The principal selection process at this Philly music magnet is broken, parents say

When the principal of the Girard Academic Music Program resigned, Philadelphia School District leaders promised parents and community members a robust national search for a new leader.

More than a year later, parents say the pursuit of a principal has been anything but. In fact, they say, school system leaders are conducting interviews with candidates who responded to an inadequate and cursory job description posted well after traditional educator hiring season ended that didn’t mention the school’s arts mission or its unique fifth-through-12th-grade configuration.

Multiple GAMP parents and supporters have asked the district to freeze the hiring process, keep the school’s interim principal — a veteran leader familiar with the arts — until the end of the school year, and hire a new principal when most candidates are applying, in the spring, for a summer start.

Complaints about hiring practices at GAMP surfaced at last Thursday’s school board meeting, but the process exposes larger flaws in the way the district recruits talent, said Kathryn Ott Lovell, a GAMP parent and member of the principal selection committee.

“This is not a GAMP problem,” said Ott Lovell, the city’s former commissioner of parks and recreation and the current CEO of the Philadelphia Visitor Center. “We’re very committed to our school, and we’ve got some very savvy parents who are really involved and are seeing this process for what it is — which is disorganized, dysfunctional, and not in the best interests of our school and our students.”

GAMP’s principal odyssey stretches back to August 2023, when its last permanent principal resigned. Multiple district leaders met late that month with parents and community members and promised both a full search and a transparent and well-communicated process.

But no search committee was formed until spring 2024, and when one was formed, its participation seemed perfunctory, members of the community said. Alarmed, they asked for and received a pause in the process.

After some phone calls were exchanged, and a letter was sent to the search committee saying it was being disbanded, a new committee was formed with the aim of choosing a principal by the end of December. (Eventually, that exact committee was revived, but it’s not clear why it was originally disbanded.)

Seemingly without any outside advertisement, the community was told interviews were to be conducted Tuesday — the day of the music school’s major winter concert.

GAMP community members asked privately for another pause to the process but were rebuffed by district officials; with no resolution, they showed up en masse to the school board’s Dec. 5 meeting to make their concerns public.

Soyini Seabrook-Tilley, a GAMP graduate and parent of two current students, is furious. GAMP wants what every other school in the district is promised — a real chance to weigh in on who leads their school, she said.

“We’re not asking for favoritism,” Seabrook-Tilley said. “There’s a hiring season, and we believe that we would have the greatest pool of eligible applicants during hiring season. We just want them to hire in a transparent way, and that’s being circumvented for reasons that are not clear.”

Seabrook-Tilley is an educator herself, a teacher in a suburban school system.

“If parents in Lower Merion were given the runaround like we have been,” she said, “there would be a complete uproar.”

Robin Cooper, president of the city principals union, said she’s found the process “disheartening,” but for different reasons. She said it’s unfair to qualified candidates who have waited a long time for a shot at the GAMP job.

”It’s been a year and a half,” Cooper said. “It’s time. We just want folks to have the ability to compete. We want viable, positive competition, and this just opens up uncertainty at a time when we can fill these schools.”

After GAMP community members spoke out to the school board on Thursday, Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. said the district “will be sure that we review this and make sure we have a good process.” The next day, the hiring committee received word that interviews would be postponed because of the winter concert, but would need to be held before Dec. 20, according to documents reviewed by The Inquirer.

On Monday, responding to City Council inquiries about the process, Watlington said that he had directed Deputy Superintendent Jermaine Dawson to hold an “open-mic session with the GAMP community to talk directly to those constituents.”

Dawson sent a letter Tuesday night informing the GAMP community of a forthcoming meeting, though no date has been set. Dawson said that the process will gather feedback and detail next steps, and that officials are listening.

“The district is committed to school communities playing an integral role in the principal selection process,” Dawson wrote. “Additionally, for each vacancy, we are committed to following a clear, transparent process for how principals and assistant principals are selected. Over the past two years, the district has hired 41 new principals. Most of these processes have been successful, and it is the district’s expectation that we place a strong principal at GAMP once this process concludes.”

Diane Dannenfelser spent decades at GAMP, as a music teacher and later, until 2016, as the school’s music director. She remains active at the school in her retirement.

GAMP is “a Camelot,” Dannenfelser said, “a wonderful, special school that takes students and transforms them” but that requires much of its principals. They must understand the challenges of a unique school where music is a major subject, drawing from all corners of the city, and teaching children from fifth to 12th grade. The school won a prestigious U.S. Department of Education Blue Ribbon prize in 2021.

“You can’t just put anyone in there thinking it will work,” Dannenfelser said. She said she’s particularly frustrated by the district’s refusal to let outside candidates apply after a deadline it did not advertise widely.

Ott Lovell said she’s mystified that in a district where its superintendent often talks about becoming the fastest-improving big-city school system in the country, the search and hiring process “is in no way a reflection of excellence.”

“It is bare minimum,” she said. “They are phoning this in. There’s no communication with us, but there is no communication within the leadership of the school district. If there’s nothing more important for the success of a school than who leads it, it’s a huge missed opportunity to not want to think about a very robust and transparent and excellent recruitment process to identify school leadership.”

Large bureaucracies can be complicated; Ott Lovell knows that well, having managed a complicated city department that employed hundreds of unionized employees. The GAMP committee wants to interview internal candidates, but it also wants to cast a wide net, she said.

“But no company, no governmental agency, no nonprofit agency would run a hiring process like this,” she said.

GAMP isn’t the only district school where some community members are upset and confused about what they say is an opaque hiring process.

G.W. Childs Elementary lost its beloved principal a week before the school year began when Masterman tapped the Childs’ school leader to become its leader.

An interim principal took over, and applications went out to form a search committee. Weeks went by with no word; an assistant superintendent told a parent that the search process was paused indefinitely, people with firsthand knowledge said.

When some parents found out last month that the intention was to place a new permanent principal at Childs by January, another email went out asking for applicants for a search committee, with no acknowledgment of the prior solicitation for a search committee.

By late November, six people received notification that they had been accepted to the search committee; other applicants heard nothing. (The community had been told there would be nine committee seats and were not told why three slots remained empty.)

Principal interviews were scheduled for GAMP and other schools on Tuesday, but hours before the interviews, members of the committee had not been given candidate names, resumes, or any other materials.

Cecily Harwitt, a Childs parent, is one of a number of people alarmed by the situation.

“It’s really unnecessarily opaque for a process that could build community and buy-in for our new leader,” Harwitt said. “And I don’t understand the Jan. 1 start. Why are they squeezing this in at this time of year when everyone is distracted?”