Mayor Kenney announces three new community schools paid for with soda-tax proceeds

Three Philadelphia schools were named “community schools” by Mayor Jim Kenney on Tuesday, given extra resources and support paid for with the city’s soda tax.

Frankford High; Add B. Anderson, a K-8 in West Philadelphia; and Paul Dunbar, a K-8 in North Philadelphia, were tapped for the community schools program, a hallmark of the Kenney administration. Each will get a dedicated, city-paid worker embedded in the school building expressly to assess needs, seek out community partnerships, and provide wraparound supports for students as a way to remove barriers to learning.

Community schools have attendance supports for students who struggle to come to school regularly, adult education classes, connection to social services and emergency funds, plus after-school and summer programming and career exploration. And their buildings are also typically open for longer days and in the summer, and accessible to the community at times when school is not in session.

Each community school gets more than $500,000 extra annually; the city is proposing an $11.2 million budget for 20 community schools for the 2022-23 school year.

The addition of three new community schools makes 20 in total, and Tuesday’s cohort is the first new group named since 2019. The first community schools were chosen in 2016.

Kenney and City Council President Darrell L. Clarke first saw community schools up close on a trip to Cincinnati in 2015. They were wowed by school buildings that offered not just academics but also vision, medical, and dental clinics, food banks, day-care centers, and mental-health resources. They made schools into hubs accessible not just by the pupils enrolled there, but also by the larger neighborhood.

“It made all the sense in the world,” Clarke said at a news conference Tuesday. He said he had high hopes for “50, 60, 100″ community schools in Philadelphia.

New Philadelphia Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr., who served as principal of three different schools in North Carolina, said he wished he had the extra supports offered to community schools when he was an on-the-ground leader.

“We all know that for schools to help students thrive, we need to work with our partners to address the struggles and the challenges our students face both inside and outside of the classroom. That’s exactly why it’s important to have community schools,” Watlington said.

The principals of the newly tapped community schools said they were thrilled to get to work, hiring a community schools coordinator and assessing needs.

Frankford High Principal Michael Calderone said his community has great promise, and also great need, particularly around the trauma of gun violence.

“The safe space — community options for our children to learn, play, and grow — seem to dwindle by the day,” Calderone said. “Today’s announcement will forever change the trajectory of this amazing community and bring more equitable access to resources to a community that has gone without equitable access to resources for far too long.”

Laurena Zeller, Add B. Anderson principal, said students’ opportunities are too often limited by their zip code, and this program is a way to change that.

“We have lots of work to do as we continue to dismantle inequitable practices in our city,” Zeller said. “We thank the School District of Philadelphia and the City of Philadelphia for giving us the opportunity to do what we do best — love our community wholeheartedly.”

Zeller said an initial survey of the Anderson community showed a need for culturally responsive opportunities for students, for STEM connections, and for “more resources and more things for students to do beyond the school day.”

Jared Beck, community school coordinator at Locke Elementary in West Philadelphia, said the program is “giving voice to people that have been left out,” and said the program has yielded results at Locke — fewer student suspensions and overall, more time for teachers to focus on teaching.

At Hamilton Disston in the city’s Tacony section, the community schools program has engaged neighbors in a way that they weren’t before.

“There was a disconnect — Disston was sort of seen as a last resort,” less desirable than charter options, said Ester Roche, Disston’s community schools coordinator. That’s changed, Roche said.

The other community schools are: Cramp, Hamilton Disston, F.S. Edmonds, Gideon, Gompers, Locke, Logan, McClure, Overbrook Educational Center, Webster and Richard Wright Southwark Elementary Schools; Tilden Middle School; and Dobbins, Kensington Health Sciences, and South Philadelphia and George Washington High Schools.