Inside Mastbaum High, a refuge for Philly kids at the epicenter of the opioid epidemic

Jordy Navas-Garcia leaves home in Fishtown every morning to walk to school, a 20-minute trip to a towering brick building at the epicenter of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis in Kensington.

“When I’m walking here, I’m walking by people offering me drugs, needles on the street — a very toxic environment,” said Navas-Garcia. “But then I get here, and it’s different.”

Here is Mastbaum High, where on a recent morning, Navas-Garcia was one of the first students in line when the doors swung open before sunrise. He’s a senior, enrolled in the career and technical high school’s electrical shop, eager to lock up his cell phone, walk through the metal detectors, and get to work. Six months before graduation, Navas-Garcia already has three separate job prospects — good, stable work with room for growth.

David Lon smiled at Navas-Garcia. The principal is a fixture at morning admission; he knows each of the school’s 565 students by name.

“Good morning! Welcome back, Jordy,” Lon said, standing just under a giant statue of The Thinker — Jules E. Mastbaum, the school’s namesake, created the Rodin Museum.

The building that bears Mastbaum’s name hosts 11 career and technical programs, from welding to graphic design. It offers students industry certifications and college credits.

And it has made significant strides in recent years — more students are on track to graduate, and standardized test scores have risen, with notable growth for Black males. Mastbaum’s Act 13 score — a state measure of teachers’ effectiveness — was third-highest of the city’s non-magnet high schools. And its serious incidents, like assaults, have plummeted.

But being a school at ground zero of a public health crisis has taken a toll on Mastbaum, both in terms of the trauma endured by students and staff from the drug use and violence in the surrounding neighborhood, as well as on its enrollment.

In 2009, 900 students attended the school. Now, it enrolls 565.

“We try to get the message out as much as possible on the academic growth, safety, our programs,” said Lon, who’s in his fourth year as Mastbaum’s principal. “But it’s still difficult — we have parents that come into our school community the first week or two, and they say, ‘I didn’t know it was like this in Kensington,’ and they unenroll. That’s a struggle that we fight every single day.”

Mastbaum’s mission is to equip students with real-world skills that set them up for success in careers or in college. But the staff believe deeply in their school’s mission statement: to “encounter our students as they are and accompany them on their journey.”

That is, Lon said, “it’s part of our identity that we work in the opioid epidemic. That is the work here at Mastbaum.”

Inside the warm, bustling hub of Mastbaum’s culinary program, students worked on pizzas they had made themselves, drizzling hot sauce and placing toppings onto slabs of dough and tomato sauce. Chef Timothy Lopez checked their progress, eyeing some of the finished pizzas, from a traditional cheese to a balsamic goat cheese sprinkled with arugula.

“I need someone to check the ovens,” Lopez called out. “Keep cooking, keep cleaning.”

Marihah Scott, a senior, has found a haven in Mastbaum’s kitchen. High school wasn’t always easy for her — she started out at another district school, Parkway West, where she struggled as a freshman after her brother was shot and killed the day before her eighth-grade graduation.

“My grades weren’t good,” said Scott. Eventually, she had to find a new school. Mastbaum accepted her, but she was worried.

“A lot of people don’t think Mastbaum is OK,” said Scott. “But it’s not like that. The shops, they keep kids going, and we can use our certificates to go to other places. Mastbaum has a lot of benefits.”

There are challenges, to be sure.

Some staff at Mastbaum, and at other district schools, have said they’re hampered by a lack of adequate staff to do the intense work of supporting students. (Lon said the district has worked to help preserve staff and programs, even as the school’s enrollment shrinks, but “from a school safety standpoint, you could always use more people.”)

The school building is enormous and old — eight floors, built in 1927 — so it’s hard to monitor and maintain. Mastbaum currently has no building engineer; the school’s custodial assistant does his best, but many mornings, it’s Lon’s job to sweep the front steps of trash, needles, and sometimes human waste, before students arrive.

On a walk through the school, Lon’s face fell as he stepped into a staircase and recognized the unmistakable scent of marijuana. Despite a focus on climate and culture and four hall sweeps daily, there are no cameras in the seven stairwells, and sometimes students duck into one to smoke undetected.

“It’s impossible to cover eight floors and all these stairs with the staff that we have,” the principal said. Still, the staff tries.

Lon, a Philadelphia native and Frankford High graduate who comes from a family of tradespeople, came to Mastbaum after a career as an English teacher at Furness High, then as an assistant principal at Lincoln High and Mastery Simon Gratz. On his third day as Mastbaum’s principal, “there was a riot at the school. Police had to come in and restore order,” Lon said.

Those days are gone. Mastbaum built itself back up with consistent expectations, an emphasis not just on community partnerships and student opportunities but also on relationships. Lon used Mastbaum’s federal relief funds to bolster his mental health team; there are trauma groups and an enviable-for-the-district 185-1 student-to-counselor ratio. (What happens once the federal money disappears is not clear.)

The staff works hard to make the school feel welcoming, despite what goes on in the neighborhood. Lon never knows when he might get a call to lock down his building because of trouble outside.

“I’ve never been in a school before where you have to be in a constant state of readiness,” he said.

When a group of district seventh graders visited Mastbaum recently, Wilneliz Rivera was thrilled to show the younger kids around her shop.

Rivera, 18, a senior who’s studying electrical technology, liked showing off what she and her classmates do: read blueprints, install and maintain wiring, and more.

“Being in electrical is just my safe zone,” said Rivera. “I like to do hands-on. I like to keep my mind moving.”

Rivera lives in the neighborhood, and “it’s been really tough for my mom and me,” she said. “I hate seeing the stuff I see.”

But Mastbaum has given Rivera a way forward, an internship with Elliott-Lewis, the Philadelphia HVAC firm, which gave her the chance to work as a maintenance technician at the Ronald McDonald House. She has multiple job prospects after graduation. She dreams of buying a safe car, a nice house.

At 17, Alexas Williamson, a Mastbaum junior studying automotive technology, is already a city employee, working in fleet management and earning a pension.

“Our students can walk right into the workforce,” said Jonathan Jacobs, a district career awareness specialist who oversees programs including Mastbaum’s. “Companies are actually calling us. Recent graduates, they now own houses, they graduated making 40-, 50-grand right out of high school.”

Mastbaum has the city’s only pre-apprentice program for construction trades through its partnership with Philadelphia Academies Inc. It has programs that allow students to become certified EMTs before they graduate from high school.

And the students Mastbaum serves is expanding; they come from 24 countries, with a growing English language learner population. That’s a rarity for a career and technical school — English learners are vastly underrepresented in such programs.

Still, the positive inside environment is constantly at odds with the messaging outside.

During one hall sweep, Catherine McPhilemy, a Mastbaum teacher leader, was handing out detentions. One student challenged her.

“She said: ‘We’re in Kensington. Why are we held to these expectations?’”

McPhilemy knew why the student felt that way — the neighborhood conditions she walks past daily, the layers of trauma she’s endured — and knew the staff must work hard to counteract those experiences.

Don’t count Mastbaum out, said biology teacher Matthew Lessie, who recently earned citywide recognition for highest possible academic growth among his students.

“There are a lot of kids that get overlooked because of problems in the city, and the district, in America,” Lessie said. “Students rise to whatever expectations you place for them, and I just see the brightness in our students.”