March 13, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Public or Private?
Parents give reasons for school choice
by Kristin Pazulski

Parents have differing reasons for choosing private over public education for their children. For Megan McGowan (left), Norwood-Fontbonne was the best choice for her kindergartener, but being familiar with Jenks she would not be opposed to a public education. On the other hand, to Jay Valinis (right) the religious aspect was really important and he would be unlikely to send his boys to public school. (Photo by Erin Vertreace)

One of the benefits of living in Chestnut Hill is a wide choice of schools. Along with a wealth of private academies, the area also includes one of the Philadelphia school district’s strongest public elementary schools, J. S. Jenks Elementary.

Yet of the 471 students at Jenks, only half are neighborhood children. The rest are transfers from other parts of the city — a positive statement for the school but a disappointing statistic for the neighborhood.

Many parents interviewed by the Local claimed that the local public school was more dangerous and had fewer resources than the nearby private schools, and that a safer school with more opportunity justified the tuition payment.

But how much of this is perception rather than fact? How many parents even bother to visit Jenks and other public schools to give them a fair chance?

J. S. Jenks Elementary is one of the better schools in the district. Linda Grobman, Northwest regional superintendent for the school district, said that most of the schools in the Northwest region are target schools for other neighborhoods but admitted that Jenks is known to be one of the best.

“Jenks offers lots of opportunity for kids,” she said. “Part of it is the location, part of it is the playground, and part of it is the veteran staff.”

In the public school system, parents have the option to transfer their children from the neighborhood school to another of their choice. Jenks has a high transfer request rate, with 461 applicants last year. Only 25 of those were granted, and more than 50 percent of the school’s enrollment comes from other neighborhoods.

While there are benefits to transferring to another school, schools and students could also be losing out when local kids leave.

“It could be argued that schools lose their sense of community within the school when local children leave and out of area students enroll,” reads a statement from the school district. “Many consider education to be a community effort.”

But despite Jenks’ status as a “go-to” school and the strong sense of community the school could give a student, a number of Chestnut Hill parents choose to shell out tuition and send their kids to private school.

Bad News

Much of a parent’s decision to choose private over public has to do with perception.

In the past few years, particularly since last spring when it was revealed that, despite the initial heroic reputation of former district chief executive director Paul Vallas, the school district was nearly $100 million in the red, the district has had a lot of bad publicity. Underfunding, program cuts, staff reductions and changes in leadership have dominated headlines about the city’s schools.

Grobman said bad publicity was obviously a factor in a parent’s consideration of schools.

“Parents see the financial difficulties in the school district,” Grobman said, “and if they have the funding, of course they want to send their kids to the schools that publicize themselves as well-funded.”

But she added that compounding the effect of the bad publicity was that parents do not even consider visiting their local public school.

Michelle Kingsberry, whose daughter attends second grade at Penn Charter, said the teaching style attracted her to the school,  but admitted to not knowing much about the public schools’ teaching styles.

“I don’t hear enough about that [teaching methods] with the Philadelphia school district,” she said. “Unfortunately, we only hear the bad stuff. Maybe they are doing [good things], but we don’t hear about it.”

“Part of that is they just have to get in to see the school,” Grobman said, convinced that if parents gave public schools a chance, they might send their children there.

For some parents, that might be the case.

In a series of interviews by the Local at various open house events at local private schools, parents were asked if they were considering public school options in Philadelphia, particularly Jenks and Mt. Airy schools Charles W. Henry and Henry H. Houston, and if not, why.

For most, it was about safety and resources.

Parents looking at private schools said Jenks was a decent school, but they were not willing to sacrifice their children’s education, and particularly their safety, if they could afford to go elsewhere.

For Jay Valinis, who has two sons at Norwood-Fontbonne Academy, this was the case.

“I heard Jenks was a good school as far as Philadelphia public schools go, but I really value education, so I wanted to give them the best we could,” he said.

He said he did not visit the public school, but said that even if it had been competitive, the public school would not offer the religious aspect NFA could.

Megan McGowan, a NFA parent who is familiar with Chestnut Hill’s schools after six years working with Need in Deed, a program that helps conduct service learning projects in public and private schools, echoed Grobman’s observation that parents do not even give the public schools a chance.

“Parents automatically dismiss the public schools because of all the bad press and financial problems,” she said. “I think people don’t even look at them.”

And, often, she’s right.

Many of the Hill and Mt. Airy parents that the Local interviewed while they visited private schools for their children were not planning to visit the local public school.

“There are so many good private schools to choose from that we’re excited to look at them,” said Stephanie Heck of Mt. Airy at a Germantown Friends School open house. She was not considering public schools.

“I probably would choose a private school anyway,” she added, “even if I lived in a good district.”

On the other hand, there are parents who have explored both and found Jenks lacking, or at least not up to par with another school.

Grobman admitted that despite its private or public status, sometimes a certain school just has something an individual student needs.

“If parents send their child to a private school, they must see something in the school that meets their child’s needs or see the resources for that,” she said.

Also, for some parents it is just a matter of alma mater tradition.

“A lot of people are sending their kids to where they went,” said Megan McGowan, who sends her daughter, Riley, to kindergarten at NFA, although she went to Our Mother of Consolation and Springside.

For her, the decision to send her daughter to NFA was based on its athletic department and a Catholic-based education.

“For Riley, for my daughter, NFA was the best fit,” she said. “I do have a degree of guilt not sending her to public school. Jenks is a great school, but NFA offers a more definite path. There’s a lot unknown in the school district.”

The unknown issues for McGowan were the district’s finances and the future of Germantown High School, the area high school for Jenks , which is not fairing well with No Child Left Behind Act standards.

McGowan shares her concerns about sending her child to Germantown High with other parents.  Students in the school district have the chance to apply to high schools throughout the city, but if they do not get into a charter or another school of their choice, they go to Germantown.

A parent from Chestnut Hill, who agreed to speak anonymously while attending a GFS open house, said she was also visiting Plymouth Meeting Friends and Springside schools for her soon-to-be kindergartener, but was not going to Jenks because of its high school options.

“From everything we have heard, we like Jenks very much,” she said, “but we aren’t comfortable with where it feeds into in terms of size and resource.”

Wealthy area brings wealth of private schools

Another contributing factor to the private school preference is the high number of private schools in and near Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy.

In Chestnut Hill alone, there are Springside School and Chestnut Hill Academy, two Catholic schools, Our Mother of Consolation parish school and Norwood-Fontbonne Academy, a private  Catholic school, and the Crefeld School.

In close range are Project Learn and the Waldorf School in Mt. Airy, Germantown Friends School and Greene Street Friends School in Germantown and the William Penn Charter School in East Falls. Others in Montgomery County and Center City are an easy car drive or train ride away.

“It’s a wonderful thing about where we are located,” Grobman said. “It’s good that parents get the choice to send their kids to a school that best fits the needs of their children.”

“We’re spoiled for choice here,” McGowan said.

So what could the public schools do to attract the local private school attendees? In the case of Jay Valinis, the answer would be “nothing.”

Valinis said he heard Jenks was a good school, but he was looking for a religious component in his child’s education.

Other parents, like Rob Warren from Mt. Airy, call for smaller classrooms, sounder resources and confidence in their child’s safety.

“They need to clean up the schools,” he said, listing the above as issues he had with the public schools. “There’s definitely a movement going in that direction, but it’s in its infancy.”

New leadership is one of the hopes parents have for the school district. Warren said he had some optimism with the new mayor, Michael Nutter, taking the helm. Also, parents and school district administrators have expressed hope in new principals at Jenks and Houston — Steve Brandt and Kim Newman — who, in Grobman’s words, “bring a new energy to the school.”

Parent action

But parents are also taking action, and have been for years.

The Jenks Home and School Association, which meets regularly, takes an active role in the school’s activities and development.

At Henry school, parents Nancy and Kevin Peter have been hosting monthly meetings in their home for parents for more than a year. They invite guest speakers and school administrators, such as principal Caren Trantas, to talk about issues in the school and the district.

“The purpose of the meetings is to help parents make informed decisions about choosing an elementary or middle school,” Nancy Peter said. “Our selfless agenda is to provide information and support that would otherwise be difficult to find. Our selfish agenda is to continually recruit neighborhood, middleclass families into Henry — thus enriching the school and improving the experience for [my] son.”

In October, Nancy Peter and Lisa Kleiner, another Henry mother, conducted an online survey with parents to discover what Henry needed to do to improve itself and attract parents. The survey specifically asked local parents what factors came into play when choosing a school.

Out of 25 factors parents were asked to rank in importance when choosing elementary and middle school, parents were most concerned with teacher quality (66 percent), socioeconomic balance (61 percent), curriculum (51 percent), enrichment activities (47 percent) and class size (44 percent).

Non-Henry parents were also asked what deterred them from choosing Henry for their children’s education. The top five reasons were that they didn’t think Henry met their needs regarding: class size (90 percent), the school’s grounds (68 percent), curriculum (64 percent), high school preparation (63 percent) and family value reflection (55 percent).

In contrast, Henry parents ranked the school’s favorable characteristics. One of the highest was high school preparation (65 percent), indicating that the non-Henry parents’ dissatisfaction with high school preparation may be a perception problem. But concerns about class size and grounds were echoed by the parents of Henry students.

Generally, the study found that the school has “strengths as well as practical and promotional challenges,” suggesting that Henry was a good example of the school district’s problems with perception and action in its schools.

This week, Peter and Kleiner are discussing the results of the survey with principal Trantas and regional superintendent Grobman, and will then present the findings at a meeting of West and East Mt. Airy’s Schools Committee on Monday evening, April 7. The meeting is open to the public and begins at 6:30 p.m. at the Lutheran Theological Seminary of Philadelphia.

“We hope to demonstrate to the school district that some aspects of Henry or public school must be improved to attract neighborhood families, school district marketing strategies must be seriously reviewed and enhanced; and, if parents can complete this type of school choice survey, the school district should be able to as well,” Nancy Peter wrote in an e-mail.

Why tuition?

So why pay private school tuition, which locally can range from $2,600 to $22,100, depending on the school and grade level of the student, when parents already pay school taxes?

According to parents, it’s a matter of safety and resources. Parents want small classrooms, attentive teachers, new textbooks and secure future options for their students’ education. Whether the public school system can provide these depends on whom you talk to, and parents are not willing to risk their child’s education, even if it comes at great expense.

But there is hope that with a new mayor and, more recently, a new chief executive officer, Arlene Ackerman, the school district could be heading in the right direction.

As for Megan McGowan, she would prefer to keep her children in private school for now, but she is not opposed to public schools and is taking tuition bills one year at a time. With only one child at NFA, the tuition is manageable. But when one-year-old Katie and two-year-old James are ready for school, she’s not sure.

“We’re taking it one child at a time,” she said.