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When it opened in 1973, Ada H.H. Lewis Middle School was a source of deep pride for East Germantown, the kind of state-of-the-art educational facility that only suburban kids had at the time.

But on Saturday, when police found Kada Scott’s corpse buried in a shallow grave in the woods of the long-ago vacated school grounds, ending a two-week search for the missing 23-year-old Mount Airy woman, the Rev. Chester H. Williams saw only decades of failure.

“It’s a disgrace,” said Williams, a pastor who runs a neighborhood civic group. “We were very hurt to hear that this happened.”

On top of the shock, Scott’s kidnapping and murder has renewed animus in some quarters about the Philadelphia School District‘s failure to repurpose the blighted property, one of dozens of schools shuttered by the district over the last 20 years.

Since Lewis closed in 2008, local officials and civic leaders said the sprawling seven-acre campus has become a magnet for squatting, illegal dumping, and other criminal activity. City officials have cited the school district 10 times since 2020 for overgrown weeds, graffiti, and piles of trash that blanketed the property, public records show. And four years ago, the district passed on an opportunity to reverse course on the blight.

A proposal to redevelop the land into new homes, championed by neighborhood leaders like Williams, sat before the school board for approval. But the district abandoned the plan at the eleventh hour without public explanation, which the developer alleged was due to meddling by City Councilmember Cindy Bass — a contention Bass denies.

“The school district, for some reason, we don’t know why, they put a block on anything being built there,” Williams said.

Philadelphia Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. extended “deepest sympathies” to Scott’s family and friends in a statement, and said the district’s operations and safety departments will review the vacant-property portfolio “to create and maintain safe and healthy spaces in every neighborhood.”

While some call Lewis “abandoned,” the district is careful to call the building “vacant,” one of 20 such properties in the district’s portfolio. It says maintenance and inspection logs are kept about work on vacant properties; details were not immediately available.

The debate over Lewis comes at a crucial time for the district: It is preparing to release recommendations about its stock of 300-plus buildings — and likely add to the list of decommissioned schools-turned-vacant public buildings. The district’s master planning process will contain recommendations for school closures and combining schools under one roof, officials have warned.

A fizzled redevelopment

In 2011, then-City Controller Alan Butkovitz said the district’s vacant buildings were “catastrophes waiting to happen.”

Butkovitz, in a report released that year, said district inaction around such structures was dangerous and noted that the schools were magnets for criminal activity.

Just before the pandemic hit in 2020, after years of pushback over Ada Lewis, the school district began accepting applications to redevelop the crumbling middle school. Germantown developer Ken Weinstein was one of three developers to place bids. He sought to buy the property for $1.4 million and build 76 new twin homes, at a density that neighbors felt complemented the surrounding area and resolved concerns about density brought by apartment buildings.

Weinstein said he gathered letters of support from 60 neighborhood residents and elected officials, including U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans and then-State Rep. Stephen Kinsey. The school board seemed eager to move ahead and set a final vote for the proposal in May 2021.

The vote never happened. The only explanation given that day was that “the Board had concern” about “what the long-term plan is for developing schools for the 21st century,” according to a district spokesperson.

According to Weinstein, some school board members received calls from Bass asking them to table the vote. Bass has faced criticism for interfering in development projects, including other proposals made by Weinstein, as vacant properties languished for years in her district. Her district includes the Lewis property and parts of North and Northwest Philadelphia, where Weinstein has focused his development work.

Bass, in an interview Monday, denied meddling in the vote. She acknowledged that she did not support Weinstein’s proposal because of the price of the homes — averaging around $415,000 — which she said would have triggered “immediate gentrification in the neighborhood.” But she said she had no involvement in the board’s reversal.

“That was up to the school district,” Bass said. “I don’t sit on the school board.”

While community groups in her district supported Weinstein’s project in 2021, Bass said she objected to market-rate housing as the sole alternative for East Germantown, arguing that it amounted to the district and developers saying “you should just take any old thing just so it’s not vacant.”

A tragic turn for the property

In a letter dated Friday, Bass called on the school district to demolish the vacant school, saying she was troubled by the evidence that led investigators to the property during the search for Scott.

“The continued presence of this unsecured and deteriorating structure is simply unacceptable,” the Council member wrote in a statement, noting the site is now associated with “tragic violence.”

Cell phone records and tips from the public first led police to the former Ada Lewis school last week, where they found Scott’s pink phone case and debit card, but nothing else. Then, late Friday, police received a new tip saying that they had missed something on their first search of the grounds, and that they should look along the wooden fence that divides the school from the neighboring Awbury Recreation Center. Officers returned to the property Saturday and found Scott’s body, buried in a shallow grave in a wooded area behind the school.

Prosecutors expect to charge Keon King, 21, with the murder, though police continue searching for others who they believe may have helped dispose of evidence.

Bass took office in 2012, when the school was already vacant. She said she pushed the school district for several years to take action, as nuisances piled up at the property. She said she still hopes that another “institution” could replace Lewis.

“I think that having something that the community wants is not hard to figure out,” Bass said. “This is what the community’s interested in — they’re interested in another institution.”

She said a proposal for a charter school is now in the works, though she said she was unable to provide details.

A glut of vacant schools

The school district still views Lewis as a potential “swing space” — a building that could be used to house students if another district building is closed due to environmental problems.

There is precedent: The district has used other school buildings for such purposes, like Anna B. Pratt in North Philadelphia, which was also closed in 2013, to house early-childhood programs, and then students from other North Philadelphia schools whose buildings were undergoing renovation.

Still, it remains unclear how much it would cost to bring the Lewis building back to an inhabitable state.

The school system currently has about 70,000 more seats throughout the city than students enrolled. Though officials have said their first preference is to have closed schools reused for community benefit, it’s unlikely that all will be able to serve that purpose. And the timetable will surely be slow.

City officials at times have expressed frustration with the pace at which the district is making decisions about how to manage its buildings. School leaders have said the wait is necessary given the district’s capacity and the need to make correct choices and not rush the process.

Weinstein said the tragedy that culminated at Lewis reflected the conventional wisdom that blight breeds crime.

“There’s always consequences to shutting down a proposal that the community supports,” Weinstein said. “In most cases, nothing bad happens. In this case, something very bad happened.”

Staff writer Ellie Rushing contributed to this article.