Letters
New admissions policy threatens equal enrollment opportunities
Concerns over dumped milk and juice
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Letters to the Editors
New admissions policy threatens equal enrollment opportunities
To the editors:
The School Reform Commission’s new enrollment policy giving Center City residents preference for Center City schools is a setback for school choice in the District and should alarm city families seeking access to Center City’s most sought-after schools. This controversial policy risks isolating thousands of Philadelphia K-8 students in struggling schools. These students deserve equal access to the District’s most prospering schools.
Under the old admissions policy, children within a school’s immediate boundaries always had a guaranteed seat. But everyone else in the District, whether they lived in Center City or not, had an equal opportunity to fill the remaining seats. Now everyone outside the Center City Region is being pushed back. All of the regions in the District will have this “regional preference” enrollment policy by 2010.
The Center City Region is where most parents living near failing schools are likely to turn. Many of the city’s most desirable schools are located there, and these schools have more developed academic and enrichment programs than the other regions. That’s why parents send students to the region in droves. Thirty-five percent of its students live outside of the region, more than in any other region. Getting Philadelphia’s children from worse-off regions into these desirable schools just got that much harder.
What is left for those children who can’t get by the new admission priorities? They risk being stuck at the bottom end of Philadelphia’s unequally performing district. In spite of the District’s welcome efforts to equalize educational opportunities, the city’s schools are hardly on an equal playing field. Even a Herculean effort by the District will not equalize the quality of education offered across the District by the time the new policy is in full effect. Given these realities, it’s clear that poorer families with fewer resources now face fewer choices.
The rushed and secretive process with which this policy was enacted did not adequately include the input of city parents and education advocates. The commission should have taken the time to address their questions and concerns before going forward with a policy change of this magnitude.
In spite of the District’s attempts to downplay the impact of this policy, parents should be concerned. It is their children’s educations that will suffer if the District is wrong.
Blondell Reynolds-Brown
City Council
Philadelphia
Concerns over dumped milk and juice
To the editors:
I have witnessed milk, juice, and food in closed containers in the dumpster outside a local school. These foods were not out of date.
The school was throwing away one or two big boxes of milk or juice whenever I checked (two or three times a week). Each box, I think, was about 5 gallons of milk or juice in little four-ounce containers.
If the food cannot be used in the school,
can’t it be donated to a food bank?
Rachel Frankel
Fishtown
Editors’ note: We posed the question to Wayne Grasela, head of food services for the School District. He maintained that District waste of food is low due to conservative ordering. But some unopened items do get discarded – once food items are taken by students, they must be consumed or discarded, he said.
Regulations require the School District to reduce waste. Grasela said in a statement, “When students select their meals they have the option of denying two items of a five-item lunch and one item of a four-item breakfast. If students still have food they do not want they are encouraged to share it with another student by placing their unopened or unused food items on a sharing table centrally located in the cafeteria.”
The case described seems to involve cartons of food that had not ever been served to students. Grasela said that any school suspected of wasting food should be reported to the District‘s Inspector General’s Office at 215-400-4030.