Philly students’ math scores are up. So is enrollment. Here’s a beginning-of-the-year Philly report card.

Three weeks into the 2023-24 school year, Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. offered a glimpse into the Philadelphia School District, by the numbers, at a recent school board meeting.

Here’s how things look for Pennsylvania’s largest school system at the beginning of the year:

Preliminary Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) results are in, and district students posted modest increases in most categories.

In math, 20.1% of district students in grades 3 through 8 met or exceeded state standards in 2022-23, up 3.6 percentage points from 2021-22.

In English language arts, 34.1% of students hit the mark, down slightly from 34.4%.

On the state science exam, student scores were up 3.4 percentage points, with 40.5% of fourth and eighth graders passing state tests.

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Fewer students scored “below basic,” at the lowest level. The share of students scoring at that level was down 2.8 percentage points, to 25.4%; the below-basic group was down 4.4 percentage points in math, to 57.3%. In science, the number was down 2.6 percentage points, to 33% below basic.

“We know we have a long way to go, but we certainly believe this is promising data, that nearly all areas K-8 saw increases,” Watlington said Thursday night. “We’re moving in the right direction.”

Asked to contextualize the numbers, the superintendent said that with two-thirds of students still not meeting state standards in English and four-fifths not where they should be in math, the district must still treat raising achievement “like a crisis, the crisis that it is.”

But, Watlington said, “I think it says that we’re doing something right in the district, and we can expect to build on the momentum if we execute well.”

The school district’s enrollment on day 12 this year — the day by which schools have to drop students on their rolls who never showed up — was 115,953, Watlington said.

That’s 853 students above the district’s count at the same point in the 2022-23 school year, though Philadelphia’s enrollment is always a moving target, with high student mobility.

As of Sept. 15, the district had filled 96% of its teaching jobs. Officials did not release exact numbers of unfilled teacher positions, but in a system that usually carries about 9,000 teachers, that means hundreds of teaching jobs are unfilled.

Watlington has said provisions have been made to cover classes appropriately.

All principal jobs are filled; 98% of assistant principals jobs are staffed.

The numbers are lower for counselors and nurses — 94% and 90% of those jobs are filled, officials said.

The highest vacancy rates come for district support staff jobs. In all, 82% of food-service worker and 87% of school safety officer jobs are filled. And for school climate staff — workers who maintain order in hallways and schoolyards — just 76% of positions are filled.

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Watlington said 99.5% of district classrooms were cleaned prior to the start of the school year. It’s not a measure the district had reported in the past, but one the superintendent said was particularly important to him.

The school system’s buildings are old — the average age of a district school is 73 years old.

Still, Watlington said, schools “ought to be cleaned, the grounds should be mowed, appropriately manicured, when students walk in they ought to see lots of smiling faces, because it says something about what we value.”