Fifth graders from Kensington grilled nine mayoral candidates. This is what they asked of them.

With nine people hoping to become mayor sitting in the elementary school gym in front of them, the Kensington students pulled no punches.

People make a lot of promises, the students said, but we want details: How will you fix my school? How will you make my family’s lives better?

“When I walk to school, I find trash and needles, and I see people using and selling drugs,” said Jhovanny Quiñones, a fifth grader at Gloria Casarez Elementary. “It makes me feel uneasy and unsafe; I’m only 10 years old. What will you do as mayor to clean up the streets in Kensington and stop drug usage and drug trafficking?”

» READ MORE: These Kensington 4th graders wanted a new schoolyard. Here’s how they made it happen.

Jhovanny and 11 of his classmates, member of the Change Makers, a social-justice club at Casarez, want better for their school and their city, so they invited mayoral candidates to answer questions Tuesday. With dozens of parents, teachers, and other community members in the audience looking on, the young people offered up questions from asbestos to youth development.

Here are some highlights of the children’s asks and the candidates’ responses:

Casarez “is old, very old, like 124 years old, with no air-conditioning, no elevators, no ramps for people in wheelchairs, no good bathrooms,” said Devyn Smith, a fifth grader. “With a yes or no, if you become mayor, do you commit to helping us advocate for a new school building? Since it’s my last year here, I won’t get to see it. I hope my little sister, Saydee, she’s in kindergarten right now, I hope she gets to see it and learn in a comfortable classroom like other kids do, with no asbestos or things like that.”

Each of the candidates present — Warren Bloom Sr., Amen Brown, Allan Domb, Derek Green, Helen Gym, David Oh, Cherelle Parker, Rebecca Rhynhart, and Maria Quiñones Sánchez — said they would. The state of the district’s mostly old buildings, and the environmental conditions inside, are a hot-button issue at the moment, as the school system copes with two schools closed by damaged asbestos and a fight with City Council over a facilities plan.

Domb, the former City Council member and real estate magnate, said the district needs to tackle the issue of schools operating with hundreds of empty seats — at 20% capacity or less — but also open new, “state-of-the-art” schools.

“We should probably have a building plan that realistically, we’re building three to four schools, and closing schools so that we can cover the expense,” Domb said.

Gym, a former Council member who also spent time as an education activist and city teacher, said it’s unconscionable that while many Philadelphia schools crumble, Lower Merion is building a $140 million middle school five miles away.

“That inequity cannot stand, and as a mom, I fought tooth and nail to make sure that it will not,” Gym said. “This city will not grow if it leaves its families and its children behind.”

(The mayor does not have the power to close schools or fix how state funding is distributed but does choose school board members and can advocate in Harrisburg.)

On the school-building question, Gym said: “We have the money when it becomes a priority.”

Gym also said if she’s elected mayor, the city and school district will present their budgets together.

“They are not separate budgets, they are not separate ideas,” Gym said. “If the school district is left behind, the entire city is left behind.”

Every candidate addressed conditions in Kensington, which Domb said “in my opinion ... is the worst thing right now in the city of Philadelphia.”

Quiñones Sánchez, who grew up in the neighborhood, suggested city government was currently “normalizing conditions that no other zip code would tolerate, and Kensington should not either.”

Jhovanny’s question about walking to school past trash, needles, and drug deals had many in the audience nodding their heads in agreement.

Parker said that, if she is elected, the city won’t “hug our way through this open-air drug market. That means zero tolerance for the open-air drug market, along with the open-air use.”

She said she wants Gov. Josh Shapiro and President Joe Biden on the ground in Kensington.

“We’re going to clean this stuff up,” said Parker, adding that her administration would go after the pharmaceutical industry and gun lobby. “I want you to know some people are going to be upset with Mayor Parker, but that’s what we’re going to do. I don’t care how many people I p— off by doing it.”

Parker also drew murmurs from the audience when she said bringing supervised injection sites to neighborhoods would not fly in her administration.

“It may have worked in Canada, but we don’t want it here,” she said. “It’s not part of our solution. Under a Parker administration, we will make sure that the people who live here are the voices we hear first.”

“You’ve got my vote!” a woman in the audience called out.

Bloom, a block captain and minister who vowed as mayor to visit each of the city’s 900 schools (there are 216), exhorted each of the Casarez students to “be a godly person” and asked them to repeat his campaign slogan back to him. (”Vote for Bloom in the spring, let’s do the right thing. I’m from the hood, I’ll do you good.”)

He also revealed a truth that left some of the grown-ups raising their eyebrows.

“There’s no Santa Claus,” Bloom said. “You can’t put your faith and hope in politicians.”

Devyn, a veteran Change Maker whose poise and grace under pressure made him the natural choice to ask the first question, sat for the entire two-hour forum and digested what every candidate said.

If he were eligible to vote, who’d get his backing?

“Ms. Parker,” Devyn said.