Testimony for Town Hall on School Recovery Spending - March 30, 2021

 Good evening everyone. I would like to thank the members of City Council, Councilmember Helen Gym, and her staff, for their work in organizing this town hall. My name is Akira Drake Rodriguez and I am a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. The work I do is how communities can and do mobilize around planning processes in order to create and sustain political power in the city. The infusion of federal funds, up to $1.9B in a school district with innumerable needs, requires a plan that is equitable, participatory, and builds in measures and conditions for accountability.  While I am happy to discuss the items, programs, and resources the School District should prioritize in its upcoming spending, I would much rather focus on the processes and tools that enable and guide that spending.  While it is unfortunate that the institutions and processes of democratic governance must be preserved by those who are least afforded its benefits, that is the unfortunate situation we find ourselves in the City of Philadelphia.

As many on this call know, the residents of the City have had little ability to elect (and thereby control) the governance of the city’s 200 schools. With an annual budget just under $3.2 billion, there is an amazing potential to have a transparent and democratic process to design and administer these funds in a way to achieve greater equity and socioeconomic mobility for historically disadvantaged groups in the city.  I want to take some time to briefly review the Superintendent and District’s March 25 proposal for spending of federal funds, and what are some core suggestions for feedback, participation, and accountability that might help this spending achieve these broader, citywide goals.  Like many school district documents, this presentation and budget items are posted on the district website, which unfortunately is the least accessible website in the city. It is busy, is not dynamic, and is emblematic of some of the barriers to participation in the city. The board’s recent move to limit public participation by grouping and responding to “categories” of questions, screening and reducing public testimony times, and its ongoing refusal to address all of the questions in testimony by written or verbal response, suggest that moving towards transparency and accountability will require some significant institutional changes in local school governance.

Returning to the district’s proposed expenditure plan, the presentation frames the last year, of a global pandemic as one of social-emotional trauma (correct) and learning loss (incorrect). Through that frame the budget categories of “educational recovery,” “school modernization,” “social emotional needs,” “more supports in schools,” are logical, but perhaps will not achieve these latitudinal and longitudinal needs of the school district.  As a planner, documenting existing conditions, including the history of a place, are critical. The time frame for the district’s proposal is not accounting for the century of disinvestment and disadvantage that was baked into our school system before COVID. So in order to address social emotional or learning loss issues, we must look at the entire history of the district, and not this last year.  Attempting to recoup the last year will put us where we were in 2020. Is that progress?

My suggestion is to reverse the priorities of the district so that there is a clear accounting for what is the existing disadvantage, what priorities should we use to address that disadvantage, And how are we measuring that progress? So, let us begin by framing the problem as one that began in the 1950s and continues into the present, the systemic disinvestment of schools that are in neighborhoods with low property values. What if we began targeting investment there, to address “more supports in schools”? I bring up property values because that correlates well to race and class, but imagine if we looked at schools with high IEPs and other needs, who are also being disinvested. We can give them more support.

Lets now look at the issue of social emotional needs. By my count, we are entering a historic era of gun violence in Philadelphia, except that’s a phrase I’ve heard more than once in my years living here. So if we are to think about social emotional needs, grieving, community loss, and broader mental health supports, lets start in the areas experiencing the greatest losses over time. And lets be quite expansive on that “loss” – it is more than gun violence, it is hunger, it is lack of health care. Lets target those schools for social emotional needs, and create programs and resources that address that. Let us not think loss begins and ends with a pandemic.

School modernization is another budget category, which again, we need to think of in a more expansive definition. Modernization is often just getting things up to code, remediating lead and removing asbestos. I cant even articulate what a scourge the term “modernization” has been in the planning field, but needless to say, these are concepts that need to remain in the 20th century. No longer should we settle for these antiquated notions of modernity, but instead, seek to think collaboratively about what a school facility looks like in the 21st century. Think beyond aesthetics, and of the last year, and what you would want in your school building if you had your druthers. I doubt lead remediation and asbestos would be a priority because that should be the BASELINE. We need healthy buildings for healthy communities, but we also need aspirational buildings that reflect the community and spirit.

And finally my least favorite pandemic term, learning loss. While I agree there is something that we loss over this year, I cant say that it was “learning.” What we loss were people, humanity, experiences, moments, memories, futures, first dances, graduations, proms, weddings, funerals, everything. We lost it all. It surely is terrible my son, learning remotely as his peers are in person, missed an opportunity to experience his first day of first grade, his first recess. But while I could bemoan his failure to dominate his multiplication tables, I am instead thinking of how long we will remain physically-distanced and hybrid situations because of this overwhelming loss of community, of public health, of caring for our neighbors at our own personal comfort. So lets think of the learning “gains” from this year – 1:1 chromebooks for the first time in the school district, fully funded summer programs, after-school programs, tutoring and perhaps an expansion of school days and early childhood interventions. Instead of doing this once to “make up” for the last year, lets consider funding some of these interventions permanently to make schools the vehicles they can and should be for our communities that need and care for them.