Activism
Win for student group in small-schools effort
Student Union celebrates 10 years of organizing
Continuing the pressure for state funding equity
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Activism around the city
Win for student group in small-schools effort
After four years of student organizing and pressuring the School District of Philadelphia to transform the large and aging Kensington High School into four small schools, members of Youth United for Change (YUC) finally have reason to declare victory.
The School District is issuing a request for proposals to build a new, small high school in the area, news that 10th-grade student and YUC member Terrise Thomas greeted with elation.
“I’m happy because they’re finally going to give something back to this community,” she said in a recent phone interview. “They’ve promised for four years.”
Long before the District embarked on its own plans to create 28 new, small high schools, members of the student group researched and investigated small schools and delivered a proposal to the District for the creation of a quartet of small schools to replace Kensington.
YUC members toured acclaimed small schools in New York and Providence, R.I., and surveyed fellow students and community members on their idea.
This year, significant steps toward a small school model were taken. The old Kensington High School building reopened in the fall as two separate schools – Creative and Performing Arts and International Business, Finance and Entrepreneurship, while its annex reopened as a third school, Culinary Arts at the Emerald.
However, there was still uncertainty about the prospects for a newly constructed school building – perhaps one that would come with an athletic field. District officials said the project was being delayed by land-use issues and differing views in the Kensington area, as schools elsewhere in the city broke ground on or received commitments for multi-million-dollar construction projects.
But now the District is moving on plans that call for the fourth Kensington school site to be secured through a “turnkey” process, in which an outside party is hired to take on the often-complicated steps to secure land and construct a school and then sell or lease it to the District.
Thomas said the new school should lead to a “better opportunity to learn.” She expressed hope that with small high schools in Kensington, “teachers can finally get around to helping students who need more help.”
Student Union celebrates 10 years of organizing
The Philadelphia Student Union isn’t a kid in the organizing world any more.
The youth-run group that organizes young people to transform their schools into safer, better-equipped and more academically rigorous places recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary.
A celebration and fundraiser titled “Living the Change We Wish to See” took place at The Enterprise Center in West Philadelphia on November 15. Another milestone for the group was its farewell to founder and executive director Eric Braxton, who helped start the group when he joined with 11 other students in 1995 to challenge the poor quality of education in Philadelphia high schools.
The students initially convinced White Dog Café, a West Philadelphia-based eatery, to sponsor a leadership development program. A year later, the students started the Student Union, which became a project of the White Dog’s nonprofit arm, Urban Retrievers.
Today, the Student Union boasts seven high school chapters (Bartram, West Philadelphia, Central, Gratz, Masterman, Girls, and Sayre) and counts among its accomplishments creating Student Success Centers in 10 schools, playing a leading role in limiting privatization of schools in the School District, and influencing the District to double its number of high school counselors.
In addition, the organization has established and campaigned successfully for its positions on public school funding, small schools, teacher quality, student involvement in decision-making, an interactive curriculum, school safety, public transportation, multicultural education, and more.
Helping to guide the youth organizing work in the next decade for the group will be a team of staffers: Taina Asili is the director of organizing, Sheddy Rollins is the director of leadership, and Courtney Lewis is the director of finance.
"One of the things I’m most proud of is the foundation that we’ve laid for a movement around broader social justice issues as well as for educational change," Braxton commented. “There are hundreds of students who have come through the organization who will go on to be lifelong community leaders.”
Continuing the pressure for state funding equity
As state legislators carry on a special session in Harrisburg aimed at adopting property tax reform, public education advocates continue to pressure the legislature to fix the state’s regressive school funding system in the process.
Governor Ed Rendell opened the special session on property tax reform September 28. He proposed that the Pennsylvania General Assembly approve a bill that would force school districts to accept tax revenue from slot-machine parlors, using those funds to provide property-tax rebates.
Good Schools Pennsylvania and the Education Law Center, along with 200 organizations statewide, have developed and sent a letter to the legislature arguing that “property tax reform that is not accompanied by school funding reform is destined to fail our children, our schools, our communities – as well as taxpayers.”
“Today, only one state pays a smaller share of total education costs than Pennsylvania,” the letter to legislators noted. Education advocacy groups are concerned that legislators may simply trade state gambling dollars for reduced property taxes without raising the level of state support for public schools.
“If the state would pay its fair share of public school costs, local districts would not need to raise property taxes to such high levels,” explained Janis Risch, executive director of Good Schools Pennsylvania.
With local school systems heavily dependent on property tax revenues, Pennsylvania is characterized by huge inequities between districts in the amount of funding available for public education. In this region, districts in the top fifth in school spending allocate from $3,800 to $8,000 more per student than the School District of Philadelphia.
That gap between city and suburbs translates into differences in spending per school of more than a million dollars even at the smallest schools.
Good Schools Pennsylvania is continuing its work to “engage people in sustained conversations with their elected officials about public school funding,” Risch said. The organization is developing a legislative scorecard for monitoring whether state legislators are actually working actively to bring about appropriate levels of school funding.
Both Good Schools Pennsylvania and the Education Law Center are advocating that the state create an ongoing process for “costing out” what level of funding is needed to provide adequate public schools. According to Risch, 33 other states have embraced the idea that part of a state’s responsibility for school funding is determining what it costs for a district to ensure adequacy in its public schools.
For more information on work to address school funding equity in Pennsylvania, contact Good Schools Pennsylvania at 215-332-2700 or go to their website, www.goodschoolspa.org. The Education Law Center can be reached at 215-238-6970.