Participatory Planning to Resist Racialized School Closures in Philadelphia

• In Event: School Shuttering and the Fight for Black Public Educational Access, Improvement, and Protection

Abstract

In 2013, the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) announced the decision to close or consolidate nearly 25 schools (out of 300 total) over the next year. The SDP’s governing body, under state control as the School Reform Commission (SRC), recommended these closures following a report by the Boston Consulting Group to close or consolidate 57 district schools. The decision was made following years of declining population and school district enrollment, school district financial mismanagement, and declining graduation rates. Although the process of school closures was framed as a school facilities planning process, few stakeholders in the district or broader community were engaged before or during the decision, and there was little consultation with the Philadelphia Department of Planning (DPD). The actual school closures were in neighborhoods that were majority-Black or majority-Latinx, creating community-wide destabilization over the next decade, as evidenced by decreasing home values and population. After the closures, district enrollments continued to decline, with many opting into neighborhood or citywide charter schools. However, new organizations dedicated to educational justice and school district data transparency emerged during this period.

In 2019 and 2022, the SDP announced new school facilities planning processes. The purpose of this paper is to understand how educational justice advocates organize to produce a “Peoples’ Facilities Plan” to counter the SDP’s historically exclusionary and racially disparate process. In partnership with several advocacy groups and two planning studios (applied planning courses across two universities), we use a participatory action research design to produce a people-centered planning process with the objectives of centering and investing in public school facilities as community infrastructure. The people-centered planning process (data collection, community engagement, goal setting, investment prioritization) acknowledges racialized histories and disparate impacts of SDP’s Capital Programs office, while leveraging community assets and social capital to address these disparities. We use a critical race approach to urban planning known as racial planning (Williams, 2020) within the frame of public schools as community infrastructure (Filardo et al., 2010; Vincent, 2006). Data include participant observation from SDP facilities planning meetings, document analysis of SDP’s planning policies and datasets, interviews with advocates and planning stakeholders, and census and other administrative data relevant to public school communities.

The results of the planning studios and people-centered planning meetings include: a Peoples’ Facilities Plan workbook for advocates to use for training the community on the need for and benefit of a people-centered facilities plan; a vulnerability index using school facility, administrative, census, and other data for advocates to determine which schools are vulnerable to closure, a “Fight Kit” which provides information on how to collect “counter data” to present to SDP decision-makers during its facilities planning process, and curricula and training materials on a website to train advocates in other cities facing similar district planning processes. This paper contributes to ongoing gaps between school district and urban planning processes and goals, while also providing tools for other advocates to combat the ongoing legacy of racialized school closures in their own cities.

Authors

• Akira Drake Rodriguez, University of Pennsylvania

• Ariel H Bierbaum, University of Maryland