Emily Pugliese has been a Henry H. Houston parent for eight years, and couldn’t be happier with her children’s education.

At C. W. Henry, J. S. Jenks, Houston, and Emlen — Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy’s public elementary and middle schools — Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) and Home School Associations (HSAs) help run the volunteer library, host fundraising for teaching supplies, plan spring flings, host movie nights, and advocate for state funding in Harrisburg. Parents express admiration for what they say happens inside these buildings: caring, committed teachers and staff, an unrivaled learning experience, and a school serving a crucial community role. But the structures themselves? Falling apart.

“Generally our school experience has been wonderful,” Pugliese said. “The facility stuff is kind of a different story.”

All four school buildings are ranked “unsatisfactory,” among the worst facilities in the district’s 300 schools, according to data under review from the School District of Philadelphia (SDP). Parents described broken plumbing (including a tree growing in a Henry toilet), failing heating and cooling with some rooms boiling and others freezing, peeling paint, past closures at Henry for asbestos remediation, and bathroom doors without locks.

Pugliese is a member of the Parent Advisory Group for the SDP’s Facilities Planning Process. The process, launched in 2022 from within a larger strategic plan, aims to “assess and better manage” the school buildings, according to the district’s website. Final decisions on which schools will be closed, consolidated, or repaired are expected by December 2025, and preliminary plans for those decisions will be presented this fall.

What is the Facilities Planning Process?

Each unsatisfactory building has five options: maintain, modernize, co-locate (one school program is moved into the building with another, leaving one building empty), repurpose (the district keeps the property but closes the program), or close. For a district still reeling from closures in 2012 without community input or warning, the process will be a test to see if communication has improved.

In its effort at transparency, SDP formed nine advisory committees with city and community leaders, parents, and teachers. They also sent out surveys for feedback and hosted open-learning sessions, where attendees could see the data and ask questions about the process, in schools. Along with this feedback, SDP is considering the school building ranking, how well programs are supported by facilities, the capacity of the buildings, and measurements from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social vulnerability index (such as poverty levels).

However, with a draft of closure decisions to come some time in the fall, parents say communication has been poor. Pugliese described meetings as mostly one-sided presentations from district leaders with little time for input or feedback, and future plans remained unclear. During community sessions, participating teachers expressed confusion on how district data differed from their experiences, such as full schools being listed at half capacity (many are underenrolled, which some parents largely attributed to the presence of charter schools).

Claire Landau, SDP Strategic Planning senior advisor, stressed that data is still under review, and principals and community engagement participants will have a chance to offer suggestions. She said there are both qualitative and quantitative methods for data, and no strict cutoffs for rankings.

Parents and participants expressed confusion about the meaning of data categories and rankings. The data, released in June after being pushed back from May, does not include information about how scores are calculated or data on facility components such as HVAC and asbestos levels. Akira Drake Rodriguez, a member of the Education and Community Partners Advisory Group, said it is important to supplement data with the school’s history, eliminated programming, and ways external programs could support funding.

“The school district doesn’t have unlimited funding and so we should be looking at the existing infrastructure, both the built environment and the social infrastructure of the school community to truly assess what its capacity enrollment and condition actually is,” Rodriguez said.

Blithe Riley, a Henry parent also on the Parent Advisory Group, said meetings have broadened her understanding of the challenges behind closing decisions. But she says it has been difficult to make a meaningful contribution, and the process felt “abstract.”

“It’s simultaneously a lot of information and not very much information, because making a recommendation on whether or not to shut a school based on a series of numbers on a chart feels pretty hard to wrap your head around,” Riley said. She also believes district and planning staff leading meetings are sincere as they meet parents with a wide variety of concerns.

Advocates for community

Steel Elementary in Nicetown hosted the only engagement session near Northwest Philadelphia; a district leader said more sessions will be scheduled. At that July 24 meeting, parents and staff expressed concern about the community impact of a closure given the building’s role as a Red Cross shelter in the aftermath of a fatal rowhome explosion on June 29. They also noted a lack of support for parents and children in poverty. The facility’s condition was rarely mentioned.

Henry, Jenks, and Houston fall between low and very low risk in the district’s data for neighborhood vulnerability; Emlen is in the moderate risk category. In Learning Network 8, a region which includes Steel and other North Philadelphia sites, every school is in the high or very high risk category. In community meetings, the school district announced they are looking at vulnerability scores first, although what that means for decisions is unclear.

Councilmember at-Large Kendra Brooks, a Working Families Party member who also serves as the minority leader in City Council, fought for Steel to remain a public school, instead of being sold to a charter program in 2014, and has led parent organizing to push for “Community Schools” that use funded partnerships to promote stability, social services, and after-school programs in areas that need additional case management and support. She is on the Elected Officials Advisory Group for planning.

Brooks said the district has moved in the right direction, but she still hears complaints from residents about being shut out of the process. She said engagement sessions are often hosted before the workday ends, around 3 p.m. Brooks believes in investing in parent associations as trusted messengers for information and giving them gathering spaces in schools rather than relying on the district to do so.

“As a longtime community organizer and a parent leader at schools, it’s a lot of unpaid labor that’s oftentimes not respected,” Brooks said. “It comes with a lot of fights, but most parents stay involved because it’s for their children.”

Rodriguez said looming school closures bring worries about gentrification, displacement, and a loss of community. She also said the district should be communicating the rationale and benefit of closures through continuous engagement. “We can build strong equitable neighborhood schools, but we need to have an honest assessment and we need to engage with the community,” she said.

What’s to come

Rodriguez encourages parents to show up to future community engagement meetings, which are published on SDP’s Office of Operations Facilities Planning website, and to contact their child’s school leadership.

“I definitely encourage people to come out and show out and talk about their schools and what’s working and what’s not,” Rodriguez said. “But I’m also asking the district to actually listen and address these concerns.”

As the Facilities Planning Process continues and students head back to school, more information on the district’s plan will roll out through fall and winter. Pugliese will work from home to prepare for the start of the school year, which at Houston usually includes early dismissal — because of building cooling issues. She hopes to see more genuine, constant engagement from SDP. She also hopes to see longstanding tensions resolve between administrators and parents.

Pugliese said, “In order for us to actually solve these problems and move forward, it’s going to take everyone working and advocating together. That’s the piece that I don’t see happening that is disappointing over and over again.”