The decision to close 49 elementary schools in Chicago has now led to layoff notices being sent out to more than 660 district employees. That includes 420 teachers, many of whom have tenure but qualify for a layoff due to an unsatisfactory or satisfactory performance rating. The most recent union contract only protects members who are rated either excellent or superior.

With layoff notices going out, it appears that an ongoing controversy over the closure of schools that district officials are claiming were undersubscribed is finally simmering down, although additional cuts are expected in the coming year to allow Chicago Public Schools to close a budget deficit. Although an additional 600 teachers are qualified for transfers to other schools, it is unclear if enough spaces will be found to accommodate them all.

The final layoff tally might not be available until late in the summer when the principals finalize their staffing plans for the coming fall.

The district also Friday announced layoffs at five underperforming schools slated for overhauls, known as turnarounds. In an effort to raise the performance level of those schools, almost all employees are let go and new staff is hired.

CPS said 192 employees, 125 of them teachers, will lose their jobs as a result of those turnaround decisions, which, like the closings, were approved in May.

The Chicago Teachers Union has expressed concerns that budget cuts will result in additional layoffs.

All is not lost for teachers who receive layoff notices in the coming weeks. According to the Chicago Tribune, the district has a process for teachers who wish to find new jobs within CPS and the typical re-hire rate is about 60%. However, that might change this year as the $1 billion budget deficit means many departments are looking to shed workers rather than hire them.

CPS isn’t the only urban school district sending out layoff notices this month. On Friday, Philadelphia, which is dealing with its own budget crisis, announced that it will shed 76 district office employees last Friday which is expected to provide savings of nearly $32 million.

This week’s round of Philadelphia job losses is particularly modest in light of the one announced earlier last week. Then, 3,783 district employees – including teachers – were informed that they might not have a place in the district come September.

Combined, the job losses represent a 19.9 percent decrease in the 19,530-member workforce. As a result of the latest cutbacks, there will be fewer people to respond to the parents’ help line, field calls about tardy school buses, or handle students’ records. The district will end driver education and the live streaming of School Reform Commission meetings.

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The crisis developing in the Philadelphia School District has reached new heights as Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. announced that layoff notices are being mailed out to more than 3,700 employees informing them that they’ll be out of a job come July 1st. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that among those being laid off are nearly 689 teachers, 283 counselors, 1,202 noontime aides and 127 assistant principals.

During a news briefing announcing the layoffs, Hite bemoaned the necessity of such a step, calling it “catastrophic,” and said that the people affected were more than their job titles but also residents of the city, servants of the public and professionals with families.

This round of layoffs is not expected to be the last as the district struggles to meet a looming budget deficit.

Only staff based in the schools themselves were targeted by this round of layoff notices. The number of people being eliminated at district headquarters is expected to be announced next week.

Hite, who has led the district for less than a year, has spent much of his time trying to avert financial ruin.

Facing a $304 million shortfall in the fiscal year that begins July 1, the School Reform Commission adopted a budget May 30 that Hite has said would be catastrophic for city schools.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said: “Today we are seeing what a ‘doomsday’ budget looks like for Philadelphia’s schoolchildren, and how our city’s educators are paying the price for a deficit we didn’t create.”

Under the terms of the current PFT contract, the teacher layoffs are based on seniority, with the newest hires most likely to lose their jobs. They include math, English, reading, elementary, and special-education teachers, as well as music teachers who are assigned to several schools.

After the layoffs were announced, Hite reached out to all district employees via email, pledging to continue fighting for funding both from the city and from the state. Currently Hite is asking for the city to allocate an additional $60 million and more than $120 million from the state — in addition to over $100 million in givebacks that he’s demanding from the PFT.

While waiting for the money, Hite is going ahead with the changes demanded by the new “Doomsday” budget adopted earlier this month by the Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission.

In a five to one vote, Joseph A. Dworetzky was the only one to vote against the budget. He believes that the administration has not exhausted every possibility to find savings.

With $304 million in projected shortfall, schools would have to go without new books, paper, clubs, counselors, librarians, assistant principals and secretaries this fall. ‘

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Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission approved a “doomsday” budget of $2.4 billion that would mean major school-wide cuts, reports Martha Woodall and Melissa Chea-Annan of the Inquirer.

In a five to one vote, Joseph A. Dworetzky was the only one to vote against the budget. He believes that the administration has not exhausted every possibility to find savings.

With $304 million in projected shortfall, schools would have to go without new books, paper, clubs, counselors, librarians, assistant principals and secretaries this fall. ‘

The lack of funds also means that art, music and athletic programs could be cut, and at least 3,000 layoffs would likely need to occur, including teachers. Class sizes are projected to be larger than they are now with no additional help from teachers aides.

This could be the reality for Philadelphia’s education system if more funds aren’t raised. School Reform Commission chairman Pedro Ramos pledges that the district and the Commission would keep looking for additional funds to avoid these changes.

Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. requested and extra 60 million in funding from the city and another $120 million from the state. The district is also hoping to raise more than $100 million in concessions from the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

Hite said the SRC will amend the budget if extra funds can be raised. He makes clear that it is currently not a reflection of what he would like for the public education system and student services, and the public seems to agree.

In order to provide more funds from the city, Mayor Nutter proposed to raise taxes on cigarettes to $2 a pack and raise the city’s liquor-by-the-drink tax by 5%.

Proposed bills may be passed to give the city more power to crack down on delinquent taxpayers.

Mayor Nutter estimates his plan will raise an additional $95 million for schools in 2013-24 and $135 million for the 2014-15 school year. It remains to be seen if legislation will be passed to make the plan viable.

Dworetzky said, “before we take the drastic action of this budget, we should be satisfied that we have turned over every stone” to search for new sources of revenues, find savings, and eliminate expenses that do not benefit students. Dworetzky said the administration had done some of that but he was not satisfied it had done enough.

In the SRC meeting over 57 speakers appealed to the commission not to adopt the budget. Before the meeting over 800 students, parents, politicians, teachers and employees gathered in protest, outfitted in red, white and blue as a sign of solidarity.

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Philadelphia school superintendent William R. Hite Jr. knows all about controversy. Since taking over the struggling, debt-mired school district, he has taken positions that have put him at odds with the city’s powerful teachers union.

Yet the task before him calls for a lot of radical thinking. Philadelphia’s public schools are underfunded, undersubscribed and chronically underperforming, and Hite knows that to fix all these problems he is going to have to tread on some very sensitive toes.

His latest proposal, submitted as part of a plan to win up to $120 million in additional state funding for the district, is bound to be more of the same. To win over Pennsylvania lawmakers who have traditionally balked at providing money for the city, he is calling for an end to teacher seniority. In a presentation of a proposed budget to the members of the School Reform Commission, Hite explains that the state legislators are unlikely to be interested in turning over more money if they think they’re signing off on more same-old-same-old thinking.

On the table is a budget so bleak that schools would not have counselors, books, or extracurriculars next year. To add even some of those basics back, Hite and the School Reform Commission have requested $304 million – the $120 million from Harrisburg plus $60 million from the city, with the rest in labor concessions.

Mayor Nutter this week proposed giving the district $95 million by taxing cigarettes at $2 per pack and raising the liquor-by-the-drink tax to 15 percent.

But that still leaves a big hole for Harrisburg to fill. And, Hite said, outside the city, “Philadelphia is thought of as a cesspool.”

People believe that the district operates inefficiently, wastes money, and “protects individuals that are not serving children,” Hite said.

This isn’t the first time that Hite has called for renegotiating the contract between the city and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers to take out the rules governing seniority. In his opinion, financial incentives should be linked to student outcomes and school and district performance — and not to the ability to survive yet another year without getting fired.

According to Hite, compensation is only one of the problems that arise out of a rigid seniority system. Also problematic is the strict last-in-first-out rule that dictates which teachers get laid off in case of budget cuts.

Although the district is still a long way from having money in hand, such talk from Hite has at least won the ears of Pennsylvania’s Republican lawmakers.

That sounds about right, said Steve Miskin, spokesman for Pennsylvania House Republicans. Still, Hite’s publicly tying the breaking of a bedrock principle of unions to more funding surprised him.

“It’s stunning and refreshing to hear from a Philadelphia superintendent,” Miskin said. “I think we would definitely be willing to sit down and talk to him, and hear his ideas.”

Erik Arneson, a Senate Republican spokesman, agreed that a seniority change would help Philadelphia’s cause.
“There are numerous members of our caucus who strongly believe that changes like that should take place before additional state funds are committed,” Arneson said.

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According to Bobbi Kurshan, the executive director of academic innovation at the Penn Graduate School of Education since last fall, University of Pennsylvania system should take advantage of its unique position and work to foster more education technology start-ups under its auspices. Ed tech brought more than $1.1 billion in venture funding last year, and if Kurshan – who has significant private sector experience – has her way, some of that money will come to Pennsylvania in the form of new business.

A successful ed tech startup needs more than seed funding and business advice. It also needs support from education researchers as well as from teachers and schools that will use its product. Bringing all of them together is a difficult proposition, but not as difficult in a university system setting. The University of Pennsylvania is in an excellent position to provide access to all those benefits in one place.

Trying to bring those four constituencies closer together is one goal of the business-plan competition, begun in 2010. Ten early stage companies – including Autism Expressed of Philadelphia – will vie for a total of $145,000 in seven prizes in what is one of the richer competitions geared toward the ed-tech world.

The prize money has grown substantially since the Milken Family Foundation provided $25,000 for the best plan and $15,000 for the runner-up in in the first competition. This year, K12 Inc., a publicly traded online education company in Herndon, Va., will contribute $25,000 for the best business plan incorporating technology to address challenges in kindergarten through 12th grade online learning.

Each participant gets 10 minutes to pitch the judges, who will have 24 hours to decide who gets the prize money.

While the higher education system in Pennsylvania is looking to the future, the Philadelphia school district is still grappling with the way to keep schools open. Mayor Michael Nutter, along with the City Finance Director Rob Dubow are working to put together a budget proposal to fund the city’s schools which will total about $60 million in additional funding.

Nutter isn’t clear on how the money will be found, but has already said that he wants to keep city revenues flat.

Nutter has previously rejected raising property taxes to fund the schools and Dubow has now added that a wage tax hike is off the table. Nutter has previously indicated that he wants to lower rather than raise wage taxes.

The city introduced cuts prior to the recession which had to be suspended to cover a growing budget deficit.

So without touching the city’s two largest taxes (which are projected to provide about 69 percent of revenue next year), how will the city find $60 million?

In bits and pieces, it seems. A proposal that may have wide support is raising the “liquor by the drink” tax from 10 percent to 15 percent. A Nutter spokesman recently said the mayor supports such a hike, which would bring in an estimated $20 million in new revenue. Raising the tobacco sales tax is also said to be on the table. And, of course, the city could cut spending or forgo some of Nutter’s proposals for new expenditures, like $1 million to increase library hours and another $1 million to offset tuition hikes at the Community College of Philadelphia.

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What will Philadelphia schools look like if the anticipated revenue streams from the city and the state, as well as concessions from unions, don’t materialize this summer? According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, not much like schools.

Although there will still be buildings and classrooms and presumablystudents, there will be no counselors, librarians, summer school staff or extra-curricular activities. This will all be in addition to more than 3,000 layoffs including at least some instructional positions.

The changes will be implemented to close more than $300 million in deficits from the district’s $2.7 billion total budget.

It’s no wonder that the district Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. called this the “catastrophic” budget. It was Hite’s intention to draw the grimmest picture possible as he lobbies state and city lawmakers for more money at the same time as he sits down with union reps to renegotiate existing contracts.

But $220 million in additional school-based cuts is a very real possibility. Union officials have said they would not bow to demands for big concessions, and while Mayor Nutter has signaled his support for the district’s request, early signs from the state are not promising and City Council seems skeptical.

Even Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said this budget picture could come to pass.
“Clearly, this is a possibility,” Jordan said. “Our kids are in the middle.”

Commissioner Wendell Pritchett called it a “sobering presentation” that would cut not frills, but “basic things that every child should have.”

This year the district has had to borrow $300 million just to meet its operating expenses, an option that is not on the table next year according to Chief Financial Officer Matthew Stanski. He said that to keep borrowing instead of developing new revenue streams would be just pushing forward the inevitable problems and putting the district on the path to insolvency.

Instead, principals will be receiving budgets that will ask them to make cuts up to 25% with enough money only to fund the absolute minimum: costs for classes at to the contractual maximum and the teachers to staff them. Hite said that this is the limit of what the district can presently afford.

There is little room left to maneuver, Hite said. Many costs are rising – the district will pay more for employee benefits and must contribute more to pension funds – or fixed, including $280 million in debt service and $729 million for charter schools.
(The School Reform Commission on Thursday night budgeted up to $15 million over two years for a new cyber school, but officials have said that the figure was a ceiling and that the virtual school would bring back students now in cyber charters, meaning savings for the district.)

Charter advocates are pushing hard for a number of expansions, but those seem unlikely.

“We are not crying wolf,” Hite said. “Our budget situation is dire.”

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West Philadelphia recently hosted a meeting where education and technology experts came together to redesign the city’s academic system from the bottom up using tools made possible by the proliferation and declining price of technology. The gathering was called TechCamp Philadelphia – a so-called “unconference” – and among the attendees were tech experts, industry leaders, and education advocates and public sector representatives, all with the goal to improve the education of each Philadelphia student.

“I was really interested in this intersection of technology and education because I don’t think they talk to each other as much as they should,” said Claire Robertson-Kraft, a member of Philly CORE Leaders, a grassroots group committed to improving education in Philadelphia, when I asked her why she came.

Surprisingly, the meeting is not being held under the auspices of the Education Department. When it first started in 2010, it began as a program under the U.S. Department of State and its Civil Society 2.0 Initiative, which calls on the private actors in the technology community to put their effort, expertise and knowledge towards solving a civic need.

Noel Dickover, a senior new media advisor for the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy, took the train in from nearby Washington, D.C. to lead the weekend event.

“It’s really all about low-cost, easy-to-implement technology,” Dickover said. “Let’s work with the small groups on the ground who are really getting the work done.”

Per the State Department’s international mandate, TechCamp events have been held in far-flung locales such as Thailand, Israel, India, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Senegal and Zanzibar — Philadelphia is the 22nd. Dickover told me that he had just returned from Honduras, where there was a session focused on public safety and security, and would shortly shove off to Mumbai, for another focused on young entrepreneurship.

The ideas really started flowing once the opening addresses were over and the attendees broke down into smaller groups. One group tackled a project that could make a real difference now that more states are embracing school choice agendas. The participants were looking for a way to use charter performance data to allow them to compare charters against public schools in their areas. Leading the effort was Patricia DiLella, a senior IT executive for the School District of Philadelphia.

Another group tried to create a solution that would ease the way of communications between parents and their children’s teachers.

Did each group successfully solve its problem? Not quite, but that wasn’t entirely the point. After a day of drinking coffee and eating pastries and generating ideas and swapping business cards, there were many more friends with common interests than there were two days prior. Education experts and technology types were more familiar with each other; community ties were stronger. And there were plenty of fresh ideas to expand upon at a later date.

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Two urban school districts are preparing to tackle problems stemming from their revenue shortfalls and a falling student population by closing and merging schools, even if they have to do it over the protests of their local teachers unions.

In Philadelphia, where the municipal finances are especially precarious, administration officials are preparing to vote on the closure of 27 schools. However, according to Philadelphia Inquirer, parents, together with the city’s teachers unions, are banding together to prevent the planned vote.

Today is the decision day for the five members of the School Reform Commission who meet to decide not only the fate of the 27 schools, but also a number of related issues such as program merges and grade changes. Since the meeting had been announced, two additional schools have been put on the “to close” list, but the vote on their ultimate fate will not be held this week.

Security should be tight. Anti-closing protesters interrupted the last two SRC meetings.

If the SRC endorses even most of the proposals, the result would be among the largest mass school closings in the country, with one in eight city schools shutting its doors permanently in June.

The action was important enough to draw AFT president Randi Weingarten, who said she was “standing with the community, which is standing for its kids. Kids need allies, and community needs a voice, and Philly is proving that over and over again.”

The closing plan is part of a scheme “to essentially destroy a public education system for reckless alternatives,” the union chief said.

While the AFT is fighting its fight in Philadelphia, Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel has signaled that he will begin following the recommendations presented in a report by the commission charged with studying the issues troubling the city’s schools. The Commission on School Utilization found that the district could go ahead and close down 80 schools in the city, without suffering reduction in the quality of instruction or extensive overcrowding issues.

The commission was put together by the Chicago Public School CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, and she should feel justified in her selection since the findings appear to be an unqualified victory for her plans to shutter underutilized school buildings. The panel confirmed her assertions that even though the number of schools picked for closure at the same time is unprecedented, CPS is well positioned to make the transition as smooth as possible.

The district is working off a preliminary list of 129 schools that could be closed. Clark declined to give a specific number of how many might be closed, but the report indicates that CPS has the capacity to shutter 60 to 70 schools, and that others could have their staff completely replaced, a process known as turnaround, or share space with other schools including privately run charters.

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Philadelphia’s school closings provoked such an outpouring of community response that the city may change its plans, says the supervisor. Citizens submitted 38 alternative plans, in addition to many letters and meetings, reports The Inquirer’s Susan Snyder.

Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. praised the community’s response, saying that while it began with a lot of emotion, it evolved into thoughtful, useful ideas. The 38 formal proposals include some from activists and teachers, but also include a state legislator who represents a city district. He added that while citizens have asked for a one-year moratorium on school closings, the city can’t afford to do that.

The district projects saving about $28 million a year over five years as a result of closing 37 schools and making grade changes in several others. The plan comes as the 146,000-student district copes with the loss of 60,000 students over the last decade and a severe financial crunch.

School closings will go ahead, but he said that many of the new proposals may be better than what they had been planning. In some cases, under-enrolled schools might be used for the same students, but for a larger age range. That’s what the state legislator suggested:

State Rep. Cherelle L. Parker (D., Phila.) made several recommendations for schools in her district, which includes the Mount Airy, Chestnut Hill, Roxborough and Andorra sections of Northwest Philadelphia.

For example, she suggested that McCloskey and Edmonds Schools be converted into pre-kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools.

“I am firmly opposed to closing McCloskey Elementary due to its relationship with the surrounding community and its academic performance,” she wrote.

The city’s two military academies might share one building, suggested Philadelphia Military Academy’s administration. In the current proposal, one of them would be sent to share a non-military middle school’s campus. Its staff pointed out that its grounds and location were better suited for the military academy’s purpose.

In addition to the proposals for repurposing and shoring up existing schools, many citizens wrote letters simply asking the city to spare their local schools from being cut. One tiny high school pointed out that its size was an asset for the 342 students enrolled there, because the students are better able to know their teachers. Its students made a video for the superintendent, pleading with him not to end their sense of “family.” Other community letters just pointed out that schools that look useless on paper, to the city, are focal points of community identity.

The School Reform Commission plans to keep listening to citizen comments during the week. February 21, 22 and 23, the Commission will hold closed hearings, and it plans a final vote on March 7.

Public feeling has been running high this year, after the School Reform Commission did not take action on public comments last year, but closed 8 schools as it had planned. The original proposal for this year’s closing had suggested 37 schools to be closed. Initial public outcry included a public demonstration by students dressed as zombies.

At the same time as public school enrollment has been falling, prompting closure plans, charter school numbers have gone up. Area charter schools have protested the city’s plan to put a cap on the number of students who could transfer into charter schools.

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Zombies are a hot topic in pop culture, and students from the Philadelphia Public School District concluded that they could draw attention to their effort to keep 37 schools in their city from closing their doors by dressing up as a zombie mob. They organized a flash mob set to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and carried signs calling on administrators to reconsider the closures.

Students aren’t the only ones protesting the proposal to close the schools, a move which will save the cash-strapped district about $28 million. Since the plan was first announced, lawmakers, parents, and teachers have all stepped forward calling it a mistake and warning that it would have a detrimental effect on Philadelphia’s kids.

The plan was announced by district Superintendent William Hiite, who said that the district could no longer afford to keep the 21 elementary, 5 middle and 11 high school operating. There are over 50,000 seats in schools around the city going empty for lack of students, and by shifting students around and closing schools, the district could achieve substantial financial savings.

Deirdre Darragh from the School District of Philadelphia said that school closures could save the city the cost of maintenance, heating and general upkeep.

The Philadelphia School District is extremely underfunded. Superintendent Hiite has said that if action is not taken soon, the district will run out of money to operate its existing public schools. In the long run, school district officials believe the relocation will also improve the quality of academics in Philadelphia. Most students will move to better performing schools under the current closure plan. Darragh sums up PPS’s aims in closing schools: “Officially we have two goals. One is to make the district financially stable. As part of that we’re closing buildings that are underused. The other is to improve academic performance for all students.”

Critics aren’t convinced. The zombies and others believe that the expenses that come from moving students around to other schools will far outstrip the $28 million in savings the district expects to realize.

There are also potential safety concerns. Merging two schools could create friction as students from different parts of the city are forced to co-exist.

Surprisingly, a number of parents have expressed concerns that closures could see enrollment rates at city’s charters to go up, which they fear will further strip the district of funding.

Those who disagree with the plan to close schools have not stood idly by.  The Philadelphia Student Union has organized many protests, in addition to its zombie flash mob. The Philly Coalition Advocating for Public Schools (PCAPS) has several planned rallies and protests. The goal of these groups is a one-year moratorium on school closures until more research into the consequences of closing schools can be done.

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