The district expects at least 14,000 students to enroll, based on internal data about student academic needs. Registration for the summer programs opened Thursday morning. Full-day classes will start on June 28 and run through mid-August, 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. | From: WHYY (Read more.)
The School District of Philadelphia will provide in-person and digital classes, as well as extracurricular programming, for all of its students this summer. Wednesday’s announcement from district officials means most students who opt in will be able to attend in-person summer school for the first time since 2019, after the coronavirus pandemic forced all summer programming to be digital last year. | From: NBC10/Telemundo62 (Read more.)
Wolf is calling for a $1.35 billion increase to the state’s main pot of K-12 education funding. The increase would allow him to redistribute the entire basic education subsidy through a formula based on school and student needs without negatively affecting any school district in the state. Currently, only 11% of Pennsylvania’s $6.8 billion basic education subsidy is distributed via that formula. | From: WHYY (Read more.)
The U.S. overall spends only about two-thirds as much as it should on school maintenance and upgrades, or about $46 billion less per year than is needed, according to a 2016 report by the 21st Century School Fund, a Washington D.C. nonprofit. In Philadelphia, the backlog was $4.5 billion for repairs and $3.3 billion for capital projects as of 2015, and continued underinvestment since then has pushed those figures even higher.
Washington managed to accomplish a task that has long stymied Philadelphia and many other school districts, and that over the past 13 months has exploded into public view as parents, teachers, and school administrators battled over how to safely reopen schools in the midst of a pandemic. | From: PlanPhilly (Read more.)
While online learning, hybrid or not, continues for the majority of students, Mejía said she and her fellow students deserve a better plan from the school district. That plan should address accessibility issues, like internet (Read more.)
Nearly three in five college students experienced food or housing insecurity in 2020, according to a yearlong survey conducted by The Hope Center for College Community and Justice at Temple University. | From: WHYY (Read more.)
Pennsylvania does not require nonprofits, including colleges and universities with large endowments, to pay property taxes, but Philadelphia advocates have been pushing for these payments, known as PILOTs, since at least November 2019. Now, they’re explicitly asking the universities to contribute 40% of the property taxes they don’t pay to the district. The group did not have an estimate for how much that would yield for the city’s schools. | From: WHYY (Read more.)
Hundreds of protesters blocked traffic on March 30, to call on the higher ed institutions to provide more funding to Philadelphia schools.
In 2020, 195,000 students from more than 200 colleges and universities across the country responded to the survey — including students attending schools in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia — and provides one view on the impact of the pandemic on students’ lives. The most common obstacle respondents faced this year was not being able to afford rent, mortgage, or utility bills. The number of students who said they experienced housing insecurity in 2020 rose by almost 10% from 2019. | From: WHYY (Read more.)
This is the fourth set of schools announced since the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the district agreed on a phased-in reopening process, which allowed the union to review ventilation documents in all schools before bringing students and staff back for in-person instruction. | From: Chalkbeat Philadelphia (Read more.)
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