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Two of the 20 Philadelphia schools originally targeted for closure under Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr.’s facilities plan have been spared and will remain open.

Conwell Middle School in Kensington and Motivation High in Southwest Philadelphia will not close after all, Watlington announced at a charged school board meeting Thursday.

As communities advocated to save their schools in the weeks since Watlington unveiled his plan, Conwell and Motivation, both magnet schools that accept students citywide, had powerful political allies. Several members of City Council opposed the Conwell closure, and Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia) spoke out against shutting down Motivation.

Watlington said the change from 20 to 18 school closures was not because of politicians, though.

“We pored through thousands of feedback loops from a number of Philadelphians, to include parents, students, grassroots organizations, and certainly elected officials,” the superintendent told reporters during a briefing this week. “We took all of that feedback together and, in tandem, we landed on these recommended changes, not reflecting one voice or sector more than the others.”

Watlington’s $2.8 billion facilities plan, which now includes closing 18 schools, colocating six, and upgrading 159, is not yet final and continues to face strong opposition from affected school communities. He formally presented it to the school board Thursday, and the board is expected to vote in the coming weeks, though no date has been set. Schools would begin closing in 2027, and school building upgrades would take several years.

Under the revisions Watlington presented Thursday:

• Conwell would remain open and continue to be a magnet, but would also add a neighborhood admissions component. Students from nearby Elkin Elementary, a K-4, would move to Conwell beginning in fifth grade, and the school would still accept students from around the city.
• Motivation would absorb students from Paul Robeson High, which is on the closure list. Robeson and Motivation are both citywide admissions schools, and Motivation would remain so under the plan. Robeson had previously been scheduled to move into Sayre, another citywide admissions school.
• Lankenau High, the city’s environmental science magnet, had been targeted for closure and would have moved into Roxborough High. It would still close under the revised plan, but would instead move into Saul High School, the city’s agricultural science magnet. Both are in Roxborough.

‘Accelerating Opportunity’

In his presentation to the board, Watlington called the 10-year plan “Accelerating Opportunity.”

The proposed changes were spurred not by finances — though the district has 70,000 empty seats and has indicated it needs to shrink its footprint — but by a desire to accelerate progress, Watlington said.

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The district is making gains in academics, attendance, and dropouts, but still, the superintendent said, “the majority of our young people still don’t perform at grade level of reading and math.”

Philadelphia, Watlington told reporters, “must multiply that acceleration curve by five or 10. Because we can’t wait for generations to improve these outcomes and opportunities for all of our children. And we know that there’s a huge disparity based on where you live in Philadelphia.”

The 159 modernization projects to upgrade schools range from new roofs and fresh paint in some buildings to larger projects, including a $58 million refresh at South Philadelphia High. The district released the full list of proposed modernization project details this week. But funding for them is not yet certain; the district plans to pay $1 billion of the $2.8 billion cost and hopes state and philanthropic funding will cover the rest.

How did Conwell and Motivation get spared?

Students, parents, and staff at each of the 20 schools proposed for closure have made cases for why Watlington should change his mind since their schools landed on the closure list last month.

In Conwell’s case, Watlington told reporters the advocacy work of the “large, historic alumni base” of the magnet middle school helped move the needle.

So, too, did “significant feedback from individuals about a part of the city where individuals felt very strongly that we have to figure out how to invest more in.” Conwell supporters spoke out strongly against divesting from a school in Kensington, the center of the city’s opioid epidemic. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, for example, said at a meeting at Conwell that “we are saying to these families, we are punishing them because as a city, we can’t respond to the public safety issues that we have on the outside, and that is just not fair.”

Also, Watlington said, the distance between Conwell and the school its students would have been sent to — AMY at James Martin, more than two miles away in Fishtown — was significant.

Instead, officials decided to build Conwell’s enrollment by routing students from Elkin. Elkin students now attend Stetson Middle School, which remains on the closure list.

Conwell would remain a magnet school, open to students citywide only through the school selection process. Elkin students would be in separate classes, and Conwell would continue to offer accelerated classes to its magnet students.

Closing Motivation would have left Southwest Philadelphia with no magnet school. Watlington said officials liked the idea of routing Robeson, a strong citywide school in West Philadelphia, to Motivation.

“The building itself at Motivation is not at the bottom of the heap in terms of programmatic ratings,” the superintendent said. “The problem with Motivation is that we’ve lost enrollment.”

Relocating Robeson inside Motivation solves “the number one problem we’re solving for, is how do we build our enrollments, address under- and overenrollment so we can push in more high-quality academic and extracurricular programs. Our community, quite frankly, made some suggestions that had merit.”

Disappointment for Lankenau and other schools

The outcry around closing Lankenau was also significant; Watlington’s team did not retreat from a closure recommendation, but now wants to locate the school at Saul, another magnet with a complementary mission.

Saul has room to accommodate Lankenau, Watlington said. But he said district lawyers are reviewing a recent revelation that the Lankenau site must be offered back to the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education as a result of a 1973 deal. The district had proposed giving that school property to the city.

“We have to do our due diligence, and those sometimes can be a bit complicated, but we’ll work through all of the details as appropriate,” he told reporters.

The ball is in the school board’s court now. It has not set a date for a vote on the plan or said whether it will consider further public engagement.

But, Watlington said, “we look forward to the board of education receiving these recommendations and doing some thoughtful digesting of these very well-thought-out recommendations that reflect our community at large’s feedback.”