Amid the planned school closures announced by the Philadelphia School District in January, parents and teachers at Fitler Academics Plus School in Germantown are advocating strongly for their school to remain open.

Fitler is among the 18 schools in the district to be scheduled for closure in the next few years as part of the consolidation plan proposed by the district.

On March 12, parents, students, and advocates spoke at the school district’s public town hall relating to the closure plan, including several speakers from Fitler.

One Fitler parent, Kyra Faust, did not get the chance to speak at the town hall, but feels the school district has pitted schools against each other because of the closure plan.

“We’re all proud of our schools, and want to stay in an environment that we feel is safe and just comfortable, but it’s like the war. It’s like pitting us against each other. Like, ‘Don’t close our school, close their school,’” Faust told the Local.

Faust grew up in Germantown and was familiar with Fitler when the time came to enroll her son in school. She was thrilled when her son, who is now in seventh grade, got the opportunity to attend Fitler.

“It’s just a blessing to be able to stay in your neighborhood and get a quality education and not have to pay for it,” Faust said. “I don’t understand the point of developing and building all these houses and apartments and stuff. You don’t have anywhere for the kids to learn.”

The current plan is to gradually phase Fitler out of the school system by 2030. Next school year will be normal, but following it, in 2027, kindergarten through fifth-grade students will be moved out. The remaining middle school students would finish their time at Fitler, finally closing after the last eighth-grade class graduates.

“It would be a four-year phaseout of Fitler, with students transferring to J.B. Kelly and Roosevelt Middle School to make up the difference,” Mary Rooney Thorp, a sixth-grade teacher at Fitler, told the Local. “Eventually, by 2031, according to the district timeline, J.B. Kelly will have an addition built onto it, so they will be able to start serving sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.”

While several factors contributed to the selection of specific schools to close, the age of the building has been an ongoing issue for Fitler.

The building was constructed in 1897 and is the oldest existing building still utilized by the School District of Philadelphia.

“Because of that, we don’t have some of the facilities that maybe a newer building would have,” Thorp said. “That’s kind of one thing that we’re kind of stuck on. We can’t really change the building, but the building really hasn’t been invested in in a while.”

Building utilization was a factor in why Fitler was chosen for this plan, with the district considering the facility underutilized due to decreased enrollment, which Thorp said is now 177 students.

However, Thorp feels this is a district-created issue as a result of the decision to end yellow bus transportation for city-wide admit schools. While Fitler had been on a downward trend for enrollment, this past year, it saw an increase, Thorp said.

A 2025 report from the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia estimated the cost to renovate Fitler to be $14 million. However, the report also found the cost of demolition and replacement of the building to be over $5 million greater than repairing it.

The report said that the “cost of demolition and new construction often outweighs that of preservation and modernization.”

Thorp feels that the loss of Fitler would pile on to the impact of other closures in the area, and previous school closures like Germantown High School.

“The parents are very upset, because they see this on two levels. This is an attack on their children’s public education, and this is also a referendum on the value of their building and the value of their neighborhood in some way,” Thorp said. “Parents at one meeting I attended were very upset and very stressed about being homeowners, being renters, and how the sale of this building or the closure of this building is going to affect their day-to-day lives.”

She added, “I feel like they’re squeezing us into a box in order to check a broader box about creating affordable housing … If we look at our placements, (around) 100% of our eighth graders get to go to whatever magnet school they choose.”

Community impact

Even though Faust’s son will have graduated from Fitler by the time it’s scheduled to shut down, she worries about the impact the closure will have on Germantown.

“This house will be in my family forever … So if my grandchildren need to go to Fitler, I want it to be available for them to go there. It’s a good legacy,” Faust said. “There aren’t that many [public schools] in the city now, with all the charter schools and the glitz and glamour of the charter schools, but it’s not the same standard.”

Faust previously worked in the school district and worries about the expansion of charter schools in the area.

“I think they’re impersonal and more business-oriented than anything else. I don’t think that they’re about the children and really learning,” Faust said. “It’s just not the same quality of education, and I worked in charter schools, and I worked for the school district.”