Frankford High students are back to school as the building’s future remains in limbo

The hallways can be crowded. Some teachers have to share classrooms. To get to the gym, students have to exit the main building and walk through a narrow path with a makeshift plywood roof to protect them from the elements.

And yet, the general consensus is that people are delighted to do it.

After students and staff of Frankford High — “Home of Champions,” they call it — were displaced since April when the school closed to fix damaged asbestos, now 700 Frankford students in 10th through 12th grades are making do in the Frankford annex. (All ninth graders are on the “Erie campus,” sharing space with Clemente Middle School and the Linc, two other Philadelphia School District schools.)

Frankford’s asbestos damage was so extensive that the school’s main building, a grand 1912 structure on Oxford Avenue, remains closed. Officials have not yet decided whether they will gut and revamp the building, or tear it down and build anew.

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Although the annex is adjacent to the main building and was already in use before the asbestos discovery, getting it to work took all summer and such concerted effort on the part of school staff and the district’s tradespeople and maintenance staff that workers were putting the finishing touches on the roof between the gym and annex at 5:30 a.m. on the first day of school, said Michael Calderone, Frankford’s veteran principal.

Joan DiPre, a Frankford senior, can deal with the fact that he’s eating lunch in a converted library.

“Although it’s a little crowded now, it’s still the same people,” said DiPre. “Frankford is a family, and at least we have somewhere to go.”

When Frankford abruptly had to shift to virtual instruction in April of DiPre’s junior year, “it felt bad, familiar, like COVID all over again.”

Everyone missed their friends. Teachers did their best, but virtual instruction was difficult; some staff publicly decried being deprived of information by the school district. And officials wondered how they could find a single space to accommodate Frankford’s growing student body, that wouldn’t require students to go to different neighborhoods.

DiPre, a strong student who plays lacrosse and participates in Frankford’s robust media program and student government, said some students discussed finding new schools if Frankford’s temporary space wasn’t nearby.

But when Sept. 5 rolled around and the first students swung open the school doors, Calderone was overjoyed. The normal beginning-of-the-year bumps — students who need entirely new rosters, hiccups as students settle back into the school routine — almost felt like a joy. Staff are sporting T-shirts that read “In this family we have two homes, but one heart.”

“It’s just been fantastic,” said Calderone, who described the spring and summer months as “an emotional roller coaster” for students and staff.

To get the 1950s-era annex up to snuff to accommodate 700-plus students and staff, staff carved up some spaces, such as an old shop class, into new classrooms. They put up walls, re-painted, replaced ceiling tiles. The barrier between the annex and the main building is several layers thick.

One-quarter the size of the main Frankford building, the annex is being used to its maximum capacity; the staffer in charge of English language learners now has a tiny office that used to be a copy room. There’s no faculty lunchroom, and eight employees work out of the main office because there’s nowhere else to go.

The logistics of running two campuses are complex: a “Pioneer Express” bus shuttles students between the main campus and the Erie campus. The roster chairwoman had to spend her summer tearing up existing rosters and building new ones. The school district had to give Frankford extra teachers to accommodate for the split, because teachers who previously taught freshmen and other grades had to give up their upperclassmen.

“You can’t have teachers teach in two different buildings,” said Calderone, who spends a few days a week at the Erie campus.

Frankford’s projected enrollment, between the two campuses, was 930, but 1,000 are on roll. New enrollments have been deflected for months, but most schools in the Northeast are already bursting at the seams.

As delighted as most staff and students are to just be back on a Frankford campus, Calderone is thinking long term: Will the school be able to reopen in the main building, or will it be torn down? What’s happening next year?

“People need to know what the next step is,” said Calderone. “I don’t want to go through last-minute prep again.”

District officials have said no decision has been made about Frankford’s long-term fate. But the clock is ticking — school selection applications open Friday, and Calderone thinks students and staff should be able to make decisions about where they want to be next year with good information.

“It’s toughest on the teachers,” Calderone said of the shift. “For years, they had a space and now they have to share a much smaller space.”

Calderone, for one, is rooting to get back in the main building, even if it’s gutted and remade.

“Get us back into the Home of Champions,” he said.

But for now, Albaliz Dominguez, a Frankford junior, is still counting herself lucky to be back in any kind of classroom at a school she adores.

“They include the kids in the school, we have a voice,” said Dominguez, 16, who’s involved in student government and youth court. Dominguez said she feels sorry for the ninth graders, separated from the rest of the school, but “I’m just happy to be here. They did good for the little space that we have. It feels like home.”