River. But from my understanding looking at these numbers, the School District is sinking. That ship is sinking right now, right? And so I think we have to start over, start anew, blow it up, right? And essentially zero-based budgeting starts at a zero point every single year for every single program, right? And I think it's a much more efficient budgeting method than an incremental-based budgeting. However, I think there's an even better method of budgeting when it comes to education and, that is, outcomes-based budgeting, right? Because 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. the School District is in the results business, the achievement business, and so how do you measure the results? How do you measure the dollars versus the results. And I think during this financially restrained times which you're in, you know, we can target austerity measures with less reliance on raising taxes, because $400 million is not going to come from anywhere. So outcomes should inform your budgeting process, and with that, in instances where the data doesn't show significant improvements, like, for example, the attendance rate. It went up from 57 to 60. That's a three percent improvement. That's great, right? But what investments are you making to lower that gap? How much money is being invested to close that gap? How much money is being invested to say, you know what, we need to go from 60 percent to 80 percent? Like where can we as a body see that the School District is 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. investing this amount to achieve that goal, right? And there are other goals that we have in mind. Essentially with the dropout rate, right? Where can we see that the School District is investing this amount to close this gap? And that's something that is not fairly obvious for us to see and to determine. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: I will say that when you think about this Harvard/Stanford study, it wasn't done by someone down the street. These are pretty reputable resources at those institutions that have the resources to really study the academic rebound for 30 percent -- 60 percent of the U.S. public school population. I do think it is not insignificant that our students are rebounding faster than Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles. I don't mean that to suggest --
We've 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. heard that, Dr. Watlington. You've told us that. We are rebounding faster than some of our peer cities. That's great. We were much lower than them in achievement anyway. So we're rebounding at a -- we shouldn't be there in the first place to have to rebound faster than that. So essentially -- again, I understand all that. Outside of that rebounding fast, again, where can we see the money that is being invested to achieve these goals that you have? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: I'll say one other thing, and I will certainly invite President Streater to speak from the Board's perspective, because he's been in the District -- been a resident here longer than I have. I will tell you that the top two things that I prioritize as the Superintendent is investing in highly qualified and well supported teachers. Now, because the pipeline is down by 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. 71 percent, you won't see me go and say, you know, Councilmember Young, let's just go buy a whole bunch of technology, let's go buy a whole bunch of tutoring kits, let's just go buy a whole bunch of workbooks. For me it's always going to be highly qualified, well supported teachers. So the industry standard is that since school districts are people-intensive organizations, we spend greater than 70 percent of our budgets on people and benefits, we've got to invest in them. So the industry standard is to spend no less than five percent of the budget on meaningful professional development, supporting teachers with, A, knowing my content; B, knowing how to connect the content and make it interesting and get students engaged; and, 3, how do we really connect with families to understand the neighborhoods and culture from which our kids come from. That's number one. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. A second piece is --
Mr. Chair, if I may, Mr. Watlington, I understand that point, and I guess it's not getting to the question that I asked specifically, so I'll just ask another question specifically. You mentioned teachers, right? So when it comes to the need for teachers, we have classroom aides. What incentives, what help does the School District provide for any of those aides that now want to become teachers? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: We have a paraprofessional initiative that we've got some $2 million additional investment in in partnership with currently with Cheyney University, La Salle, Temple, and College Unbound. They can get -- they already know our kids. They work in the School District. They can get their degrees debt free and come back to work in the School District. That is a signature program that we're 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. doing in partnership with the PFT.
Now, how often -- because I have a lot of friends who are paraprofessionals, right, and that question came from them, who had no 7 idea this program existed. So how are you getting that word to them? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Again, Chief Coppadge is helping us to have an aggressive communication strategy. In fact, I'll be attending a graduation at Cheyney this year. We've got a number of people who raised their hand, well over 200. And, Councilmember, here's what's interesting about that: Whereas our teaching population has an imbalance of white teachers to a majority Black and brown student population, the paraprofessional pipeline --
I know. They're all Black. I know. So, you know, those are things that we already know, right? And it's just what are we 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. doing to change that, is the question. What are we doing specifically to increase that number of Black and brown, Latino, Asian teachers in the classroom? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: We're expanding our footprint for recruiting, number one. We're investing in the paraprofessional initiative, number two. We are planning for a launch of a middle college high school in partnership with the Community College of Philadelphia where we will identify young people as early as the 7th and 8th grade. Instead of putting a basketball in their hand and say go be a professional athlete, we're going to encourage them to think about becoming a teacher. We're going to take them through a rigorous program through high school and we're going to find the money for folks who live right here in our city and get them through college debt free, just like we do with the paraprofessional initiative. Those are three signature initiatives. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. And also we've got some work already occurring at Parkway West, SLA Beeber, and other schools where they're doing some good work to prepare people who are interested, young people who are interested in education.
Councilmember Young, thank you for the line of questioning, and please tee in for the next line. Let me just add a couple attachments to Councilmember Young's question. I think he asked some important questions, especially around academic achievement. I don't need the answer right now, because I'm going to call up Councilmember Harrity and then Councilmember Landau, but when we come back from our break, a couple things that I would like you to have for us in line with Councilmember Young's questioning. So the Philadelphia School 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. District has been under local control since July of 2018. We're about six years as having control of our own schools here. When we come back from the break, we would like for you to let us know what were the ten lowest performing schools when the SRC was running the School District of Philadelphia and what are the ten lowest performing schools right now. That's one thing. The second thing, if we exclude charter schools and special admission schools, what is the baseline proficiency for all of our kids in both math and English, looking specifically at 11th grade standardized testing mechanisms that are out there. I don't need the answers to that right now. The third thing we're going to ask is, what percentage of Philadelphia children have attended a school that has been closed due to lead or asbestos while they were currently a student in the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. school? So similar to the questions that Councilmember Young asked, if we can get a little more information around what Councilmember Young is asking around dollars being spent on moving the needle as well as the questions that I just asked, that will help us coming back on the other side from the break. The Chair recognizes Councilmember Harrity, followed by Councilmember Rue Landau.
Thank you, Councilman. I have a whole list of questions here that I'll get to in the second round, I guess, but I have a few from a couple constituents who are texting me asking me to ask questions. So let's start with this one: How will principals be held accountable to adhere to the Accelerated Philly goals, especially pertaining to effectively partnering with parents, 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. family, and community members? I'm sorry. Did you not hear that? Okay. How will principals be held accountable to adhere to the Accelerated Philly goals, especially pertaining to effectively partnering with parents, family, and community members? That's one. And how often do FACE liaisons receive professional development to teach them how to advocate families and community members? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you, Councilmember Harrity. To your first question about how will principals be held accountable to Accelerate Philly and our expectations, absolute expectation that starts with the Superintendent and goes right on over to the schools to partner with families and communities. We absolutely are hardwiring that into how we deliver annual evaluations. We can't just say at the 10,000-foot level that we want to partner with families and communities as 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. equal partners and have no tool for measuring that. There's a guardrail that the Board created around the extent to which we work in the community, and we're also including that in how we evaluate the Superintendent, members of my team, Assistant Superintendents and others. To your question about how often the FACE office receives professional development, I can't sit here and tell you the exact number of days, but I'll get that number for you. I will tell you that we're taking a hard look at how we can drive better and more robust community engagement relative to the FACE office given the staffing levels that we have there. We absolutely recognize there's room for improvement. It's no secret. I've heard that, notwithstanding the hard-working people we have in the FACE office.
Okay. And you'll get us those? So that's good. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Absolutely. Yes, sir.
I got another question. It's actually kind of disturbing, if it's true. Teachers' jails or rubber rooms, there is supposed to be three. What are they, how many are there, and where are they? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes. There is this phenomenon referred to as a rubber room. So I don't give you the incorrect information and I certainly won't want to talk about confidential personnel information, I'll invite Deputy Superintendent Grant-Skinner up, who oversees the Human Resources Department, and he can speak specifically to the location and anything else that would be appropriate to share about that. Deputy Superintendent Grant-Skinner. (Witness approached witness table.)
So what 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. are these? These are rooms that are used for disciplinary? Is that what it is? DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT GRANT-SKINNER: Sure. Thank you for the question. There are times when we have allegations of some kind of improper behavior of an employee, which could include a teacher and could include other employees, where that necessitates us to temporarily reassign that individual from their normal work location, such as a school. So an example of that is, there could be an allegation that involves DHS where we get information that says we need to implement a safety plan while that is being invested to remove that person from their normal work location. So while those are not the words we use to name the spaces, we have a couple of spaces at the District office where individuals in those temporary circumstances are reassigned to report to work instead of their typical work 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. location.
So these are actually teachers that are being -- who are accused or being invested for something else unrelated or is it related to the school? Could it be related to the school or is it just if they're having, as you say, an issue with DHS with their own family and then we have to -- so how does it work? DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT GRANT-SKINNER: This could be appropriate for any employee of the District who is under -- for which we've received some allegation that relates in some way to their ability to be in their normal work location.
Okay. So these would be teachers or staff that are kind of suspended, is that what it is, or like kind of -- can you explain like what's the method behind this? This is -- so we're pulling teachers out of classes or whatever in order to send them 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. over there to do what? DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT GRANT-SKINNER: Sure. So you used the word "suspended," and I will say you might think about it in lay terms like that, but it is actually while we are going through an investigation and/or due process. So we've not made any determination of a consequence, which could be suspension, which could be termination, which could be something else.
So they're waiting for their case or whatever it is to go through the process, and as they're going through the process, they are assigned to these other rooms? DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT GRANT-SKINNER: Alternate location.
And while they're there -- I'm sure there's levels of severity for what's going on there. What's going on while they're there? Like what are they doing? Are 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. they working? Are they getting other training? Like what happens? DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT GRANT-SKINNER: So they're --
Or are they just sitting there doing nothing, in other words, collecting a paycheck? DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT GRANT-SKINNER: It's a range, and I would say what is consistent in all of those cases, it is aligned with an expectation that they continue to report to work, because these are cases where, again, we are going through due process and can't stop paying them.
Yeah, innocent until proven guilty. I get that. I get that. So I'm just trying to get a whole handle on the whole situation. So how many at any one time do we have assigned to these rooms? DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT GRANT-SKINNER: I don't have any specific number available today, but we could 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. follow up with that.
I'm sorry. If we can get those -- and I got you, Councilman. If we can get the number of teachers or staff in general that are currently in the rubber room before we finish our hearing today, that would definitely be appreciated. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you. Happy to follow up, Chair Thomas. I do want to note that the School District of Philadelphia has some 19,000 employees, and when we get you the number, sir, you'll find that there's a very minuscule percent that are going to be there. So I do want to manage that expectation. And, number two, I will defend to the death any individual's right to due process. The key is due process 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. ought to occur in a timely manner. It's no different than in the court system. Nobody should sit -- I'm no lawyer like President Streater, but nobody should sit in a courtroom for 50 years waiting to get to trial to be able to face their accuser. But we'll be happy to get that information. Thank you.
And if you could, what's the average length of stay that they're assigned to this other thing, like how long? Are they there average six months waiting for the -- because I know how the court process works, because it takes sometimes, especially with DHS, it could take a long while for their investigation to finish, and at that point, these teachers are pulled out of teaching our children. So I'm just curious, you know, the length of stay and the number that are actually in that teachers jail or rubber room, whatever they're calling it. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Councilmember Harrity and Chair Thomas, since I don't routinely ask for that report and it's not an established data system that I routinely review, since you've asked me that question, I'd like to defer to giving us an opportunity to go back and pull the data and be very transparent with the response to you.
I'm fine with that. I'd rather it be right than a guess. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, sir. Happy to.
Thank you, Councilman. Appreciate the line of questioning. Just for clarity, Doc, can we get the number of people in the rubber room sooner, because I know that number is not hard for you to come by. The Councilman's other request as far as the 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. average time, I know that might take you some time to get. So if we can just get the first part of his question answered today, and the second part, if you can get it to our Council President, we would definitely appreciate that. The Chair recognizes Councilmember Landau, followed by Councilmember O'Rourke and after Councilmember O'Rourke, that would be the end of the first round and we will take a brief recess. Councilmember Landau.
Thank you. Thanks for sticking with us here. Appreciate you. I want to ask a couple of series of questions, but just underscore what my colleagues are saying about reimagining how we're doing things at the School District. I appreciate that our scores are going up, but the floor should not be the floor. We should only be 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. continually moving the ceiling, because we've got some wonderful young kids who can do so well and some educators that just need support. So on that level, I wanted to ask, so many of our schools have one, maybe two counselors. I'm told that sometimes counselors are pulled from their counseling duties to cover a class sometimes twice a day. Can you share with Council the classroom coverage procedures and why are counselors covering, especially when our students are experiencing so much trauma? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you, Councilmember Landau. I'll say two things. Number one, the National Counselors Association recommends a student-to-counselor ratio of one counselor per 250 students. That sounds like a big number. Historically the counselor-to-student ratio in the School District of Philadelphia has been one counselor per 649 students. That's been 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. our historic ratio. Now, we have made some inroads to get that down in part with the COVID -- the ARPA dollars. We can follow up and get the exact numbers through Chief Herbstman and we'll communicate that back to Council. Yes, we have been in communications with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers that represents many certificated staff members, not just teachers, and one of the things we've been talking about is trying to keep our counselors specific to their roles given the level of trauma we have in the City. We have received some complaints, very transparently, about counselors being asked to work on attendance issues, to teach in a rotation sometimes so that teachers can have more time to plan together, and we've been addressing those with our PFT partners I think with great progress.
Can you 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. tell us how many schools have social worker teams helping students, how many social workers those schools have, and how many schools do not have these teams and how much would it cost to put these teams into every school? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: I'd like to pull those numbers and have staff to pull them, unless Chief Herbstman has those numbers at the ready. I don't think we have those at the ready, but we can -- Chair Thomas, we can pull that data together very quickly and we can also share with you. Now, in a lot of districts, and I'll have to check with ours, there are some positions that schools actually share. Like it's very rare that one school will have a dedicated speech-language pathologist depending on school size, but we'll take a look at that and we'll get you the information. We understand your question.
Right. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. The more supports to our teachers, the better. Okay. Next set of questions. According to Penn Law Professor Dorothy Roberts, 50 percent of Black children will be subjected to a child welfare investigation by the time they are 18, and truancy is a major driver of family separation. What schools have the highest truancy rates in the City? I have a few questions. I'll rattle them off. What schools have the highest truancy rates in the City? Can the District send information documenting the primary causes for truancy? Are school-based factors like bullying, unmet special education needs, and high teacher vacancies taken into account? And what specific strategies does the District use to reach young people with persistent truancy and disengagement from school given the high rate with which we see these children becoming involved with gun violence on both sides of the tragedies? 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Thank you. Relative to the question, Councilmember Landau, on what schools have the highest truancy rates, we absolutely can get you that very quickly, because we look at this every Monday afternoon in my cabinet meeting. My direct reports and I meet and we look at attendance across the board and we look at the school over the previous week to month that had the most absences, all the way down to the schools that have some of the most improving absences. So we can get you that report. The primary causes varies. I can tell you that kids who have supports outside of school, family structures that provide support seems to be a big piece of the equation. It ranges from everything to kids who are ranging -- who are helping to care for other family members, all the way to kids not having clean clothes to wear to school and things like having washing machines 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. inside of schools that work. We're finding lots of different needs, but the nucleus is having a support system, a family nucleus support system that is able to provide the supports necessary to be in school. I will tell you we've looked at truancy -- we're also looking at truancy for children who come to some schools, to some classrooms and not others, and that data is very telling, as well in terms of how we make school places where kids want to be, that they find relevant, that they find -- that they have connections to. And then, third, when we look at our kids who are involved in the arts, athletics, chorus, band, et cetera, we're finding that they have much better attendance, much better graduation rates, and less truancy problems, and the same is true for our children who are engaged in some kind of extracurricular activity. And so we know that's a nucleus that we're looking at as well. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. We've got a number of strategies regarding truancy, but the first one is not to necessarily increase the students in courts and taking the punitive measures, because it's kind of like if Reginald Streater is not in school every day, once he comes to school, why in the world am I going to suspend him again? That may be what he wants. That's certainly not going to help him. So we have to get eyeball to eyeball with our young people, and we have to stop saying that schools need to be the schools of yesterday. Our kids are different. They've got different needs, and we have to understand their perspectives and, quite frankly, we have to also focus on the curriculum. I know this doesn't sound like a sexy answer, but when kids have to come and sit in a straight row for eight hours, I know I can't do it. So we're also thinking about how we make schools more engaging 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. for them as well.
Great. I would also, just before I pass the mic, say I'm a big fan of the Lift Every Voice talking about a Chief Joy Officer, because I don't think they should be sitting in rows for eight hours a day. I think that's part of the problem. It's very hard for them to do that. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Joy is one of our Board-approved core values.
Thank you, colleague. Thank you for the questions. A lot of homework hopefully that we can get information for after the break, and I think Councilmember Landau just added to that list. I'm like 90 percent sure Councilmember O'Rourke will add to that list as well too. Councilmember O'Rourke is the last person for the first round of 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. questioning, and we just want to remind you that when we come back for the second round after our break, we want to start with hopefully some data and some answers to some of the questions that Councilmembers asked that we unfortunately could not get the answers to. Councilmember O'Rourke. Thank you, sir. Appreciate your patience.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Appreciate you and your leadership. Blessings, good afternoon to you, Superintendent. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Good afternoon, sir.
As well as Chairman Streater. Since you already teed it up, Councilmember Landau, I was really compelled last night by folks who spoke at our budget town hall in West Philly. We were blessed to have the hosting 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. pleasure of Councilmember Gauthier at West Philly High School where Lift Every Voice was there in numbers, and they spoke about the ways in which schools rob our students of joy with practices like punishing students for dancing in line, taking away student recess, silent lunch periods, being quick to suspend or expel students. We know these practices have disproportionate impacts on students of color, Black students, poor students. For example, Black students make up about 50 percent of students in the District, about 71 percent of suspensions, and economically disadvantaged students make up about 40 percent of the District but 86 percent of suspensions, which I'm sure you are fully aware of. This reflects a punitive status quo, is their point. Lift Every Voice proposes that we establish a Chief of Joy, Chief of Joy within the District, a senior-level role that would spearhead efforts to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. prioritize the emotional well-being of all Philadelphia children. This may look like reviewing discipline practices and developing proposals to shift our school cultures to ones that elevate joy as opposed to punishment. So, first, what are your thoughts on Lift Every Voice's proposal for a Chief of Joy, a cabinet-level official focused specifically on student well-being, mental health, and approaches to discipline? And I'm reminded even as I'm saying this to take a note out of Madam Mayor's quotation book. If you want something done, you give that job to somebody, and if we are trying to address the issue of joy or lack thereof, it seems to me like it wouldn't be too much of a far shot to give that job to someone to ensure that it happens as opposed to assuming. Can you speak to that for me, Superintendent? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. Absolutely. Councilmember O'Rourke, thank you very much for the question. I'm absolutely intrigued by the concept of a Chief of Joy. While we took the step to establish joy as one of our core values, I was struck by the spirited debate about that one core value in our strategic plan, Accelerate Philly. There were people who were patently opposed to it. I distinctly remember they said, look, kids don't come to school to have a lovefest or to have fun and to play. I grew up in a time where my mother and father or grandmother told me I need to do something, we just did it or else, and if I didn't do it, the teacher told my mother, father, somebody, grandfather before I got home. And I'm not opining on that. I'm just saying it's very interesting. We had another group of folks in the District in our external stakeholders who said, absolutely, we should be thinking about how to build 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. schools around kids that they feel good in. And I remember asking the question, I said, I want you guys to raise your hand, what do you want your own children to experience, and I'm putting my hand up for joy. So I think it certainly has value. I also think that the more -- we've got some issues and problems we've got to deal with in the District. There's no question about it, particularly related to Black boys and how they're treated, higher suspension rate, lower achievement. I also think that part of that, in addition to thinking about that joy officer position, is we ought to think about how do we communicate with our teaching force that's declining in a way that we give them permission to feel a little bit more joyful about what we think about them, how we appreciate them, because if we don't invest in our teachers, how do they say, they'll eat the students or they'll 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC.
just -- too often they walk out of schools because they feel like they don't feel enough support, both from the District, from parents, and the School District at large. I grew up in a time where teachers were revered, and unfortunately across the country, we've moved too far away from that. I grew up in a time where it didn't matter whether you were a teacher of Black, white, brown, polka dot. If they ask you to do something, you do it the first time. A little bit of that stuff kind of helps teachers have a little bit more joy, and I think they pass that joy onto students. But your point is well taken. When I see children, particularly Black and brown children in pre-K and kindergarten, and they come to school full of wonder, excitement, et cetera, and then I see them sometimes in 7th, 8th, 9th grade and I say, what happened 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. there? And I'm going to be quite frank, and the Superintendent and our staffs have to ask that question and look at ourselves in the mirror in that regard as well.
Thank you for hearing that question and thank you for noting all that you noted as it relates to the process and how people responded to the joy piece. I do feel strongly that as odd or as loosey-goosey or liberal as it may sound, if we're intentional about prioritizing the things that we actually want, we'll see it show up in a real meaningful way. So thank you for entertaining it. As we all know, teacher shortages are a huge issue across the country and in Philadelphia. In 2021 and 2022 school year, nearly one in three Philadelphia teachers left their positions. It's also notable to me that between 2018 and 2022, educators in charter schools left teaching at a rate 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. almost double that of District teachers. So we've got incredibly high attrition rates problem, especially in our charter schools. I want to talk about this more. What were the teacher attrition rates for District and charter schools in the 2022 and 2023 school year? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: We can get you that information. I'm not sure if we have that on the ready in front of us, the attrition rate in 2022-'23, but we can get that in short order. If we could add to the list, Chair Thomas, if you'll permit that.
Appreciate that. And as you're doing it, does the School District actually conduct exit interviews with all teachers who leave their positions? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: I'm sorry. I couldn't hear that. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC.
Does the School District actually conduct interviews with educators that actually leave their positions, exit interviews? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, sir. We do exit interviews, and routinely I will just handpick a teacher here or -- teachers in particular. I don't get a chance to do it with all employees, but I will handpick a few every now and again just because I'd like to get eyeball to eyeball with our teachers, but Deputy Superintendent Grant-Skinner leads that process in the Human Resources Department.
And what are the primary drivers of teacher attrition from your reports? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: It looks like there are two reasons. One, low pay. Two, our teachers feel like they have not received the support by their direct administrator, their direct -- whoever directly supervises 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. them, and some teachers report that they struggle with classroom management.
Okay. I know we've been here a long time and I've heard the bell, but what are some of the key strategies the School District is actually employing to improve teacher retention? I really wanted to ask more specifically between that versus charter, but just for the sake of expediency, what are some of the key strategies the School District is championing here? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: One, providing training and development for supervisors to know how to best connect with and pour into and support their direct reports, and it goes way beyond giving somebody a birthday card on their birthday or recognizing them for an accomplishment. I'm talking about classroom-based supports where teachers feel like they can go to their administrator and talk about concerns or problems they are having and they not 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. immediately be evaluated on it but that we coach them to get better and give them the supports to get better. Another teacher retention strategy is, there are some schools that are hard to staff. We probably have a lot more, and we're not doing as many of them, but where we provide a financial recruitment incentive for teachers who work in some of our hard to staff schools. That number is still not robust enough, and generally it's not competitive even with districts like Camden, New Jersey, which is a much smaller district, but we're moving in that direction and we intend to recommend more incentives -- recruitment and retention incentives to the Board of Education in the upcoming year as we work collaboratively with PFT and CASA unions.
Thank 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. you, colleagues. Thank you to Dr. Watlington, President Streater, the entire leadership team and other Board members who are here today. We are now going to stand in recess until 3:00 p.m. At that time, we will return. We will continue our dialogue, and hopefully start with you, Dr. Watlington and President Streater and your team, providing some answers to the questions that folks asked today. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Chair Thomas, we'll do our best to go retrieve as much of that information. We don't have our computers here, but we'll send folks to the District to see if we can get that quickly.
Thank you, sir. See everybody at 3:00 p.m. - - - (Recess from 1:55 p.m. to 3:09 p.m.) 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. - - -
This is Round 2, and the Chair relaxes his time to Chairman of Education, Councilmember Isaiah Thomas.
Thank you, Council President, and thank you, colleagues. Let's start, Dr. Watlington, Board President Streater, with hopefully some of the data and responses to some of the questions that Councilmembers had before we took our recess to be able to provide some level of information and clarity on some questions that were asked. Dr. Watlington, if it's okay with you, Board President, Dr. Watlington, if it's okay with you, I would ask that you hold your responses to Councilmember Young's questions specifically because he's not here. So if you can just answer Councilmember Harrity's questions, Councilmember 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. O'Rourke, my questions, and if you could hold Councilmember Rue Landau's questions as well as Councilmember Young's, that would be appreciated.
I would like to respond to the question around academic achievement, and I can speak to the charter sector.
Can we hold -- I think that was Councilmember Young.
Can we hold off until he comes back? We definitely want to hear your response, but I just want to give the Councilmember the leeway to be able to offer some type of rebuttal. Any information around the rubber room, number of people in the rubber room? Councilmember O'Rourke had questions as well too that you said you would get back to. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, sir. Chair Thomas, if you permit me to also give a very clarifying statement about extended-year schools, because I'm not sure that we fully answered that question. May I do that really quick?
I'm not -- I don't memorize the Councilmember that asked that question. I know it was somebody on the right, and I don't think it was Councilmember Nina Ahmad. So can we hold off on that one as well too? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Absolutely. Relative to the talent question, there are 85 employees currently temporarily assigned to the Central Office as an alternate work location. We'll need to do a little bit more research to let you know how that compares to previous years, but 85 employees out of 19,000 District employees are currently assigned to an alternate location. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. There was a question, Mr. Chairman, about environmental closures since I joined the District in June of 2022. During my tenure, approximately 4,163 students, 4,163, less than two percent of our population, the District population, have been affected by a school closure preventing in-person learning due to facilities issues. The schools are Building 21, Gratz, Mitchell, Frankford, CW Henry, Universal Vare, Southwark -- and Southwark. Other schools have been -- had space closures, but relocation was possible within the school. That includes Ben Franklin High School, Bartram High School, and Masterman. I can't remember if you wanted me to speak to the lowest performing -- ten lowest performing schools. We'll hold on that. I think that was per Councilmember Young's question.
Partly Councilmember Young, partly myself. So 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. we can hold it until Councilmember Young comes back -- SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: Yes, sir.
-- to have a more robust question. I do want to go to a line of questioning that Councilmember O'Rourke had. I don't know the exact concept he said, but he talked about a position of joy. So unfortunately I was not able to attend the hearing yesterday, but I did hear this concept presented at another one of our town halls. If I heard Councilmember O'Rourke paraphrase it correctly, the goal of the position would be able to basically create positive experiences for young people who attend our schools, is that correct, based on what your knowledge of the position is? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: That's correct, Mr. Chairman.
Okay. So when Frankford High School first 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. closed -- clearly I'm a graduate of Frankford High School, so my bias is there. When Frankford High School first closed, there was a lot of uncertainty from the District around how bad the asbestos problem was, which again you did not create, but the problem was so bad that we were not sure if it should be renovated or if it should be a brand new building. Dr. Watlington, with all due respect, I pressured you, Mr. Oz, President Streater, the entire District for months to give us a response as it relates to the future of Frankford High School. The other side of what I pushed you on was positive experiences. One of the things that I asked you all to do was to try to put us in a position to be able to make sure that we're providing trips, incentives, and positive activities for the parents -- I'm sorry; for the staff 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. and for the students that were at Frankford High School. So being inspired a little bit by Councilmember O'Rourke's line of questioning, I'm wondering on a small scale have we been able to adhere to what this position is calling for as it relates to providing positive, fun experiences for the people at Frankford High School? Because if I remember correctly, we did agree at the beginning of the school year that we would go down that journey with Frankford High School. We're in April, May at this point. So I'm wondering where are we as it relates to positive experiences for Frankford High School and what have we done to make sure that that school is experiencing positive events and activities? SUPERINTENDENT WATLINGTON: I'll say two things. First, Councilmember Harrity's point about a -- and Councilmember O'Rourke's point about a position dedicated to joy, Chief of Joy 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. and the like, it has merits. We're taking that as a homework assignment to think about. Relative to Frankford High School, since the 9th grade class is relocated to Roberto Clemente School, not specifically to joy per se, but we've arranged, thanks to the good work of our COO and Principal, Dr. Calderone, we've got what they call the Pioneer Express. I believe that's what they call it, the bussing system that moves children from Frankford to Roberto Clemente. I think the way they labeled that and tried to make it a positive experience, not something dreaded moving from neighborhood to the next and to try to make it -- talk it up as something that's kind of fun and interesting. I think that is a very, very small manifestation of how we're trying to see the glass is half full instead of half -- the glass half full instead of half empty. 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. I know we provided some additional budgetary resources to Frankford so that they don't lose -- we know they need more staffing because they're on two different campuses. Relative to specific acts of joy, I would need to drill down a little bit deeper with Principal Calderone, but I can tell you, I've been on that campus to have lunch with he and members of his staff, and the mere fact that we're talking to them, engaging them face to face, I know President Streater and members of his Board have been there themselves to walk the campus, and I think that assured the principal that there's a level of support, both at the Board and Superintendent level.
Thank you. I appreciate that response. I'm going to open the floor up to some of the other responses. Councilmember Young has joined us. There are some responses to 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. your questions from earlier, so we do want to allow for that dialogue. After that, I have a few questions, and based on who is queued up, we will start with Councilmember Lozada, if she makes it up, but if Councilmember Lozada doesn't make it up, we'll start with our Majority Leader, Councilmember Gilmore Richardson, followed by our Minority Leader, Councilmember Brooks. Councilmember Young, just for the record, we're going to pass it to Board President Streater as well as Superintendent Watlington to provide some more detailed answers to the questions that you asked earlier.
Thank you for the question. Just to frame the question, the Board of Education doesn't have direct oversight as to the day-to-day operation, curriculum. We don't know the attrition rate, for 4/30/24 - WHOLE - BILL 240179, ETC. example --