[ education ]
January is a tense time to be a parent of a kindergarten-age child in West Philly. It is, after all, school registration time, when in-the-know parents camp out overnight to register their kids at Penn Alexander — the school that, through a partnership between the Philadelphia School District (PSD) and the University of Pennsylvania, has become both beacon of hope and object of envy for ambitious neighborhood parents.
This year, with a still-fluid Facilities Master Plan in play — designed to eradicate the bulk of the PSD's more than 70,000 empty classroom seats this year by closing some schools and redrawing catchment boundaries for others — the anxiety is greater than ever.
Parents who weighed the options and chose to raise their children in Philadelphia, in the neighborhood public school system, have invested big: either financially, in properties in sought-after catchments like Penn Alexander (where housing prices have quadrupled since the school opened in 1998, according to a study by Penn's Urban Research Institute), or with their time, sometimes 20 or 30 hours a week devoted to improving schools their children might not even be old enough to attend for years.
While they watched their peers flee to the suburbs, pony up funds for private schools or try their luck with the increasingly competitive charter school lotteries, they made pacts to stick it out, feeling a little like educated, middle-class pioneers. Now, there are questions.
Like this one: "What advice are you giving parents who want their kids to attend their neighborhood school ... besides get a warm sleeping bag?" That was Vicki McGarvey, a West Philly mom of a 3-and-a-half-year-old, querying interim PSD Superintendent Leroy Nunery at a recent community meeting.
McGarvey lives at 46th and Osage, just inside Penn Alexander boundaries, and her panic is palpable. "Everyone on our block is concerned about the redrawing of the catchment zone, and whether we'll be drawn out," she says.
As to her question, the apparent answer from the School District is, "Be patient" — and that doesn't come easily.
"We need to know where schools will be closing and where grades will be changing before we could look at redrawing boundaries," says Deirdre Darragh, a spokesperson for the district. Until then, parents can only speculate. And, of course, worry.
Graduate Hospital resident Ivy Olesh's son is just a year old — not exactly school age. That didn't stop her, months before her son was even born, from helping found Friends of Chester Arthur, a community group to support the neighborhood elementary school.
So far, the group has raised money for school supplies and launched a tutoring program to replace one that had lost its funding. They're fundraising to build a playground, and recruiting volunteers for projects like an after-school music program.
Olesh says her plan to send her son to Arthur makes her an anomaly among her friends, many of whom have moved away or opted for private school. "People look at us and go, 'Are you serious? This is what you're doing?'" Olesh says.
Now with the nearby E.M. Stanton school up for closure, and the 146 Stanton students who live in the neighborhood to be redistributed to either Arthur or the larger Childs Elementary, Olesh just hopes there will be room for her son at Arthur by the time he's old enough to attend.
"Our neighborhood is burgeoning and capacity is always an issue. And we don't want that to become a problem, if Stanton closes and Arthur's at capacity when there's an influx of parents ready to start sending their kids to school," she says.
Stanton parents aren't happy, either. James Wright, who has a daughter in sixth grade, says he's been working with the ad hoc Save Our Stanton group since June. He's worried about the impact on his property value, as well as his daughter having to adjust to a new school in seventh grade — just when she's applying to high schools. "If you bring it down to one school in the neighborhood, you're limiting the marketability of that area," he says.
Clearly, more Philly parents are making proactive choices about their kids' educations. The PSD projects enrollment will decline by 10,000 students over the next decade, while charter school attendance will grow by 9,000 between 2010 and 2015.
But across the city, there are pockets of parents like Olesh, who chose to forgo the charter lottery gamble and bet instead on neighborhood schools.
In West Philly, parents near (but mostly not within) the Penn Alexander catchment have banded together to form the West Philly Coalition for Neighborhood Schools. Amy D'Antonio, who helped found the group, says that after a stress- and resentment-filled year of attempting to arrange voluntary transfers and charter enrollment for her son, she had an epiphany. "I'm going to make sure [my son's] OK wherever he ends up," D'Antonio says. "And if something needs to change, I'll just change it. Involved parents are the key."
The West Philly Coalition has done a great deal to transform Lea Elementary in particular: using grant funds, partnerships and donations to revive the library, green the schoolyard and, starting this month, bring in Curtis alumnus Stanford Thompson's intensive, five-day-a-week after-school instrumental music program, Play On, Philly.
But nearby Drew Elementary is on the closure list, with its 151 neighborhood students to be shuffled over to Lea and other schools, like the already-competitive Middle Years Academy and Powel School — while potentially shifting, for example, would-be Lea or Penn Alexander kids into other catchments.
West Philly Coalition member Amara Rockar says that, for now, she and others are watching potential redistricting carefully. Rockar herself doesn't yet have children — but she volunteers because she considers it a social justice issue, and because she'd like to have kids in the neighborhood school one day.
"Penn Alexander is great, but that's a top-down model for supporting a school. We're trying to do this from the bottom up," she says. "This is not an attempt to be a middle-class takeover of the school; it's an attempt to get everyone involved."
But community members' power is limited. Rockar points out that, despite the new library and revamped schoolyard, the 98-year-old Lea building, too, is in need of repairs. (Schools are crumbling across the city; the PSD targeted for closure buildings where repair costs would exceed 75 percent of the cost of replacement. At Lea, that repair-replacement ratio is 72 percent.)
Still, it works for now. Meg Gardner, who has an 8-year-old son, had signed a lease for a $1,400-a-month apartment because it was in the Penn Alexander catchment. Then her son was put on the school's wait list. She tried "working night and day to send him to private school." When it became too much, she enrolled him at Lea.
So far, she's thrilled ... ish. The art, tennis and hockey are more than her son had access to in private school. But, she says, "When you go into Penn Alexander and they have everything you can imagine, and then you go a few blocks away to Lea and they're like, 'Oh, yay, the bathrooms are fixed,' that's inequality staring us right in the face."
Even if Lea wasn't Gardner's first choice, she now feels lucky to live in the catchment — at least, as it's drawn for now.
But, D'Antonio says, that's just it: "You shouldn't have to be lucky to go to school."
