Some schools in Northeast Philly are bursting at the seams. Here’s what that looks like inside Lincoln High.

Lincoln High — like many schools in the Northeast — is bursting at the seams, with more than 2,000 students in a building designed to hold 1,586.

To accommodate the bumper crop of students, the Philadelphia School District carved the school’s library into six classrooms, with tall partitions separating the spaces.

That design, with no real walls and ceilings separating the rooms, has yielded frustrating learning conditions, those at the school say: Noise carries, students have trouble concentrating, and the dividers have fallen out of their frames.

Science teacher Sarah Caswell used to teach in a Lincoln laboratory; now, her space is one of three classrooms partitioned into thirds before the start of the 2023-24 school year. The room she’s left with has no sink, no counters, no cabinets and is sweltering, even in winter. For one period a day, she also teaches in one of the library classrooms, where things are no better, she said.

“You might as well be in other people’s classrooms; there’s no soundproofing,” said Caswell. “The walls fall down on the regular — if there’s a fight outside or kids are just goofing around, the walls just fall down. It’s horrendous.”

Though some schools across the district are under-enrolled (Strawberry Mansion High School, built for 1,800 students, has 250, for instance), many schools in the Northeast don’t have enough space to accommodate their growing populations.

Or, when such places as Southwark Elementary School close because of damaged asbestos, forcing emergency remediation and the relocation of students, other schools get an influx of students, though the district now has a “swing space” plan that designates schools with extra room when other schools temporarily close. In Southwark’s case, students went to South Philadelphia High and G.W. Childs Elementary.

The district in 2019 began a $1.4 million long-range school planning process, but there were questions about its efficacy and ultimately it was shelved during the pandemic. Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. paused facilities planning when he first arrived in Philadelphia last year, saying he needed to develop an academic blueprint before tackling building questions, but has promised the district will soon turn its attention to the matter.

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, in her inaugural speech Tuesday, said her administration would “prepare a strategy for school building modernization and work closely with the school district on its own plan for school facilities.” In the past, she has talked about “rightsizing” the school system.

But in an underfunded district with 216 schools, an average building age of 74 years old, and myriad environmental issues, it’s a process that is going to stretch on for years.

The school system has already spent almost half a million dollars to address the situation at Lincoln, whose building was constructed in 2009 on Ryan Avenue in the Northeast: In August, the school board ratified a $400,000 contract to purchase dividers “to add an additional 15 classrooms at Lincoln High School to support enrollment.”

Before the dividers, filing cabinets and dividers on wheels were used to create separate spaces, said Marissa Orbanek, a district spokesperson. And because a school’s budget is based on its enrollment, Lincoln’s swelling population means the school added teachers, climate staff to monitor hallways and lunchrooms, and mental health supports.

The district is doing its best “to provide comfortable and appropriate learning spaces for all of our students,” Orbanek said in a statement. “We know that overcrowding can make an impact on students and staff, so we work to make the necessary adjustments to reduce disruption and maintain desirable class sizes. At Lincoln, for example, we converted unused spaces, added instructional spaces throughout the building to reduce the footprint of larger rooms, adjusted scheduling, and added a lunch period.”

Lincoln staff say that even with the dividers and added staff, conditions inside the makeshift classrooms are poor.

“Kids hate it; they can’t concentrate,” one teacher said of the library classrooms. The staffer asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal. “I had a student say, ‘This is so ghetto.’ Sometimes, the kids yell at teachers to shut up in the next room because they’re just trying to concentrate. Physical conditions are just abysmal.”

After the district’s leveling process, which moves teachers from sparsely attended schools to overcrowded schools several weeks into the year to account for enrollment shifts, some changes were made at Lincoln, teachers say, and some classes that had been held in the library were moved out. But most still remain.

Another staffer who works in the makeshift classrooms said teachers have brought concerns to the administration and were told that “nothing can be done. It’s very much, ‘Good luck, with that.’”

“It’s noise constantly. One of my major concerns is fights or almost fights. In one of my rooms, there was a fight in the room next to me, and my wall was just shaking so much. I was trying to get my students to back up, but what happens if the wall falls? Some kids stood on desks to stand up to look into the other room. From a safety point of view, it’s concerning how this is happening,” said the staffer, who also asked to be anonymous because of fear of repercussions from the district and administration.

The situation impedes how teachers are able to instruct students — it’s too loud and chaotic for certain kinds of lessons, the second staffer said.

“I never even thought of a ceiling as a luxury until now,” the second staffer said. “I’ve had kids say, ‘This is not a real classroom, I can’t learn here, I just can’t focus.’ In a normal setting, the whole issue is getting kids to focus. We’re putting them in a space where there’s so many barriers.”

For Caswell, who said she often “can’t even hear the kids when they’re asking me a question” in her makeshift rooms, the tight space is an issue daily. And she worries about the impact of holding multiple health classes in the auditorium, in having lunch periods that begin at 9 a.m. in order to make sure every student has a lunch break.

“We need to be in appropriate spaces,” said Caswell. “Kids are on top of each other; it’s not a healthy environment for kids to be in.”

Lincoln is not the only overcrowded school in the district, or in the Northeast, where much of the district’s growth is concentrated, fueled in part by gentrification and immigration patterns.

Northeast High, on Cottman Avenue, has long been the city’s largest school. It has more than 3,200 students in a building that’s supposed to have just more than 2,100; it’s been overpopulated for years. At the same time, Fels High School, in Oxford Circle, was built for about 1,700 students but has just more than 1,200.

The Northeast is the only area of the city where district enrollment is growing, Orbanek said; it’s declining or staying steady in every other neighborhood.

In recent years, the district opened Northeast Community Propel Academy, a new K-8 school adjacent to Lincoln. It also built a new structure to house Solis-Cohen Elementary, a large K-5 on Horrocks Street.

One district administrator with knowledge of the situation said more new construction should be part of the solution. But more needs to be done, said the administrator, who said having too many students in one space affects both climate and instruction.

“They need to give a hard look at feeder patterns,” said the administrator, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal from district higher-ups. “You could give immediate relief if you reshuffled feeder patterns, but they don’t want to touch it. They need reasonable and meaningful solutions to the overcrowding problems, and they need long-range planning, vision, and political courage.”