Archives for category: Closing schools
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Michigan: Governor Whitmer Tells Benton Harbor that “Doing Nothing Is Not an Option”

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2019 //
7

Governor Gretchen Whitmer wrote a letter to the Benton Harbor school board, letting them know that it was up to them to accept the state’s offer, which meant the state would forgive the district’s debts and the district would close its beloved high school.

Excuse me, Governor Whitmer, but why doesn’t the state offer to send support to this impoverished school district, not just forgive its debts. It does not have the tax base to support its schools. Doesn’t the state has a legal obligation to secure equal educational opportunity for every child, regardless of zip code?

Is Governor Whitmer relying on the same education advisors as those who counseled Rick Snyder and John Engler?

Categories Closing schools, Funding, Michigan

Civil Rights Leader Jitu Brown Speaks Out Against Privatization by Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2019 //
6

 

Jitu Brown is leader of the Journey for Justice and a national civil rights leader.

In this interview, he explains why he opposes school closings, charter schools, and vouchers, which have been disproportionately imposed on communities of color.

Don’t believe the claims by corporate reformers that black and brown parents want privately managed charters where they have no voice. They want well-funded public schools with experienced teachers and a full array of programs and services, where their voice matters.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

Benton Harbor: Residents See Possible Closing of Beloved High School as Racism, Despite Low Test Scores

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2019 //
10

 

Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitme campaigned in Benton Harbor, promising to invest in schools and to reverse Republican Rick Snyder’s ruinous policies of state takeover and school closings. Once elected, she offered Benton Harbor a deal: the state will forgive your debts if you close the high school to cut costs. If you don’t take the deal, the whole district may be closed. The residents felt betrayed.

And rightly so. Poor communities can’t raise as much revenue as rich districts. The state has a responsibility to step in and assure equal educational opportunity, especially for the neediest communities.

 

BENTON HARBOR, Mich. — In Benton Harbor, a small city beside Lake Michigan, the high school binds generations and strangers. This is a place where basketball games are a highlight of the social calendar, where signs celebrating state championships are placed at the edge of city limits, where residents say what year they graduated when they introduce themselves.

For years, Benton Harbor’s school system had faced dismal fiscal conditions, miserable academic rankings and intense scrutiny from the state. But when Michigan voters chose a new governor last November, it was seen as a hopeful sign in Benton Harbor. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who won more than 90 percent of the vote in this city, presented herself as a supporter of investment in struggling places, a defender of public schools, someone who cared about Benton Harbor.

But in May, Ms. Whitmer brought a grim message: Benton Harbor should close its high school and the state could forgive the district millions of dollars in debts. Otherwise, the entire school district was at risk of shutting down.

The proposal was seen as a betrayal in Benton Harbor, a predominantly black city where the high school has operated since the 1870s. What would it say to the children, residents asked, if their hometown was deemed unfit for a high school? And without Benton Harbor High School — without Tiger football games and the robotics team and the marching band — what would be left of Benton Harbor?

“It would kill the whole community,” said Greg Hill, 18, who graduated from Benton Harbor High this month and said he hoped to eventually return to the school as a history teacher. He called Ms. Whitmer’s plan “educational genocide.”

Michigan has a uniquely troubled history of state intervention in financially struggling cities with mostly African-American residents. In Inkster, where 72 percent of residents are black, the school district dissolved six years ago after the state deemed it financially unviable. In Detroit, where the population is 79 percent black, the state seized control of the school system and took the municipal government through bankruptcy. In Flint, 54 percent black, a state-appointed emergency manager changed the drinking water source and touched off the city’s water crisis.

So in Benton Harbor, where 86 percent of the 10,000 residents are black, many people saw Ms. Whitmer’s proposal not as an unavoidable end to longstanding academic and fiscal problems with the high school, but as the racist result of years of state meddling and disinvestment.

Categories Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Michigan, Racism

Teacher: Stop Ranking Schools—It Is a Fraud!

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2019 //
38

Attention Editors of U.S. News & World Report!

Gina Caneva teaches in a high school in Chicago that received a high ranking from U.S. News & World Report, but she is not happy. 

She knows the rankings are destructive nonsense. They are a fraud.

I began teaching 15 years ago at Corliss High School in the Roseland community on the Far South Side. Then and now, the school’s student body is nearly entirely African American, and 90% are termed “low income.” Currently, U.S. News and World Report states that Corliss is in between 430-647 in their rankings, CPS gives it a Level 2 rating and the Illinois Report Card designates it as a lowest performing school. Although I don’t have the numbers from 15 years ago, without a doubt these rankings would have been similar as I remember it being a school “on probation.” This meant that it could be closed.

But inside, it was neither a school on probation nor a failing school. Teachers worked together to prepare a rigorous curriculum that engaged students at many different skill levels despite lacking resources. Many students were fully present and active in their coursework. When outsiders stereotyped my students by asking, “Do they listen to you?” and “Do you just pass them through?” I told them story after story about my students reading and analyzing the nearly 600-page “Invisible Man” and writing poetry that rivaled published authors.

But there were some obstacles a rigorous curriculum and student engagement couldn’t overcome. Back in 2004, we only had one working computer lab for over 1,000 students. When we returned from winter break, bullet holes pierced our corridor windows — a glaring reminder of the violence in the neighborhood. Students had very few resources to deal with trauma or social-emotional learning as social work services were slim to none. I remember working with a student who lost her mother and younger siblings to violence over Christmas. She did not need rigorous instruction; we were ill-equipped to supply the emotional support she needed.

My second school, TEAM Englewood Community Academy, was a start-up school that opened because a low-ranked school was closed. Again, teachers and students worked diligently together to achieve district goals. Our students rarely met them, but not for lack of effort or focus. Bodies of research support the impact of poverty and segregation as legitimate factors of limited success on standardized tests. But whatever the factors were, for my students, they proved to be too much as the school would be labeled a failure. Last year, TEAM Englewood closed in much the same fashion as the school it replaced.

Presently, I teach at the 11th best ranked high school in Illinois. Lindblom teachers work diligently and are experts in their fields. We strive to provide a rigorous curriculum as much as teachers I worked with at Corliss and TEAM Englewood did. But there are two major differences at Lindblom. First, our students meet and exceed district, state and national goals. Second, they have to test in to get accepted into our school. As a selective-enrollment school, if a student does not meet the criteria of a certain score on a placement test before ninth grade, they cannot attend Lindblom. Yet our school, with our selective population, is ranked using the same measures against schools that are not selective. Simply put, the process is unfair.

 

Categories Accountability, Closing schools, Competition, Fraud

Mercedes Schneider: Bill Gates Has Been Spending Millions to Buy Influence for Years

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2019 //
43

 

Mercedes Schneider was a little surprised that Bill Gates is setting up a lobbying organization. Why should he? He has been shelling out millions to buy Influence with state and federal policy makers for years.

She writes:

Whereas the idea of Gates paying individuals to lobby to alter policy in line with his billionaire preferences, the public should realize that Gates already has an oversized influence on legislators and other elected and appointed officials.

For example, from 2002 to 2018, the Gates Foundation has paid the National Governors Association (NGA) $33.2M for Gates-approved initiatives, mostly affecting K12 education.

Shall we pretend that Gates’ steadily funding an association of state governors to promote Gates goals does not sway these governors? I think not.

From 2002 to 2018, Gates has also paid $122M to the state education superintendent organization, Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) on his K12 education preferences.

Both NGA and CCSSO were key organizations in promoting Common Core (see here and here, for example). Common Core is a Gates pet; he has been shelling out his billionaire bucks on it for years, even trying to tie it to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Gates has even paid grants to the US Department of Education: $858M (2013 – 2016). Wrap your mind around that one.

But there’s more.

From 2013 to 2016, Gates paid $1.8M to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The largest grant ($1.2M in 2015) was “to support education of state policymakers.”

In 2009, Gates stood before them and, as National Conference for State Legislatures “co-chair,” he told them what he wanted, as excerpted below from my March 20, 2014 post, which also references my March 17, 2014, post about Gates dining with 80 senators:

On March 13, 2014, Bill Gates had dinner with 80 senators and other elected officials. Given his keynote the following day to members of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), make no mistake that Gates used his time with the senators and other officials to push the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

However, Gates is more than CCSS. Gates is the entire spectrum of reforms, and he is more than willing to use his influence to promote his opinion of educational reform to those supposedly elected By the People.

The following text is an excerpt from Gates’ 2009, speech to the National Council of State Legislatures, which“co-chair” Gates offered as part of his complete speech on so-called education reform.

The entire speech is worth a sobering read.

Mercedes links to the Gates’ speech and quotes it.

Please open the link and read what he said in 2009.

Ten years later we know that every Gates Initiative in education has failed.

Testing, measuring teachers by test scores, closing public schools and replacing them with charters, Common Core, data-driven everything.

Do you think he knows it?

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Testing

Jack Schneider: Why Are Americans Turning Against Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2019 //
22

 

Jack Schneider, a historian of education who often collaborates with Jennifer Berkshire, analyzes the fading allure of charter schools. After years of claims that they would “save” public schools and poor children, the public has given up on them. Why? They have not delivered, and the public gets it.

For most of the past thirty years, charters seemed unstoppable, especially because their expansion was backed by billions from people like the Waltons, Gates, and Broad, as well as the federal government. But they have not kept their promises.

Today, however, the grand promises of the charter movement remain unfulfilled, and so the costs of charters are being evaluated in a new light.

After three decades, charters enroll six percent of students. Despite bold predictions by their advocates that this number will grow fivefold, charters are increasingly in disrepute.

First, the promise of innovation was not met. Iron discipline is not exactly innovative.

Second, the promise that charters would be significantly better than public schools did not happen. In large part, that is because the introduction of charters simply creates an opportunity for choice; it does not ensure the quality of schools. Rigorous research, from groups like Mathematica Policy Research and Stanford University, has found that average charter performance is roughly equivalent to that of traditional public schools. A recent study in Ohio, for instance, concluded that some of the state’s charters perform worse than the state’s public schools, some perform better, and roughly half do not significantly differ.

Finally, charters have not produced the systemic improvement promised by their boosters.

Competition did not lift all boats. In fact, competition has weakened the public schools that enroll most students at the same time that charters do not necessarily provide a better alternative.

Schneider does not mention one other important reason for the diminishing reputation of charters: scandals, frauds, embezzlement, and other scams that appear daily in local and state media. A significant number of charters are launched and operated by non-educators and by entrepreneurs, which amplifies the reasons for charter instability and failure.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Competition, Corruption, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Innovation, Privatization, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Michigan: Students and Board Members Fight to Save Benton Harbor High School

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2019 //
31

 

Governor Gretchen Whitmer was elected in Michigan last fall as a progressive Democrat. She promised to reverse the destructive anti-public school policies of her predecessor Republican Rick Snyder.

But Governor Whitmer announced plans to close Benton Harbor High School, over the objections of school board members and students. They say that Governor Whitmer made her decision without listening to their voices. Whatever happened to democracy?

Governor Whitmer, I call upon you to meet with the elected Benton Harbor school board and student representatives.

School board member Patricia Rush wrote this letter:

Hi all –

Things have hit a new high of chaos with the Benton Harbor Schools.
From the School Board perspective, we thought we were making great progress – straightening out the budget, establishing a strategy for building repairs, increased teacher pay, etc
UNTIL Friday when Governor Whitmer (a newly elected progressive Democrat) – pulled the rug out by announcing her unilateral decision that the State is closing Benton Harbor High School in 2020 and dispersing the students to a new Charter School and 9 local, predominantly white school districts.
So the past 3 days have been extremely chaotic.
Attached is our Press Release and an Open Letter to the Governor opposing the State’s moves.
The state completely under-estimated the pushback from the Community – not just BH but across the State.
Also the State not only did not consult the elected local BH School Board but excluded also the State School Board (which is 40% minority).
The State also refused to hold open public hearings and tried to get our School Board to meet with them in small groups which sidesteps the Open Meeting Act.
See this video written, produced and performed by the High School students – which they have been working on PRIOR to the current mess.
The school board of Benton Harbor released these statements.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


From the Benton Harbor Area Schools Board (BHAS)


May 27, 2019


Contact: Steve.Mitchell@bhas.org or Joseph.Taylor@bhas.org
Benton Harbor Area Schools Board and the Community Demand Reconsideration of Governor Whitmer’s Plan to Close Benton Harbor High School


BENTON HARBOR, Mich. – On Tuesday June 4, 2019 at 6pm – the Benton Harbor Area Schools Board will hold the first of several Open Public Meetings at the High School Public Commons to discuss the future of Benton Harbor High School and the entire K-12 school district. Students, families, teachers, and community members are strongly encouraged to participate.
We are urgently requesting that Governor Gretchen Whitmer appear in person at our June 4 Public Meeting – and fulfill 3 of her campaign promises: to support public schools, especially in high-poverty communities, to fight urban poverty, and to hold government accountable. Please see Whitmer’s campaign website: https://www.gretchenwhitmer.com/issues/.

Attached is the Board’s Open Letter to Michigan Governor Whitmer. We respectfully request that all news media PRINT OUR ENTIRE LETTER TO WHITMER – and display on your website.

As has been widely covered in the media over the past few days, Governor Whitmer’s Office, Michigan Treasury, and parts of the Michigan Department of Education have proposed a unilateral plan to close Benton Harbor High School in 2020 with re-distribution of BHAS high school students to a proposed charter school under Lake Michigan College and nine other local school districts.

Parts of the story not reported in the media:

– Governors Office and Michigan Treasury did NOT consult the elected Trustees of the BentonHarbor Board members prior to their unilateral decision. The two BHAS Board members who were briefed in the State Capital Lansing on Friday 5/24/19 were told by the Governors Office staff that this decision to exclude the elected Benton Harbor Board was intentional.


– Likewise, on 5/23/19, the elected state-wide Trustees of the Michigan Department of Education were informed that the Governor’s Office had also excluded them from giving input into the fate of Benton Harbor High School.

– On 5/24/19, the Governors Office informed the two Benton Harbor Board members attending the Lansing meeting that the Governors Office had not held an open public meeting for community input – and did not plan to do so. Instead, the Governors Office met with undisclosed community members that the Governor felt were “representative.”

– The BHAS Board were told that the Governors Draft Plan is a “Yes – or – No Decision with no opportunity for negotiation.” BHAS Board was told it must decide by close of business Friday June 7 to accept the Plan or risk that the State may elect to dissolve the entire Benton Harbor Areas Schools district at any time.

This one-sided decision-making by Michigan State officials is unacceptable. We, the Benton Harbor Area Schools Board are going to hold our State government accountable.

In April 2019, the BHAS Board unanimously voted to support the Fresh Start Resolution petitioning the State of Michigan to reexamine public school accountability and finance systems, calling for a system of improvement strategies developed collaboratively by all stakeholders – to ensure all students and teachers have a voice and receive the opportunities and support they deserve.

The State bears direct responsibility for a significant portion of the BHAS debt. The legacy of this debt should be transparently reviewed and addressed – but the High School cannot be held hostage for the State to agree to debt forgiveness.

The fate of the Benton Harbor High School and the entire School District requires careful planning by all involved parties – especially the opportunity of full community input plus input from both the state and local School Board Trustees who were duly elected by the community to represent them.

//
The BHAS Board OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR WHITMER Follows immediately


We respectfully request that all news media PRINT OUR ENTIRE LETTER TO WHITMER and display on your website.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
From the Benton Harbor Area Schools Board (BHAS)
May 27, 2019
Contact: Steve.Mitchell@bhas.org or Joseph.Taylor@bhas.org


OPEN LETTER TO MICHIGAN GOVERNOR GRETCHEN WHITMER FROM THE ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD OF BENTON HARBOR AREA SCHOOLS, BENTON HARBOR, MICHIGAN.


Dear Governor Whitmer –


We respectfully and urgently request that you visit Benton Harbor in person to meet in an Open Public Meeting with the community and the elected School Board trustees regarding the future of Benton Harbor High School and the K-12 District as a whole.

The School Board is hosting an Open Public Meeting at the Benton Harbor High School Student Commons on Tuesday June 4 at 6pm. We would love to host you and let you hear the full story.

Hopefully you are aware that representatives from your office, Treasury and the Department of Education are claiming that, on your behalf, a unilateral decision has been made to close Benton Harbor High School in 2020. The Board was told by your representatives that a decision was made by your office to intentionally exclude the elected School Board trustees and exclude open community input from the decision-making process. Honestly, we are completely shocked and dismayed by this action. Our Board has been working in good faith with both Treasury and Education to address issues at BHAS including an outline for a new Strategic Plan, submitted to Treasury, but upon which your departments have taken no action.

We also want to openly confront the many “elephants in the room” that neither your staff nor the news media have addressed:

• The land upon which the Benton Harbor High School sits with its athletic fields and adjacent School Board properties are the LAST MAJOR UNDEVELOPED WATERFRONT PROPERTIES in Berrien County, Michigan. Is this just a coincidence, given that your office just told our Board representatives on 5/24/19 that your plan to close Benton Harbor High School has major (but unnamed) supporters in the nearby business community?

• The Draft Plan from your office is explicitly a transfer of wealth from an overwhelmingly poor and black community (Benton Harbor) to nearby white, more affluent communities. Under your Plan, that transfer of wealth will occur through the loss by Benton Harbor of its school facilities and use of school land, transfer of state funding from Benton Harbor to the adjacent nine school districts where you plan Benton Harbor students to be redistributed, and loss of jobs for local teachers and staff of all levels.

• The contention by representatives of your office that hiring a single staff person to act as a “Cultural Dean” to smooth over “discomfort” that the displaced 700 black students might feel when transported out of their community to predominantly white schools is an appalling insult to our youth and the community. Such insensitivity to the painful history of racial segregation, unsuccessful past desegregation efforts, and continued State-sponsored dis-investment in Benton Harbor calls for a swift and strong response.

We call upon you to meet with us – to hear the students voices and the expertise of our teachers.


We call upon you to fulfill your 2018 campaign promises to support public schools, especially in high-poverty communities, to fight urban poverty, and to hold government accountable.

BHAS needs balanced, constructive leadership from you, your office and all State agencies.

We need complete transparency. We need State and local leaders to stop sensationalizing limited
facts about Benton Harbor in the media and on the Michigan.gov website created by your office to
promote your Plan to close Benton Harbor High School. Our community needs to feel that our
youth are respected, valued and worth meaningful investment so that they may achieve their
tremendous potential. The students, their families, our teachers, and our community deserve that.


Sincerely, Steve Mitchell, Trustee and Board President
Joseph Taylor, Trustee and Board Vice-President
Patricia Rush, Trustee and Board Secretary
Denise Whatley-Seats, Trustee and Board Treasurer
Matthew Bradley, Trustee
Lue Buchana, Trustee
Michelle Crowder, Trustee
//

Categories Accountability, Closing schools, Democracy, Democrats, Michigan

NYC: Parents and Activists Win Battle to Keep PS 25 Open: A Victory for Resistance!

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2019 //
5

 

The NYC Department of Education wanted to close PS 25 in Brooklyn to make room for a Success Academy charter middle school, but parents and activists fought them in court. Yesterday the Resistance won.

PS 25 will stay open!

PS 25 is a high-poverty, high-performing school.

It has small classes, and Leonie Haimson says it demonstrates the importance of class size. 

Leonie and her small-but-mighty organization Class Size Matters was in the thick of the fight, supporting the. parents of PS 25 against the Powers of the city, the DOE, and Eva.

Leonie writes here on the NYC Parents blog:

Today we won our fight to keep PS 25 open!  DOE had tried to close the school last year, despite the fact that it is an excellent zoned neighborhood school in Bed Stuy that gets stellar results despite a highly disadvantaged student body: 27% kids with special needs, 18 % English language learners, 92% Black and Hispanic, and a 96% economic need index- which combines measures of poverty, public assistance and homelessness. And yet the school performs as well as the citywide average in ELA (46% proficient vs. 46% citywide) and far above the city average in math (71% proficient compared to 47% citywide), according to the DOE’s performance dashboard.

Last year, as I pointed out in my open letter to Chancellor Carranza, published in the Washington Post, the school had the fourth highest rating of any elementary school in the city according to it’s “impact score”, which measures achievement and attendance compared to schools with students of a similar demographic background.  And yet under Carmen Farina, the DOE tried to close the school anyway because of its low enrollment.

At the same time, it was as a result of its low enrollment that PS 25 students had the benefit of very small classes, ranging from 10 to 18 per class – which was one of the main reasons for its success, along with excellent, experienced teachers and a collaborative principal. This year, class sizes at PS 25 are even smaller: 8 to 16 students per class. In essence, the school has served as a natural experiment in class size, showing the heights at which disadvantaged students can achieve if given the right conditions and a real opportunity to learn.

Yet despite the great track record of the school, in February 2018, at the recommendation of then-Chancellor Farina, the Panel for Educational Policy voted 8-5 to close it, with the eight mayoral appointees all rubber-stamping the proposal.  The following month, I helped PS 25 parents file a lawsuit to prevent its closing, with the assistance of Laura Barbieri, our pro bono attorney from Advocates for Justice.

Our primary legal hook was that the Community Education Council in District 16 had never voted to approve closing the school,  which would be required according to NY Ed Law section 2590-E and Chancellor’s regulations A-185, since PS 25 is a zoned school and the district CEC has to pre-approve any changes in zoning.  On May 24, Judge Katherine Levine of the Kings County Supreme Court granted the parents a temporary restraining order, and said the school should stay open for at least year, while she examined the legal issues more closely.

The Judge scheduled another court hearing today, May 16 at 11 AM, nearly a year later.  Right before hand, yesterday afternoon, the city’s attorney called our attorney Laura Barbieri.  She asked Laura to agree to a postponement of the hearing.

Then unexpectedly, the city backed down and agreed to keep the school open for at least another year.

The charter vultures will have to settle somewhere else.

Categories Closing schools, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

Breaking News: California Charter School Will Close Its Doors Tomorrow, Not Waiting for End of School Year

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2019 //
11

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote the following note:

The Summit Preparatory Academy Charter School will be shutting down tomorrow. Like so many charter schools, financial mismanagement is the reason for the closure. The school raised funding with a “Go Fund Me” drive, but they are not waiting till the end of the year to shut their doors. 

California teacher, Martha Infante is a Fulbright teacher, and the past-president of the California Council for Social Studies. She emailed me about Summit and this is what she wrote: 

“My last year at L.A. Academy M.S. our school was devastated to lose significant space to a fly by night charter school, Summit Preparatory Charter School. Schools such as these offer free uniforms, laptops, and the promise of a superior education to woo parents away from public schools, knowing these humble parents are seeking the best education possible for their children. Nothing, I mean nothing, is worse to me than lying to immigrant parents who have sacrificed so much to get to this country, to give their children a better life.”

Martha is horrified that the school is closing abruptly. She said,

“Where will those kids go? What will their families do? It is time to fall out of love with the charter school panacea and re-commit to revitalizing the schools we already have. 

If the parents have the wherewithal to re-enroll their children in a local public school, that school will be impacted by the new enrollees without the commensurate number of additional teachers. In other words, class sizes will skyrocket because districts don’t hire teachers in May. The disruption of so many lives is reprehensible and charter companies should be held responsible for this.”

I am horrified too. The charter experiment with its churn, instability and disruption has to end. The children who attend the Summit Preparatory Academy Charter School and the public school children whose classrooms will be packed once the displaced children arrive deserve better than this. 

Summit Preparatory Academy received over a half million dollars from the federal government’s Charter School Program as “seed money.” We will add one more closed charter school to our list of California charter schools that received federal grants that never opened or closed. The total in wasted funding for California alone is now $104 million.  

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Philadelphia: Closing a Historic High School to Benefit Developers and Gentrification

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2019 //
8

 

City leaders in Philadelphia, as in Chicago and other cities, have decided to sell off or give away some of their most beautiful and historic school buildings.

In Philly, the school district closed Germantown, one of the city’s elegant buildings, on the eve of its 100th birthday, in 2013.

After months of neglect and thousands of dollars of unpaid taxes, the historic pillared building at 40 E. High St., as well as an elementary school sold that year, is going up for sale again.

“After the schools were closed, the city had a responsibility to ensure efficient disposal and redevelopment of these properties,” said Emaleigh Doley, an organizer for the Germantown United Community Development Corp. “How is it possible that today, Germantown High School is up for sheriff sale, and both the high school and Fulton Elementary School sit vacant?”

In fall 2012, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission voted to close 23 schools to save money. Months later, buildings that once welcomed thousands of students were emptied, shuttered, and sold.

Some were revitalized as charter schools. Roberts Vaux High School became Vaux Big Picture; Stephen A. Douglas became Maritime Academy. Some were redeveloped into neighborhood mixed-use spaces like University City, or community and commercial centers like Edward Bok Technical.

Others, like Germantown, weren’t so fortunate….

In September 2013, the Maryland-based Concordia Group began negotiations to purchase Germantown High, as well as nearby Fulton and three other shuttered school buildings: Charles Carroll High School in Port Richmond, and South Philly elementary schools Walter G. Smith and Abigail Vare.

The schools were packaged for quick sale, but the purchase agreement shows that they sold for widely varying amounts: Vare and Carroll for a little less than half their assessed value; Smith for nearly twice its market assessment; and Fulton for one-tenth. Germantown was the lowest-priced of all five schools at $100,000 — a far cry from the value of $11 million listed by the city’s Office of Property Assessment.

Then, another twist. Before the sale could be completed, a group of Point Breeze community members filed a lawsuit in Commonwealth Court opposing the closure of Smith and saying the schools were being sold below value. The deal came to a halt.

In 2017, after an appeal from the School District, the court approved the sale of the five schools. But the Concordia Group no longer seemed so sure. It flipped Smith to Philadelphia developer Ori Feibush, who was building in Point Breeze. Carroll is in development under Philadelphia-based developer High Top, while Vare is still listed as an active project under Concordia…

The Department of Licenses and Inspections has tracked 15 violations for vacancy, weeds, and trash at the Germantown High address. And property taxes haven’t been paid since the 2017 purchase. The high school is listed as on four lots, according to city records; combined, that’s $595,306.93 in overdue taxes. Fulton, just across the street, is on two lots and has racked up just under $250,000 in back taxes.

“It definitely affected the community,” said State Rep. Stephen Kinsey, a Democrat who represents the neighborhood and graduated from Germantown High. “Two or three businesses closed as a direct result of the lack of traffic. There was more illegal activity around the school, more police on the driveway.… To have a vacant building of that magnitude for six years, that changes the whole neighborhood….”

In March, Philadelphia-based real estate broker MSC Retail released a brochure that disclosed plans to replace the Germantown High school building with two large stores and 68 parking spots. Residents were shocked and outraged. Germantown United CDC and activist interfaith group POWER called an emergency community meeting.

City Councilwoman Cindy Bass, who represents the neighborhood, said at the meeting that she planned to arrange a dialogue between the community and the company planning to develop Germantown High School, High Top. But a spokesperson for High Top says it’s not currently involved with the project. Meanwhile, MSC Retail has removed the brochure from its website. A spokesperson for MSC declined to comment on the property but said the company had no current plans for redevelopment….

According to the Sheriff’s Office, if a property owner fails to pay utility bills, school taxes, or city taxes, the property may be auctioned at a tax delinquency sale so the city can collect what it’s owed. The opening bid on Germantown High next month is listed as $1,500. 

So a city-owned property once assessed as worth $11 million has been flipped from developer to developer and is now on the auction block for $1,500.

There is something unspeakably sad about the demise of a historic building that once rang with chatter and laughter and student orations and plays and life.

Categories Closing schools, Philadelphia
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