One new member — ‘or more’ — for Philly school board to be chosen as mayor’s nominating panel reconvenes

The panel charged with helping Mayor Jim Kenney staff the Philadelphia school board reconvened Monday, and is now on the hunt for one new member — “or more” — to run one of the nation’s largest school systems.

Meeting for the first time since December 2020, the reconstituted nominating panel met to begin the process of filling the school board seat vacated by Angela McIver nearly a year ago.

Applications for the volunteer position opened Monday and will be accepted through April 22.

And though the nine-member school board has just one vacancy, the nominating panel left the door open to possible coming vacancies. Otis Hackney, the city’s chief education officer, said the panel was looking for one member “right now.”

Established by city charter, the 12-member nominating panel must come up with three candidates for each vacancy. The panel will vet and interview candidates and have until May 16 to submit its picks to the mayor.

Kenney will then name his new board member or members, who must then be approved by City Council.

The panel on Monday elected former city solicitor Sozi Tulante as chair; the former chair, Wendell Pritchett, is now interim president of the University of Pennsylvania.

The panel — the other members are the Rev. Bonnie Camarda, Daniel Fitzpatrick, Darren Lipscomb, Derren Magnum, Ellen Mattleman Kaplan, Ivy Olesh, Joanna Otero-Cruz, Kimberly Pham, Tiffany Thurman, Sean Vereen, and Barbara Moore Williams — absorbed some criticism from a handful of members of the public who took it to task for a lack of transparency.

“This meeting is a travesty and an insult to the people of Philadelphia,” Lisa Haver, a retired district teacher and a founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, said in testimony to the nominating panel, frustrated by a lack of public discussion of candidates. The nominating panel will discuss possible board members in executive session only, with the next public meeting called solely to vote on its choices.

“We have not yet been told how many vacancies they are filling,” Haver said. “Is somebody else resigning from the board? That should be disclosed today.”

Haver said the panel’s meeting time — 11 a.m. on a Monday — deliberately shut out teachers, students, and most school stakeholders. Panel members later said they would hold at least some future meetings in the evening to allow for more public participation.

Lynda Rubin, another Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools member and a retired district counselor, said any new board members must take the school system in a new direction, with more academic and emotional supports and fewer efforts to run the district like a business.

They “don’t need to be experts, but must come in with a better knowledge of children and teen development, types of learning, and the educational supports necessary to deal with trauma, so as to re-constitute a full public education support system,” Rubin told the panel.