March Newsflash
School hopes to overcome opposition from longtime community leaders
The varied ethnic community of Chinatown formed a cohesiveness in the 1960s when it fought city efforts to build a Vine Street Expressway ramp where the Catholic Chinese school and church stood, and again to fight a plan to locate a stadium there.
But divisions have emerged in Chinatown now that a new school – a proposed charter school -- is being considered by the School Reform Commission in the neighborhood of some 3,000 residents. Ironically, those in opposition include the founder and director of the organization that nearly 40 years ago emerged from the fight to save that church and school, Holy Redeemer.
Commission members were prepared to approve the Folk Arts and Cultural Treasures Charter School (FACTS), but tabled the resolution after three speakers denounced the proposal at a February SRC meeting. Commissioners said they were hoping that a postponement until the March 9 meeting would ease opposition to the school, proposed by the community group Asian Americans United in association with the Philadelphia Folklore Project.
John Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. (PCDC), told the commission the community was already well served by two elementary schools: Holy Redeemer, a tuition-charging Catholic school with about 285 students in grades 1-8, and McCall School, a K-8 District school almost a mile away at 325 S. 7th St., with about 450 students, 45 percent of whom are Asian.
Noting strong support for the school, particularly among the neighborhood’s often less-acknowledged new immigrants, Asian Americans United co-president Helen Gym said that the school proposal had “rocked the boat” for a few who remain “comfortable or even benefit from the existing situation in Chinatown.”
“Some of the arguments have been that the Chinatown community doesn’t need services, it doesn’t actually even need a school, that less is more for some,” Gym offered. “Others have claimed that there is negative impact on other schools. But we would ask you to reject the notion that less is more. . . We ask you to consider not framing our proposal by pitting one school against another – that a program that’s healthy and successful isn’t threatened by the opening of another healthy and successful school.”
If the School Reform Commission approves the charter, FACTS will opens its door in September, initially serving 286 students in K-5, and eventually, 438 through the 8th grade.
It would be the first public institution ever built in Chinatown, in a community that AAU’s Gym testified “has no playground for the 1,000 plus children who live there, . . . no public health clinic in its borders, no publicly funded recreation center.”
To support the school, the group has collected 1,200 signatures, and brought large crowds of parents and supporters to several SRC meetings. Days after the postponement, in a letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Hoyu Chinese American Association’s Jimmy Chang wrote that “95 percent of the community associations in Chinatown have endorsed this school.”
But Cecilia Moy Yep, a PCDC founder, spoke against the school at the February 16 SRC meeting. Calling AAU confrontational, she told the SRC, “Parents are concerned that their children will be indoctrinated in an ideology of protest.”
Another speaker scheduled to testify in opposition to the school, but who chose not to speak, was Kenneth Wong, of Holland, Pa., active in the Asian community, and whose wife owns Chinatown Learning Center, a for-profit pre-school for children ages 3 - 6, and after-school program.
While school supporters after the SRC meeting complained about a perceived unfairness in that the views of a few stood in the way of the desires of so many, Schools CEO Paul Vallas said the opposition was varied, and that commissioners had received “many” letters and e-mails in opposition to the school.
Press reports stated that many were form letters.