Posted on June 27, 2025
Categories: News from SDP

Dear School District of Philadelphia Community,

I am happy to share some exciting progress regarding our facilities planning process. As you know, since last year, we have been in Phase 8 of the process – launching a Facilities Plan Project Team to draft recommendations for our facilities. Today, I am announcing the Facilities Planning Summer Community Engagement Series. Starting in July, the District will host 16 facilities planning community engagement sessions where students, families, school-based staff, school leaders, and school communities can learn about how facilities decisions and recommendations will be made, participate in a facilities decision-making exercise, and tell the District what we should know about your neighborhood or school. The first session will be on July 7, 2025 – you can find the full schedule on the Facilities Planning Process website. There will be additional sessions scheduled beginning in August, and engagement opportunities will continue into the fall.

The School District of Philadelphia remains dedicated to offering high-quality academic and extracurricular programs in every school and every neighborhood, especially as many of our aging facilities are either under-enrolled or over-enrolled. The facilities planning process is positioning us to utilize our limited staff and resources more effectively by analyzing a complex set of data and using that data to recommend actions to the Board of Education. These actions could include any of the following: maintaining, modernizing, co-locating, repurposing, or closing buildings.

As part of the facilities decision-making process, the District is analyzing four key categories of data:

  • Building Score: Measures whether school site(s) have buildings that are safe and accessible, meet environmental standards, have modern technology, and are in good repair.
  • Program Alignment: Measures whether school site(s) have appropriate spaces for pre-kindergarten, Career & Technical Education, physical education, advanced placement courses, arts programs, and special education programs.
  • Capacity /Utilization Score: Measures whether school site(s) are over or under capacity. Site utilization is calculated by dividing the total enrollment at the school site(s) by the total capacity of the school site(s).
  • Neighborhood Vulnerability Score: Identifies whether school sites are located in communities experiencing high social vulnerability, and whether the communities have experienced school closures in the past. Social vulnerability is the extent to which residents in school communities are experiencing adverse conditions such as poverty, lack of transportation, crowded housing, and language barriers.

I hope you will choose to engage with us at these engagement sessions. Your voices are critical as we strive to enhance our school facilities and services to better support our children. Together, we will craft a plan that will revolutionize our District and support all students in truly imagining and realizing any future they desire.

In partnership,

Tony B. Watlington Sr., Ed.D.

Tony informal signature
Superintendent
The School District of Philadelphia