Mayor Cherelle Parker unveils details of Philadelphia schools’ ‘extended-day, extended-year’ pilot

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker on Thursday announced her plan to pilot “extended-day, extended-year” programs at 25 district and charter schools this fall — an initiative she said would provide both an academic boost for kids and support for working parents.

Schools will not just be open to provide free before- and after-care, but also will stay open during winter and spring breaks and offer six-week summer programs, Parker said.

» READ MORE: These Philadelphia schools will start offering year-round school

But the mayor — who was joined by Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. and other city and education officials — declined to discuss how or whether the program would transition into more formalized year-round schooling, a pledge she’d made on the campaign trail.

“We have our sea legs, right? We’re working to stand it up,” Parker said at a news conference at City Hall. She stressed that next year’s program would be voluntary, and that officials would be learning from the experience to expand future efforts.

Here’s more of what Parker said about the program and how it will work:

In addition to 20 district schools, the pilot will include five charter schools: Belmont Charter School, Mastery Charter at Pickett, Northwood Charter School, Pan-American Charter School, and Universal Creighton Charter School. (Penny Nixon, the CEO of the Universal charter network, and Joel Boyd, the Mastery network’s CEO, were present Thursday.)

The pilot will focus on K-8 students, said Debora Carrera, the city’s chief education officer. She said that in participating district schools, before- and after-school programming would be offered from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., and that schools would remain open for services on half-days — when students are traditionally sent home earlier for staff professional development.

Those schools will also be open for students during winter and spring breaks, Carrera said.

Meanwhile, families at all the pilot schools will be able to opt in to six-week summer programs, she said. But she and Parker said no one would be forced to participate.

“We’re trying to do absolutely nothing to interfere with the plans you have for your children,” Parker said, referring to summer travel. “What we’re really talking about here today is young people for whom that is not the standard operating procedure in their life.”

The district, in a partnership with the city’s Office of Children and Families, currently offers before- and after-school programs in more than 60 schools. A district spokesperson said the mayor’s initiative provides consistent hours, a push to all five days, and winter and spring break coverage.

Participating schools were selected based on several criteria, Carrera said: In a district with massive facilities needs, the pilot schools have air-conditioning that can support summer programming, she said.

The schools are also located throughout the city, and 10 are “community schools,” which have existing agreements with the city to support students’ non-academic needs — allowing for “rapid programming and expansion,” Carrera said.

The schools are also located in communities where children “are at high risk for involvement in the child welfare or juvenile justice system,” Carrera said.

The district will rely on community-based providers that currently offer extracurricular programs at a number of schools. On Thursday night, the school board will vote on a $20 million action item that aims to support providers across the district, including those for before- and after-care programs, Watlington said. He added that more information will come on cost once the district sees the demand for the program.

Changes to district teachers’ schedules would require negotiating with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which said earlier this week that it was caught off guard by news of the program.

The district is “not going to burn out or overburden” teachers, Watlington said. Asked whether the participating schools would become year-round schools going forward — and if teachers would have to change their schedules to continue working there — he said that the pilot schools would “have the first right to continue into future years,” but that officials “don’t want parents or schools to feel like something’s forced on them.”

A spokesperson for the PFT, Jane Roh, said Thursday that the union was “still awaiting direct communication about the pilot from [school district] administration so we have no new comment at this time.”

Parker, meanwhile, expressed frustration with sources earlier this week who disclosed news of the pilot program to The Inquirer. “When the folks leak the story, this is how you know the intention wasn’t a good intention. They knew we hadn’t completed our check-the-box list,” Parker said. ”Whoever you were, it was cute.”

It wasn’t clear whether the pilot program would lead to year-round schooling. Parker — who repeated that the pilot was “not changing the school calendar” — said she wanted to address misconceptions about her proposal.

“The narrative with so many people in the city, they heard me on the campaign trail talking about year-round schooling,” Parker said. People “think about the traditional educational day, and that our children are just going to be sitting in the same classrooms all day long, from 7 in the morning to 6 in the evening. ... That in no way defines what we mean when we talk about extended-day, extended-year schools.”

Parker, who said she wanted to “close the opportunity gap,” said other cities such as Los Angeles and Boston had seen success from extended-day and -year programs.

“When it comes to public education, our goals are high, and they must be. For far too long, our schools have struggled with far too little,” Parker said.

Funding has been a barrier for the district, which will see federal COVID-19 relief money run out in September. Philadelphia is banking on an increase in state aid proposed by Democrats after a Commonwealth Court ruling last year finding that Pennsylvania had unconstitutionally deprived lower-wealth school districts of needed resources.

Watlington, who included a year-round pilot program in his strategic plan, didn’t comment on how the program might be expanded.

“Right now, we’re focused on year one,” he said.