50 days to fix a Philly school bathroom; 20% of teachers lack certification: Welcome to the school board’s ‘Goals and Guardrails’ meeting

The school board met Thursday night to take a hard look at the Philadelphia School District’s progress toward ensuring its buildings are clean, safe and well supported — and found issues with how long it takes to fix school bathrooms and the percentage of teachers who lack standard certification.

The board took no votes at its monthly “Goals and Guardrails” meeting, but officials said they would look for answers and make decisions about budgeting and policy based on the issues raised.

Here’s a rundown of Thursday’s board meeting:

The school system has 216 schools with the average school built 74 years ago. It has more than 2,000 bathrooms, currently employs just eight plumbers and has a whopping 62% vacancy rate on plumbing positions.

That means it took, on average, 50 days for a bathroom to get fixed in the 2022-23 school year, up from 38 days the prior school year.

Students have told officials bathroom conditions matter a great deal.

“In an internal study, students cited broken stalls and toilets, as well as a lack of adequate soap and toilet paper, as a factor in how comfortable they feel in school buildings,” said Tonya Wolford, the district’s chief of evaluation, research and accountability.

“It’s hard to imagine those kinds of inadequate facilities in the schools,” board member Joyce Wilkerson said. “It doesn’t send the kind of messaging or feeling we want for students in our schools. I think this is a subject we need to be moving more aggressively on.”

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Board member Cecelia Thompson called the situation “a health hazard.” Board member Lisa Salley said when she visited one high school, because of unmet facilities needs, there was just a single girls’ bathroom available for the entire female student body.

Mallory Fix-Lopez, board vice president and parent of a child in a district elementary school, said bathroom conditions are a frequent topic of conversation among her child and his classmates.

“Kids wait all day sometimes to use the bathroom because they don’t want to use the bathrooms in their schools,” Fix-Lopez said.

Officials traced the problem to not just the low number of plumbers available, but to a dearth of maintenance workers and building engineers. Nearly one in three building engineer jobs is currently vacant; the maintenance department vacancy rate is 38%. (The district does supplement its own workforce by contracting out for some jobs.)

Oz Hill, the district’s chief operating officer, said skilled building engineers can often take care of lower-level problems in-house, without filling out a work order and waiting for central office to handle it.

And, Hill said, “aging infrastructure will produce challenges. Cold hard fact.”

Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. said he found “concerning that we’re getting worse, not better, at this.” He said the district would look at best practices among other big-city school districts around work orders, was exploring using its career and technical education programs to build up the pipeline of trades workers, and would communicate better around the limits and expectations around work orders.

Waiting 50 days for a bathroom to be fixed and not hearing why or when it might improve is demoralizing, the superintendent said, and makes staff “feel like nobody’s listening, nobody cares. We have to do a better job communicating.”

Highlighting a teacher shortage in Pennsylvania and nationwide, a full 20% of current district teachers are uncertified, working on emergency permits.

That percentage is even higher in the district’s 50 highest-need, lowest-performing schools — 34% of teachers in those schools do not hold permanent certification.

Jeremy Grant-Skinner, the district’s deputy superintendent for talent, strategy and culture, noted that standard certification is not a perfect proxy for teacher quality, but research shows that overall, teachers who go through schools of education and traditional paths to teaching have better retention rates than those who are emergency certified.

But, Watlington said, “I do not know of a university that provides an emergency licensed medical doctor. The gold standard is to get highly qualified teachers to come out of a preparation program for teachers.”

While the school district currently has about 97% of its teaching jobs filled, that means that about 250 teaching positions are vacant — and some have been that way since September.

One way to improve both the teacher fill rate and diversity of the teaching force is to focus on building an emergency teacher pathway, Grant-Skinner said, giving emergency-certified educators a more robust early career support system than the one provided to traditionally certified teachers.

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Student board representatives Cavance Snaith and De’Naiza Watson both expressed frustration with a system where schools with high percentages of needy students and Black and brown students must cope with things like a higher percentage of uncertified teachers.

“We need to do better for our students,” said Snaith, a junior at Constitution High School.

Grant-Skinner and Watlington said the district would continue to rely on strategies it’s put in place to attract teachers to its neediest schools, such as offering bonuses and allowing the hardest-to-staff schools to begin the hiring process earlier than others. It will also look for more ways to recruit certified educators.

Watlington said he wants the most skilled teachers to work at schools with the highest needs.

But, Grant-Skinner said, “we have limitations of how much we can direct where teachers work.”

Though the average number of days it took to fix district “hydration stations” — places for students and staff to fill bottles with filtered water — increased, to 34 days from 19 days, the district is ahead of its goal on getting the hydration stations in place citywide.

The district now has 1,859 hydration stations installed in its schools. It’s well ahead of the curve in reaching the standard imposed by city legislation of one station per 100 students by 2025; it’s just 238 away from hitting the mark.