20 Philadelphia schools will start year-round calendar pilot, getting morning and aftercare in the fall, sources say

City officials will introduce year-round school opportunities at 20 Philadelphia School District schools this week, sources said — the first step toward more formal school-calendar changes promised by Mayor Cherelle L. Parker during her campaign.

Not to be confused with holding mandatory classes throughout the year, the year-round opportunities will start with the 2024-25 school year, and offer free before- and aftercare at 20 schools, including next summer. Teachers and other unionized workers won’t be required to change their schedules, and families will have the ability to opt into the extra hours.

The before- and aftercare programming will be provided by so-called out-of-school-time providers, many of whom already contract with the district to offer services.

If school communities buy in, the idea will be to move to more formal, full-time school calendars in the 2025-26 school year, which would require negotiating with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, whose contract expires in August 2025.

Arthur Steinberg, president-elect of the teachers union, which represents about 13,000 teachers, classroom assistants, secretaries, counselors, nurses, and other workers, was caught off-guard by the news, expected to be announced later this week, according to the sources, who were not authorized to discuss Parker’s plans on the record.

“The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers was not made aware of the District’s plan to launch a year-round and extended-day school calendar pilot in the 2024-2025 school year,” Steinberg said in a statement. “We have requested more information about the pilot and its potential impact on our members from Superintendent [Tony B.] Watlington’s administration. As we await communication from the district, we intend to have more information to share with our members in the very near future.”

Staff at the 20 schools have been invited to meetings scheduled for the next week to learn more.

Debora Carrera, Parker’s chief education officer, said in a statement that extended-day and -year programs “are a priority initiative” of Parker and “will meet the needs of working families, close the enrichment opportunity gap and support academic success.”

Carrera said the full details of the program will be released Thursday.

The schools chosen are mostly the city’s existing “community schools,” designated by the administration of former Mayor Jim Kenney to receive a city-paid staffer to help solve nonacademic needs among school families.

According to sources, they are:

Year-round school has been tried before in the district: From 2000 through 2004, students enrolled at Grover Washington Jr. Middle School in Olney attended school for 180 days — the minimum number of instructional days required in Pennsylvania and the same as their peers in the rest of the district — but those days were spread throughout the year, with no single, monthslong break.

At the time, officials said they wanted to reduce summer learning loss and help struggling students. Grover Washington administrators hoped the schedule change would cut failure rates by 50%; research shows that such schedules especially benefit students from economically disadvantaged families.

But then-district CEO Paul Vallas ultimately ended the experiment. It didn’t show enough promise to justify keeping or expanding it past the single school.

“Obviously, if they had had tremendous growth, we would have reconsidered,” Vallas told The Inquirer at the time. Grover Washington showed only modest standardized test-score growth.

Watlington’s five-year strategic plan presented in May 2023 included a year-round school pilot program that Parker backed, but it was unknown at the time how many and which schools would participate, how they would be structured, and who would staff them.

The obstacles to keeping students in class year-round include the district’s buildings, many of which do not support central air-conditioning; the teachers’ union needing to approve a massive schedule shift; and parents used to traditional calendars and with children at multiple schools likely to balk.

Watlington has said he wants all district buildings air-conditioned, but that goal is years away. The barrier to climate-controlling most schools is not the cooling systems themselves, but the electrical service required to run them.

Michael Galbraith, a teacher who was part of the experiment at Grover Washington, loved the year-round schedule because he thought it kept his students sharper, but also because he didn’t get exhausted the way he had teaching in a traditional school year.

By summer break, “it would take two full weeks to decompress and get yourself back to feeling unruffled,” he recalled in 2023. “I just never felt it in the years we had the year-round schedule.”

At a news conference last year, Parker suggested that schools start as early as 7:30 a.m. and stay open as late as 6 p.m., expanding schools’ opportunities for development, whether it be through building trades or newer technology, such as coding.

According to the National Association for Year-Round Education, an estimated 4% of schools, serving about three million students, followed a year-round schedule in 2020.