October 16, 2015
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice
The School District of Philadelphia headquarters on North Broad Street.
While the shortage of school nurses and outsourcing of substitute teaching services were among the topics discussed at Thursday night's School Reform Commission meeting, the dominating concern was a recent charter conversion proposal, Newsworks reports.
The four-and-a-half-hour meeting focused primarily on Superintendent William Hite's recent proposal to convert three underperforming elementary schools – Samuel Huey in West Philadelphia, John Wister in Germantown and Jay Cooke in Logan – to neighborhood-based charter schools.
Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan led the call to scrap the charter conversion plan and instead create community schools — a model that co-locates other social services in neighborhood schools while retaining a unionize staff.
"It's time to try something different," Jordan said. "It's time to strengthen public education in Philadelphia through community schools, as has been done in Baltimore, Chicago, St. Paul and Cincinnati."
Many parents expressed disappointment that they were not able to vote on the potential charter conversion of their school, a process that was allowed last year. Others argued the conversion meetings were not made easily accessible to parents.
However, some parents shared their positive experiences with charter conversion.
Read more from Newsworks here.
