PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Twenty schools would close, including several middle schools that would be phased out, and others would be modernized and reconfigured under a sweeping and long-awaited facilities plan released by the School District of Philadelphia on Thursday.
The 10-year, $2.8 billion plan would expand access to academic programs while modernizing many of the district’s aging buildings. It also addresses overcrowding in some areas of the city and under-enrollment in others.
“We must find ways to more efficiently use all of our resources so that we can push higher-quality academic and extracurricular programming and activities into all of our schools across all the neighborhoods in Philadelphia, while at the same time addressing under- and over-enrolled schools,” Superintendent Tony Watlington told reporters at a press briefing.
“We are going to recommend to the board that 12 of our current schools be closed and repurposed by the district for community use,” he said. An additional eight schools would close, with those buildings conveyed to the city for housing or job creation.
Wagner, Stetson, Harding, Tilden and AMY-Northwest middle schools would be phased out, with other elementary schools becoming K-8 schools. Lankenau, Motivation, Robeson and Parkway Northwest would be merged into other high schools.
A new expanded Arts Academy at Rush high school would be built on the former Fels High School site, with a new catchment high school taking over the current Rush building in the Northeast.
Students at Morris, Pennypacker, Welsh, Waring, Overbrook and Blankenburg would be reassigned to other elementary schools. Building 21, the Workshop School and the U School would co-locate at neighborhood high schools, and Penn Treaty High School would be phased out.
Watlington said a special transition team will support students who are affected.
“These families will get gold standard, red carpet treatment directly from the superintendent’s office,” he assured.
Watlington will present the plan to the school board at its Feb. 26 meeting.
No changes would happen before the 2027-28 school year. Watlington added that principals at the schools that are closing would not lose their jobs.
“No principals who are in good standing will be impacted by it,” he said. “There will be a place on the team in the district for every principal, even if their school gets co-located, recommended for closure, etcetera.”
The release of the recommendations follows more than a year of planning, public listening sessions and surveys.
In September, the district released the data that would guide decisions on school recommendations. The district rated schools on building condition, utilization, neighborhood vulnerability, and how well a building aligned with its school’s programs.
Overall, the district’s schools are built to accommodate 180,000 students, but total enrollment is only 132,000. Of 223 school buildings rated, 40 were listed as “unsatisfactory,” 48 as “poor,” 77 as “fair,” 36 in “good” condition, and 22 as “excellent.” The district dashboard also listed 56 schools as “severely underutilized,” meaning they were at less than half capacity.
Schools were also assigned a “neighborhood vulnerability index” based on poverty and the effects of previous school closures in the area. It listed 119 schools as “high risk” or “very high risk.”
In 2013, amid a financial crisis, the district closed 24 schools.
Watlington has said the current facilities plan would be designed to use district resources more efficiently, providing more students access to high-quality programs.
Watlington initially said the recommendations would be presented to the Board of Education in November 2025, but the plan was delayed to allow for an online public survey. The district received 8,000 responses to that survey, with most respondents preferring that schools in their neighborhoods be renovated rather than closed.
The survey showed that respondents supported four themes that emerged during the planning process: improving K-8 schools, strengthening neighborhood high schools, reducing the number of grade configurations, and expanding access to 5-12 criteria-based schools, such as Masterman.
The superintendent said the public would have an opportunity to review the plan before it was presented to the school board.
“We are going to do our due diligence to get around the city, socialize these recommendations, talk about these recommendations [and] the reasons why,” Watlington said on KYW Newsradio’s weekly After School podcast. “We want to offer various school communities more and not less in terms of high-quality academic and extracurricular resources across all the neighborhoods of Philadelphia. … We want to do that really well and very transparently in a very open, honest manner before we take the formal recommendations to the Board of Education.”
The district’s facilities plan is available here and outlined below:
PRE-K-8 CHANGES
• Reassign Robert Morris students to William D. Kelley and Bache-Martin
• Reassign Samuel Pennypacker students to Franklin Edmonds and Anna B. Day
• Reassign John Welsh students to John Hartranft and William McKinley
• Reassign James Ludlow students to Paul Dunbar, Spring Garden and General Philip Kearny
• Reassign Laura W. Waring students to Bache-Martin
• Reassign Overbrook ES students to Cassidy, Barry, Heston and Bluford
• Co-locate the Martha Washington program as a K-4 school on the same site as Middle Years Alternative (5-8)
• Reassign Rudolph Blankenburg students to Heston, James Rhoads and the newly co-located Martha Washington/Middle Years Alternative
• Phase out Fitler Academics Plus
MIDDLE SCHOOL CHANGES
• Phase out Wagner Middle School and grow Hall, Pennell Rowen, Howe and Ellwood to become K-8
• Phase out Stetson Middle School and grow Elkin and Cramp to become K-8
• Phase out Harding Middle School, with Sullivan moving to the old Hardin site. Sullivan, John Marshall, Lawton and Carnell to become K-8.
• Phase out Tilden Middle School, and grow Morton, Patterson and Catharine to become K-8. Tilden property becomes sports facility for Bartram HS
• Phase out Academy for the Middle Years at Northwest
HIGH SCHOOL CHANGES
• Merge Lankenau HS into Roxborough HS as an honors program
• Merge Motivation HS into Bartram HS as an honors program
• Merge Paul Robeson HS into Sayre HS as an honors program
• Merge Parkway Northwest HS into Martin Luther King HS as an honors program
• Co-locate Building 21 at Martin Luther King HS
• Co-locate Workshop School at Overbrook HS
• Co-locate the U School at Edison HS
• Phase out Penn Treaty HS, moving Bodine HS to this site
EXPANDING 5-12 CRITERIA AND CTE PROGRAMS
• Add 5th grade to Hill-Freedman Academy to make it a 5-12 school
• Ad 5th-6th grades to Carver HS to make it a 5-12 school
• Increase capacity at Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush in a new facility and add 5th-8th grade to make it a 5-12 school
• Invest in South Philadelphia High’s CTE spaces and add grades 5-8 to make it a 5-12 school
• Merge Parkway West HS into SLA-Beeber as a new CTE program
• Open a new 5th-8th Palumbo MS co-located with Childs Elementary
• Reassign Conwell students to AMY at James Martin as a 5th-8th program
• Expand the number of seats at Bodine HS
• Move Masterman’s middle grades to the Waring building to expand access
OTHER INVESTMENTS
• Modernize Bache Martin facility
• Build a new school for Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush (5th-12th) at the old Fels site
• Repurpose current Rush building as a new catchment high school to reduce overcrowding in the Northeast
• Modernize and add to Edwin Forrest and Laura Carnell schools
• Co-locate a year-round K-8 school at Bethune Elementary
• Renovate the pool facility at E.W. Rhodes School