PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Superintendent Tony Watlington’s ambitious five-year plan to improve Philadelphia schools now has the green light from the school board.
The Board of Education Thursday unanimously approved Watlington’s roadmap to make schools safer and to boost the district’s lagging academic performance.
Watlington’s strategic plan, “Accelerate Philly” calls for new reading, math and science curricula, new school security cameras, and a pilot of year-round classes at up to 10 schools.
There’s no price tag for the plan yet, but Watlington told the board that parts will be trimmed-back, if there isn’t enough funding. “I propose that we implement a year-round calendar in up to ten schools,” Watlington said. “If we have budgets annually that only facilitate five or four or two, we will implement what we have the budget to implement.”
Watlington said he would calculate a first-year cost for his plan, by the board’s June 29 meeting.
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The superintendent made a few tweaks to his plan since it was released last week to add multilingual capabilities to the customer service chatbot under development, and to include more culturally relevant practices for teachers.
In a district where 170 languages are spoken, board member Mallory Fix-Lopez said she was concerned that students who learned a heritage language at home but were taught another at school could lose a measure of their cultural identity. “It doesn’t acknowledge that anywhere in this plan,” Fix-Lopez said. And so I’m almost concerned by us being so narrow in this that we’re losing an entire body of work and in reality an entire identity of our students."
School board member Lisa Salley supported the Superintendent’s blueprint, but said failing to improve a district where 84 percent of students aren’t doing math on grade level is unacceptable. “As encouraged as I am by the plan, I’m equally as uncomfortable,” Salley said. “Having a written plan like this is major. We’ve got to make sure it’s just not philosophical.”
“I strongly believe that there’s no quick silver bullet,” Watlington said. “We didn’t get into this off-track status overnight. This off-track train won’t be righted overnight.”
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