About 85,000 people who bought Pennie plans in 2025 did not renew for this year following the expiration of expanded tax credits that reduced what consumers had to pay, Pennsylvania’s Affordable Care Act marketplace announced Monday.
That meant that 18% of previously enrolled Pennsylvania residents dropped their coverage as premiums doubled on average across the state, according to Pennie, the state’s Obamacare marketplace.
Enrollment for 2026 totaled 486,000, down from 496,661 at the end of last year’s open enrollment period. For this year, roughly 79,500 newcomers to the exchange partially offset the people who dropped coverage.
The agency warned, however, that the number of enrollees could continue declining for several months. There’s a three-month lag between when consumers stop paying premiums and coverage ends. Open enrollment ended Jan. 31.
The agency had predicted last summer that as many as 150,000 people would drop coverage if Congress did not renew the expanded tax credits that were adopted in 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic.
New Jersey has not released final results for its ACA open enrollment period, which also ended Jan. 31.
As of the start of January, 493,727 residents were signed up for 2026 health coverage with Get Covered New Jersey. That’s up slightly from the 481,151 people who were enrolled last year.
Soaring costs for consumers
Average out-of-pocket costs were expected to double on average for people who benefited from the enhanced tax credits, Pennie said last year.
Under the ACA, people who earn less than 400% of the federal poverty level — about $64,000 for an individual and $132,000 for a family of four — are eligible for tax credits on a sliding scale, based on their income, to help offset the monthly cost of an insurance premium.
That tax credit is part of the law, and therefore did not expire at the end of December. The change affects an expansion in 2021, when Congress increased financial assistance so that those buying coverage through an Obamacare marketplace do not pay more than 8.5% of their income.
The expiration of the 8.5% cap means that a 60-year-old couple with household income of about $85,000 could see their premium triple to $22,600 this year from $7,225 last year, according to the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.
The tax credits were a key issue in the federal budget debate last year that ultimately led to the longest-ever government shutdown. Democrats wanted to permanently expand the enhanced subsidies, and Republicans refused.
Weaker coverage
About 33,000 more Pennie customers enrolled in plans that have lower monthly premiums, but typically come with high out-of-pocket costs in the form of deductibles and copays. That amounted to a 30% increase in the number of consumers choosing so-called Bronze plans, Pennie said.
“As the costs of groceries, housing, utilities, and other necessities continue to rise, higher healthcare costs mean more people will delay care, skip treatments, or take on medical debt,” Antoinette Krause, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Pennsylvania Health Access Network, said in an email.
Pennie noted that rural counties were particularly hard hit by coverage losses. Fifteen of the top 20 counties with the highest disenrollment on a percentage bases were rural, Pennie said.
That could put more stress on rural hospitals if people have to resort more often to emergency departments for care and don’t have the means to pay.
Inquirer staff writer Sarah Gantz contributed to this article.
Some federal workers aren’t leaving public service altogether. They’re landing jobs in local government.
A job-seeking platform managed by national nonprofit Work for America is helping some workers find those new roles. The service is relatively new but predates President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce in 2025.
Some 350 workers with federal job experience in Pennsylvania and 169 in New Jersey have used the platform, called Civic Match, since it was founded in November 2024.
Nearly 900 state and local government roles in Pennsylvania have been posted on the platform since its start and 42 in New Jersey.
And, according to new data, 187 former federal workers across the U.S. have used the site and landed jobs in state or local government.
While that’s a small fraction of the total federal workers who have left their jobs in the last year amid the Trump administration’s shake-up of the workforce, the new data shed light on where workers are landing after leaving government positions.
In October, just after Trump’s deferred resignation program took effect, Pennsylvania and New Jersey lost roughly 6,000 federal jobs.
There really isn’t a centralized place where someone looking for a state or other local government job can go, said Caitlin Lewis, executive director at Work for America. The platform is open only to job seekers who have federal work experience or who lost their jobs because of federal funding cuts, but Lewis hopes to open it up to others in the future.
Who are these federal workers?
Austin Holland was working in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last year, when federal workers were instructed to begin working in the office full-time. He had been working remotely from Lancaster much of the time and commuting to Washington, a few days per pay period. Relocating to D.C. wasn’t feasible for him.
“I really enjoyed my federal job, and I had imagined that it was kind of something I was going to do for my entire career,” he said. “I was struggling with losing that and trying to figure out ‘Where is my career going from here?’”
Holland estimates that he joined the Civic Match platform in early 2025. Through a virtual job fair, he made a connection that ultimately led to a job at the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency. He took a pay cut but was able to stay in Lancaster — and in public service.
Before leaving his job at the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Kreider uploaded his resume to Civic Match and attended some of the platform’s webinars.
“It was refreshing and validating to have such high-quality hiring officials participating,” Kreider said. “I think it helped remind those of us who maybe were a little bit disillusioned — or were feeling traumatized by what we had just been through — that there were places where we could continue to serve where we wouldn’t be subject to what we were going through at the federal level.”
Kreider, who lives in Chester County, also used LinkedIn to look for jobs and searched government websites. He ultimately landed a communications director job with Chester County, which he found on the county’s job listing board.
He’s been in the new job for roughly two months and says some days are “completely overwhelming.”
Andrew Kreider in Philadelphia in April 2025.
“County governments do a lot of work with not as many resources as federal agencies tend to have,” he said. “I’m working as a communication director for an organization three times the size of the one I came from, but I’m making significantly less money and sort of being responsible for communications related to far more things.”
He’s taken a pay cut but said he loves the new job.
“It’s been, for me, an affirmation of how many good people there are who just want to help,” Kreider said. “I’m surrounded by people who come into work every day to serve their neighbors and their communities.”
On a recent Thursday afternoon in February, Civic Match had seven jobs posted in Philadelphia. Available positions with the city included a chief epidemiologist, a director of tax policy, and a director of adult education.
The majority of the 187 platform users who have found jobs — 63% — are workers with at least eight years of public sector experience, according to new data from Work for America. Roughly 40% found jobs in human resources or other operations-related roles.
One-third of those hired have relocated for their new jobs out of state, with 22% reporting a move of over 100 miles from their previous position.
Their federal experience came from a range of departments, including the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation, as well as USAID, the General Services Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The aim of Work for America is to curb staffing shortages in local governments and help speed up their hiring process, Lewis said.
“Unlike the private sector, government does not really think about its employer brand and marketing itself as a potential employer,” she said. “Individual local governments don’t have the same amount of resourcing to actually think about expressing an employee value proposition and really marketing to folks who could be great fits for roles that they have open.”
Marketed as a ticket to deeper sleep, the soft hum of pink noise has become part of millions’ nightly routines.
However, its use may come at the cost of sleep quality, a University of Pennsylvania study suggests.
Published this month in the medical journal Sleep, the study found that the presence of pink noise at night reduced REM sleep — the stagewhen most vivid dreams occur and memory, emotional regulation, and learning are supported. This was based on a sample size of 25 healthy adults assessed over seven days in a sleep lab.
To Mathias Basner, a Penn professor of psychiatry and lead author on the study, it’s evidence that background noise may not be risk-free.
“The negative consequences of the pink noise far outweigh the positive ones that we saw,” he said.
Pink noise vs. white noise
Pink noise is what’s called a “broadband noise,” meaning sounds made up of a wide range of frequencies. The most well-known example of this, white noise, is considered the sound equivalent of the color white, which contains all colors combined.
Pink, brown, and other colored noises differ based on the frequencies they boost.
Pink noise, for example, emphasizes lower frequencies — making it sound similar to steady rainfall or ocean waves. It’s often used for sleep, although uses for focus and tinnitus have also been reported.
These types of background noise can mask unwanted sounds — an appealing quality in an increasingly noisy world.
Since the first white noise machine for sleep was released in the 1960s, hundreds of variations have spawned. Today, 10-hour videos of pink noise, which is often preferred over white noise for sleep due to its softer sound,pick up millions of views on YouTube.
“So many people are using it, and it’s really indiscriminate use,” Basner said.
Putting pink noise to the test
Having studied the effects of noise his whole career, Basner was surprised to learn several years ago that some people used it as a sleep aid.
That led him down a rabbit hole of research, where he found dozens of studies assessing the effects of broadband noise on sleep. However, most of them were considered to be low quality — sample sizes were small and the assessments were usually subjective.
“We don’t know whether it’s working, whether it’s harmful or not,” he said.
He designed his study to occur in the hypercontrolled environment of a sleep lab at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania,where participants were measured using polysomnography, a test that looks at brain waves, eye movements, and muscle tone.
This allowed his team to differentiate sleep stages and figure out what was happening biologically as participants were exposed to a variety of conditions: no noise, environmental noise, pink noise, pink noise and environmental noise combined, or environmental noise with ear plugs.
Each night, the 25 participants, comprised of 18 women and seven men,were given an eight-hour window to sleep. (Lights were out at 11 p.m. and back on at 7 a.m.)
His team found that environmental noise — which ranged from the sound of a helicopter to a sonic boom — led to a 23.4-minute decrease in stage 3 sleep. This so-called deep sleep phase where recovery occurs is important for physical repair and immune function, as well as memory.
And while pink noise didn’t affect deep sleep, it was associated with an average decrease of 18.6 minutes in REM sleep.
“REM sleep is extremely important for a lot of things like memory consolidation, emotion regulation, brain plasticity, and neurodevelopment,” Basner said.
Though the study didn’t look at children, he cautioned that babies spend around half of their time sleeping in REM, compared to a quarter in adults.
Based on his findings, he would discourage parents from using broadband noise machines in the bedrooms of newborns.
For adults who don’t want to forgo the noise, he would recommend using the lowest volume and setting a timer so it eventually turns off.
However, the best option would be to use foam ear plugs, he said. When paired with environmental noise in the study, they were able to block out noise and recover 72% of the deep sleep time that had been lost — although they did start losing effectiveness at higher noise levels, around 65 decibels.
“You didn’t get the REM sleep reduction because they didn’t play anything back,” Basner said.
A limitation of the study is that it had a relatively small sample size comprised of younger, healthy people without sleep disorders or hearing loss. It also only looked at the short-term effects of pink noise, and was conducted in a lab setting, versus the participants’ homes.
In the future, Basner hopes to study the long-term effects of pink noise on sleep, as well as test other types of broadband noise.
“We need to do the proper research to make sure that it is actually, at least, not harmful,” he said.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s campaign raised almost $1.7 million last year despite her not facing reelection until 2027, according to a new campaign finance report.
That is the most any Philadelphia mayor has raised during their second year in office since at least the early 2000s, when the city’s current ethics and campaign finance rules took effect, according to Parker’s campaign. She is also the only mayor in that time frame to avoid a dip in fundraising after her first year in office, when many donors shell out to support the city’s new leader.
“The Mayor has strong support from across the City and the region,” Aren Platt, the executive director of the mayor’s campaign committee, People for Parker, said in a written statement. “These numbers equate to people investing in her vision as Mayor for the City and supporting the work that she is doing.”
Her campaign also spent $812,000 in 2025, a huge sum for a nonelection year. Parker entered 2026 with nearly $1.6 million in the bank — a significant haul two years out from a municipal election cycle. (For context, Parker’s campaign in 2023 raised almost $3.4 million, and spent just over $3.2 million en route to winning the mayor’s race.)
State law gives politicians wide latitude in how they spend their campaign donations beyond traditional election expenses like buying TV ads and printing fliers.
Parker’s campaign expenditures last year included airfare to Colorado for a mayoral roundtable at the Aspen Institute, and almost $20,000 to cover costs for a constituent’s funeral.
Parker’s hefty off-year fundraising is reflective of the increasingly constant and professionalized world of political fundraising in Philadelphia. Local politicians no longer wait until challengers emerge to press donors for cash or host major fundraisers.
“Philadelphia elections keep getting more expensive, so now all the candidates have professional fundraisers, which means the frequency of their events and calls has risen dramatically as well,” said John Hawkins, a City Hall lobbyist.
City Council President Kenyatta Johnson, for instance, last year raised about $960,000 and entered 2026 with more than $1.1 million in the bank. Johnson, who, like Parker, will not face reelection until 2027, said he raises money in off years so that he can support other Council members and fund community programs.
“I am blessed to support 16 other hardworking members of Council,” he said Friday. “I always support different community initiatives that come before me, individuals always seeking support for a variety of different initiatives.”
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker stands beside Council President Kenyatta Johnson (left) after she finisher her budget address to City Council, City Hall, Thursday, March 13, 2025.
Johnson, a close ally of the mayor, is also seen as a potential contender in the race to succeed Parker, which would happen in 2031 if she wins reelection. Racking up money between now and then could allow him to enter the race in a strong financial position.
“My focus is being the best City Council president that I can be,” Johnson said when asked if he was considering the city’s top job.
Using the rules to their advantage
Philadelphia’s campaign finance laws rules limit contributions to $3,700 per calendar year from individual donors, and cap political committees and businesses allowed to make political donations at contributions of $14,800 per year.
That means incumbents can collect the maximum amount from donors in each of the four years in their terms before running for reelection. That is not possible in federal elections, where contribution limits apply to the entire election cycle.
The city’s rules give incumbents a potential advantage over new candidates, who typically have the opportunity to raise money over only one or two calendar years after they enter a race.
Incumbents do not always maximize that opportunity. But Parker last year set a new standard.
She is also among the growing number of Philly elected officials taking advantage of a rule that allows politicians to accept donations larger than the city’s contribution limits if they do not spend the excess money on electioneering activities, such as buying ads or paying canvassers to knock on doors.
The electricians union, the politically active Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, for instance, gave $50,000 to Parker’s campaign in 2025. At most $14,800 of that can be spent on persuading city voters to support Parker during her next campaign. The remaining $35,200 will be deposited into a separate bank account known as a Segregated Pre-candidacy Excess Contribution, or SPEC, account.
While SPEC accounts are nothing new, more Philly elected officials are using them. In addition to Parker, at least a half dozen Council members, including Johnson, now have SPEC accounts, said Shane Creamer, executive director of the Philadelphia Board of Ethics.
“We haven’t seen this in the lead-up to past elections, certainly not in this number,” Creamer said, adding that the trend shows that politicians are being conscientious about the city’s rules. “I think it suggests that, fundraising aside, there’s an effort to comply with the contribution limits.”
How Parker raises money
Parker hosts major fundraising events, such her annual birthday party, which last September took place at the Live! Casino & Hotel. She also calls donors to ask for contributions, and her supporters sometimes host smaller fundraisers to collect money for her campaign.
Labor unions gave more than $330,000 to Parker last year, campaign finance reports show. That includes $50,000 from the electricians union, $64,800 from the Carpenters union, and $45,000 from the Laborers District Council.
Organized labor — especially the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council, the Carpenters union, and Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union — fueled Parker’s victory in the 2023 mayor’s race.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker (center) joins the chant as she marches with Local 332 during the annual Tri-State Labor Day Parade in Philadelphia on Monday, Sept. 1, 2025.
“We’re very aligned on policy, and if you look at her campaign promises, she is doing fairly well. She’s made some progress on all of them,” said Brown, who serves on the mayor’s business roundtable and an advisory panel providing input on the city’s efforts to revitalize Market East. “I’m invested in the city, and I want to see a functional, good mayor who can lay out a vision and get things done.”
Corporate interests also donated heavily to Parker in 2025. Her campaign contributions from law firms last year included $10,000 from Ballard Spahr, $11,000 from Duane Morris, $5,000 from Buchanan Ingersoll, and $11,000 from Cozen O’Connor. She also received $5,000 from Comcast, $1,000 from Independence Blue Cross, and $4,700 from the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia.
Wealthy individuals shelled out big bucks, too. Investor Richard Vague gave $16,000; developer Carl Dranoff contributed $15,000; former Aramark CEO Joseph Neubauer gave $30,000; and Firstrust Bank executive chair Richard J. Green gave $15,000.
How Parker spends campaign money
Although campaign donors may imagine their contributions pay for yard signs and radio spots, the money also often covers strategy meetings held at expensive restaurants, gifts for constituents, and costs related to officeholders’ public duties.
Elected officials are prohibited from using political donations for personal expenses. But beyond that, the rules for spending campaign cash are famously lax and rarely enforced.
Parker’s expenditures on the recently filed reports included a $1,200 tab at Vernick Fish, and 14 more modest purchases from Shanghai Gourmet in Chinatown, totaling $424.
In addition to the Aspen Institute roundtable, Parker’s campaign helped her pay for trips to Miami for a tour of wellness and homeless centers that are part of the Florida judicial system, to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., for a Black Economic Alliance gathering, to Puerto Rico for a National League of Cities event, and to Harvard University’s Bloomberg Center for Cities.
Aren Platt (right) executive director of Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s political committee is with her after a Kamala Harris campaign event in Germantown Nov. 3, 2024. Platt was senior campaign adviser in Parker’s run for mayor, and served briefly as deputy mayor before leaving her administration.
The campaign paid $112,000 in consulting fees for ALP Impact Strategies, Platt’s firm; and $30,000 to 215 Bears, the private security company owned by Shawntee Willis, whom Parker has hired as a special assistant in the mayor’s office and who works closely with her police detail.
It also paid $158,563.73 to Rittenhouse Political Partners, the fundraising firm founded by well-known political consultant Aubrey Montgomery and used by Parker, Johnson, and five other members of Council who saw large fundraising hauls last year.
Rittenhouse’s clients include some of the most aggressive off-year fundraisers in Philly politics and some of the most prominent adopters of SPEC accounts.
Montgomery declined to comment.
Staff writer Anna Orso contributed to this article.
Philadelphia’s top lawmaker said he’s willing to hold up city funding to the Philadelphia School District over concerns about the recently released closure and consolidation plan, a warning that signals City Council intends to leverage its biggest bargaining chip as members fight to keep schools in their neighborhoods open.
City Council President Kenyatta Johnson said in an interview Friday that multiple members oppose proposed closures in their districts, and some want more robust investments in schools slated for consolidation in exchange for their support.
Johnson’s primary concern, he said, is “making sure that the issues and concerns that we would like to see addressed with the facilities plan are reflected in the final recommendations.”
Asked if he’d be willing to hold up the city’s contribution to the school district if their concerns are not met, Johnson said: “If need be.”
Schools Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. has proposed sweeping changes to schools across the city, including closing 20 schools, ordering six others to share buildings, and modernizing 159 buildings. His plan is subject to approval by the school board, which will likely vote sometime this winter.
Oz Hill (left), Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. (center), and Claire Landau at a news conference to announce plans for the first draft of the Philadelphia facilities master plan during a news conference at the Philadelphia School District Headquarters in Philadelphia on Jan. 20.
Johnson’s public insistence that Council members exercise veto power over parts of the district’s long-awaited facilities master plan is notable, and it raises the stakes ahead of a Feb. 17 hearing, during which every Council member will have the opportunity to question district officials about the proposal.
The Council president — a Democrat who is typically even-keeled and does not often speak publicly about legislative strategies — wields significant control over the fate of the city budget, which members must pass by the end of June. Mayor Cherelle L. Parker will unveil her proposed budget in March.
Local revenue and city funding made up about 40% of the district’s budget this year, or nearly $2 billion. Most of that is the district’s share of city property taxes which, unlike other school systems in Pennsylvania, are levied by the city and then distributed to the district.
In addition, the city makes a separate, direct contribution to the district, which this year was nearly $285 million.
Johnson’s opposition to elements of the plan could also position lawmakers somewhat at odds with Parker and Watlington. The pair have operated in lockstep since Watlington last month unveiled his proposal.
The plan did not appear to go over well in Council, with several members expressing immediate concerns. The day the plan was released publicly, Johnson endorsed another member’s legislation to amend the city’s governing document and grant Council power to remove members of the school board at will.
Councilmember Cindy Bass at City Council’s first session of the year on Jan. 23, 2025, in City Hall.
Some Council members said they plan to fight proposed closures and advocate for more investment in struggling schools.
Speaking at a meeting at Lankenau High School in Upper Roxborough last week, Councilmember Cindy Bass pushed back against the notion of closing Lankenau, a well-regarded magnet outside of her district, and other strong schools, including Fitler Academics Plus and Parkway Northwest in her district.
“When budget time comes up, I’ll be asking about these decisions that the school district is making,” Bass, a Democrat who represents parts of North and Northwest Philadelphia, told an emotional crowd of more than 100. “We don’t support them and we don’t understand them. They have not been rationalized.”
At Conwell Middle School in Kensington, Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, a Democrat who represents the neighborhood, said she was “having a really hard time understanding how the decisions were made.”
Closing Conwell, a magnet school whose enrollment has fallen to just over 100 because of parent concerns over neighborhood safety, was particularly galling, Lozada said.
“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,’” Lozada said. “And that is just not fair.”
Johnson said he wanted to see a clear safety plan for students being asked to travel to schools in new neighborhoods.
He also floated rebuilding consolidated schools as “all-in-one” campuses that are co-located with parks, recreation centers, and other city services.
“It would be in the best interest of the school district and the school board to think outside the box in terms of how they move forward, besides just saying, ‘We’re going to be closing down schools,’” Johnson said. “And those are conversations that we’re having right now.”
Stagecraft and technology being what they are these days, one can imagine any number of ways Peter and the Wolf could be souped up. If the key to audience-building is children, Prokofiev’s children’s classic would seem to be the perfect chance to engage them with eye-popping visuals.
But the Philadelphia Orchestra is smart enough to let the piece speak for itself.
It also knows you don’t mess with success. Saturday morning in Marian Anderson Hall marked the 10th time the orchestra has presented the piece with actor-narrator Michael Boudewyns over nearly two decades, and no one should ever touch a hair on this modest production’s furry little head. In its simplicity and humor, here is one of those rare, perfect things in this world.
The audience applauds for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of “Peter and the Wolf” Saturday in Marian Anderson Hall.
Saturday’s concert was also, judging from an audience whose ages looked to span from 2 years old to 80, a powerful generational bridge. Surely there were a few grandparents in the hall who remember going to these Philadelphia Orchestra family concerts with Leopold Stokowski on the podium.
The series continues in March with another on-ramp to classical music: Britten’s dazzling The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.
Michael Boudewyns narrating “Peter and the Wolf” with conductor Naomi Woo leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, Feb. 7, 2026, in Marian Anderson Hall.
Prokofiev’s piece — which is about to turn 90 years old — can be frightening in some productions: The French horns are as menacing as the fang-bearing wolf they depict. But Boudewyns has a grab bag of tricks so disarming that the scare factor practically disappears.
His props are drawn from household items: The duck is a feather duster, the bird a diaphanous, darting, bright yellow swatch of fabric. Who can’t help but laugh at a gun represented by a toilet plunger? Boudewyns narrates while choreographing the action in response to the changing character of the music and arc of the story. For an audience growing up in the digital thicket, here was a bright clearing. Nothing beats a good story, enticingly told and heightened by a great score.
With a suitcase as the wolf, Michael Boudewyns narrating “Peter and the Wolf” with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Feb. 7, 2026, in Marian Anderson Hall. It was his 10th time performing with work with the orchestra since his first appearance in 2007.
Naomi Woo, the orchestra’s assistant conductor, was visually engaging, leading the work and three others, including a truncated version of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. These concerts are another reminder of the deep bench of talent within the orchestra beyond the principal chairs. In the Prokofiev, that meant Patrick Williams’ glossy flute sound as the bird, clarinetist Samuel Caviezel as the bouncy cat, oboist Peter Smith’s poignant duck, and the appropriately lumbering (but polished) grandfather emanating from the bassoon of Mark Gigliotti.
All deserved special recognition, and Woo gave the players bows, but no orchestra roster was published in the concert’s Playbill (even though the usual lists of board, staff, and oodles of donors were included).
Narrator and actor Michael Boudewyns and conductor Naomi Woo embrace after their performance of “Peter and the Wolf” in Marian Anderson Hall on Saturday.
One of the unspoken truths of all art is that its effect on people is ultimately unknowable. The two children in front of me — one looked to be 3, the other even younger — were ostensibly too small to be there, and yet there’s no way of knowing what they were absorbing. The power of these concerts is in being in the presence of this orchestra, with that incredible sound. No other kind of ensemble has the same impact. And despite all the squirming and low chattering coming from the next row, there was really only one thought to which I kept returning: what lucky children.
The Philadelphia Orchestra, conductor Naomi Woo, and actor Michael Boudewyns perform Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” March 14, 11:30 a.m., Marian Anderson Hall, Broad and Spruce Streets. Tickets $29-$66. ensembleartsphilly.org, 215-893-1999.
Students and teachers from two Philly area private schools joined up with activists and protesters Friday morning at the President’s House in Independence National Historical Park to demand that the site’s slavery exhibit be restored after it was abruptly dismantled last month.
“Whitewashing history is a totalitarian gimmick,” read one sign in a crowd that included young and older people. “All our stories must be told,” read another.
The “teach in” was held in front of a granite wall etched with the names of nine enslaved people owned by U.S. founding father and first president George Washington. The wall is one of the few remnants of the slavery exhibit that was dismantled by order of the Trump administration.
Standing at a lectern, the students, from Solebury School in Bucks County and Friends Select in Center City, read the biographies of the enslaved whose names had been etched on the wall.
Activist and criminal defense attorney Michael Coard told the crowd he helped to create the slavery exhibit after learning that Washington owned enslaved people — and realizing that his educators had failed to teach him about it.
“When I learned about that, I was enraged, because I’d never heard about it,” Coard said.
With the help of elected officials, the President’s House Site became a reality in 2010, Coard said.
But when the Trump administration issued its “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order last March, Coard knew that the exhibit could be targeted. The order calls on the U.S. Department of the Interior to remove historical exhibits that “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history” or “disparage Americans past or living.”
Attorney Michael Coard makes a social media post at the now removed explanatory panels that were part of an exhibit on slavery at President’s House Site in Philadelphia, Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
“Anything pertaining to Black people, he was opposed to it,” Coard said of President Donald Trump.
Since then, Coard said, there’s been a furious legal battle to have the site restored. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker sued the federal government. A judge ordered the government to safeguard the exhibits, which are currently in storage, while the issue plays out in federal court.
Coard encouraged people to sign a petition, attend protests, and stay involved in future protests.
“Just because you can’t do everything, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything,” Coard told the crowd, quoting poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron.
Solebury School college counselor Erin Wallace joined the 50 students who traveled by bus to the site for the teach-in.
Wallace said the students are “very active” in following national politics, and were eager to attend the protest. About 25% of the student body attended, Wallace said.
“It was an overwhelmingly positive response,” Wallace said.
Workers remove the display panels about slavery at the President’s House Site in Independence National Historical Park Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. The fate of exhibits at the site, which serves as a memorial to the nine people George Washington enslaved there during the founding of America, had been in limbo since President Trump’s executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directed the Department of the Interior to review over 400 national sites to remove or modify interpretive materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
Solebury School history teacher Don Kaplan of Elkins Park attended the first vigil after the site was shuttered. Kaplan said he organized the teach-in student protest because it is relevant to what he teaches his 9th- and 11th-grade students.
“I just thought to myself, we need to address this,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan asked that his students not be quoted directly. But after the rally, he struggled to keep his 11th graders from weighing in as he was interviewed for this story.
“We should teach all history,” two students said.
They explained that in Kaplan’s class, their research often shows that historical figures are not purely good or evil and were shaped by myriad forces.
To Kaplan, that stands in contrast to the Trump administration’s perspective on teaching history, which seeks to eliminate “negative” stories about America’s founders.
“That’s not what we do,” Kaplan said. “We have to teach every possible perspective.”
To deal with the snow, the city has deployed roughly 1,000 workers and 800 pieces of snow-removal equipment, and instituted programs to break up ice at crosswalks and streets in residential neighborhoods, among other efforts. But to some Inquirer readers, the solution has been right in front of us all along.
“I know we used to toss snow into the river,” one reader wrote via Curious Philly, The Inquirer’s forum for questions on all things local. “What happens to it now?”
In the past, the city has dumped snow into the Delaware River and the Schuylkill on various occasions. But in recent decades, that practice has been used rarely — if at all — primarily over environmental concerns. Here is what we know:
An old practice
Newspaper archives show references to dumping snow in the Delaware and Schuylkill dating back at least to the late 19th century — during a storm colloquially known as the “Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899.” That storm dumped 19 inches of snow on Philadelphia around Valentine’s Day.
In the aftermath, the city sought permission from its Board of Port Wardens to dump snow in the rivers surrounding Philadelphia, but there were concerns over the “considerable amount of dirt” that would be thrown into the water.
The practice was utilized in the winter of 1909, when 21 inches of snow fell. Initially, snow was dumped into the rivers at three points, but officials later expanded approved dumping sites to be “at any point and from any wharf” along either river.
“It was contended that this was perfectly proper, since snow is not refuse, but will readily melt after it is thrown into the water,” The Inquirer reported at the time.
Article from Jan 10, 1996 Philadelphia Daily News (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) <!— –>
The blizzard of ’96
Perhaps the most well-known modern use of Philadelphia’s rivers as a snow dump came in 1996, when a debilitating 30.7 inches of snow fell in early January. The city was left with few options, and got a permit from state environmental officials to dump snow in the rivers, Inquirer reports from the time indicate.
Within days, roughly 500 tons of snow were dumped into the rivers, and that total would grow into the thousands. Famously, city trucks were spotted dumping snow into the Schuylkill from the Market Street Bridge — until being asked to stop by the U.S. Coast Guard.
“We did advise the city to stop dumping snow into the Schuylkill. Our concern was the accumulation of ice in the river,” a Coast Guard spokesperson said at the time. The piles of snow in the river ran the risk of forming dams that could cause flooding.
The piles became so severe they had to be beaten back down. By mid-January, one Inquirer report noted, wrecking balls were sent in to break up at least one mountain of snow that threatened to clog the Schuylkill.
Article from Feb 22, 2003 The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) <!— –>
An ‘option of last resort’
The city again in 2003 dumped snow into Philadelphia’s rivers, this time in an attempt to mitigate the impacts from a February storm that left about 19 inches of the white stuff. This time, though, city officials seemed to at least feel bad about it, calling it an “option of last resort.”
For this storm, roughly 400,000 pounds of snow was dumped into the Schuylkill. But along with it went road salt, antifreeze, trash, and other pollutants, prompting concerns from regional environmental groups. That pollution, they said, could harm marine life and devastate the riverbanks.
“All the stuff that’s on the road surface goes into the water,” Delaware Riverkeeper Network head Maya van Rossum told The Inquirer that year. “This is not the appropriate way to deal with the snow. There are plenty of places on the land to put it.”
The dumping, Streets Commissioner Clarena Tolson said, was limited. And the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said it asked the city to only dump “virgin snow” into the rivers.
“We’re going to take some of that down to the Navy Yard. We will not dump in the river,” Tolson said. “There are environmental concerns with placing snow in the river. The snow accumulates pollutants and salt, and dumping it in the river would be a very extreme measure.”
The Center for Environmental Policy at the Academy of Natural Sciences applauded the Nutter administration’s decision, writing in a letter to The Inquirer that the move would “prevent serious environmental damages to the river.”
“Urban precipitation, including snow, acquires a witch’s brew of contaminants such as oil, grease, litter, road salt, and lawn fertilizer,” director Roland Wall wrote. “We salute the city for making a commonsense decision that will protect one of Philadelphia’s natural treasures.”
A pedestrian walks past a large pile of snow and ice along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway days after a fierce winter storm dropped up to 9 inches of snow and sleet, with freezing temperatures leaving large banks of ice and snow on streets and sidewalks in Philadelphia, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026.
So what do we do now?
On Wednesday, Carlton Williams, the city’s director of clean and green initiatives, said the city does not dump snow in Philadelphia’s rivers, as that practice is “not an EPA standard.” Instead, the city has gravitated toward removing the snow from city streets and placing it at 37 snow dump sites around Philadelphia.
The city did not respond to a request for comment regarding those dump sites’ locations. Some of them contain mounds of snow up to 12 feet high that stretch for blocks, Williams said Wednesday. Officials also brought in a snow-melting machine from Chicago.
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection guidelines, meanwhile, recommend municipalities push snow at least 100 feet away from surface waters, where it will be able to melt with less environmental impact.
“Dumping of snow directly into a stream carries with it the shock of loading de-icing chemicals and anti-skid agents,” the agency said in a recent recommendations document. “Allowing a natural melt provides a slow release of the water, dilutes the chemicals, and provides filtration of the solids through the soil.”
Gov. Josh Shapiro blasted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Friday for buyinga Berks County warehouse that may be used to detain people.
“I’m strongly opposed to the purchase,” Shapiro said after speaking at an event at the Steamfitters Local 420 in Northeast Philadelphia.
Shapiro said the facility is “not what we need anywhere in Pennsylvania,” adding that he was not alerted ahead of time of ICE’s $87 million acquisition of the warehouse on 64 acres in Upper Bern Township.
“The secretive way the federal government went about this undermines trust,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro has grown increasingly vocal in his criticism of ICE and President Donald Trump in recent weeks as he’s toured the East Coast promoting his new memoir. In addition to voicing his opposition to the warehouse, Shapiro criticized Trump for sharing a racist video attacking former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama.
The Democratic governor, who is widely seen as a contender for the White House in 2028, is in the midst of a reelection campaign against Trump-endorsed Republican Stacy Garrity, who has urged cooperation with ICE.
He said the commonwealth is exploring “what legal options we may have to stop” the ICE procurement, but he acknowledged “those options are very slim, given that the federal government is the purchaser.”
Shapiro told this audience of union workers and apprentices that the Berks County building would be better used for economic development.
At the same event, Shapiro announced a new $3 million Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP) grant to expand the Steamfitters Local Union 420 Training Center, which he said would help “train the next generation of workers.”
Shapiro criticizes Trump over racist anti-Obama video
Duringthe union hall event, Shapiro also leveled criticism at the Trump administration for sharing on social media a racist video depicting Obama, the first Black president, and his wife, as apes.
When asked for a reaction, Shapiro said, “I actually agree with [Republican] Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina that it’s racist.”
Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, called the video “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” after Trump shared it to his Truth Social account Thursday evening.
Shapiro said thatTrump “seems to always find a lower and lower common denominator. We’re not going to get sucked down into the depths that this president seems to reach for each day.”
Trump took down the video early Friday afternoon.
The governor also strongly chided Trump for recently saying the federal government should be in charge of elections.
Specifically, Trump named Philadelphia, along with Detroit and Atlanta, as cities where the federal government should step in to run elections. The predominantly Black cities are in swing states and have long been targeted with Trump’s false claims of voter fraud.
“The president of the United States doesn’t run our elections,” said Shapiro. “County officials run our elections, Republican and Democrat alike.”
“We’re not going to have interference from the White House,” added the governor, who served as attorney general when Trump tried to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results in 2020.
Narberth’s borough council hasvoted unanimously to bar the municipality’s police officers from cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the agency’s 287(g) program.
The resolution approved Thursdaymade clear that “our police department operates to protect our residents and protect the public safety here and does not have a role in immigration enforcement,” said Council President Fred Bush.
ICE’s 287(g) program deputizes local law enforcement officers to carry out immigration actions, including identifying, arresting, and deporting immigrants. ICE has signed around 1,400 such agreements with law enforcement agencies in 40 states, including dozens in Pennsylvania.
In Philadelphia’s collar counties, only the Lansdowne Borough Constable’s Office in Delaware County and the Pennsylvania State Constable Office Honey Brook Precinct 1 in Chester County are 287(g) participants. Bucks County Sheriff Danny Ceisler, a newly elected Democrat, terminated his office’s controversial partnership last month, citing negative impacts on public safety and law enforcement trust.
Neither Lower Merion nor Narberth participates in the program.
Narberth’s resolution establishes that the borough will not enter into any agreement with the federal government, including 287(g), that would commit borough time, funds, efforts, or resources toward ICE noncriminal enforcement activities.
Officials clarified that Narberth’s police department would cooperate with ICE officials if they had a judicial warrant to arrest someone. An internal memo first reported by The Associated Press last month has authorized ICE to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant.
Narberth officials acknowledged that the resolution could be seen as “virtue signaling,” given that the borough already does not participate in an ICE partnership. Yet council members said they believe it’s important to publicly signal the municipality’s values regarding immigration enforcement.
The resolution“lets the public clearly know where we stand on the issues, helps reinforce trust, and provides that clarity of what we will do and what we won’t do,” said Dana Edwards, Narberth’s mayor. “From my standpoint, it’s a practical resolution.”
“When our community members trust their law enforcement, they feel comfortable reaching out to them for assistance,” said Councilmember Jean Burock. “We can’t afford to erode that trust.”
Bush cautioned residents against interfering with ICE operations, describing the agency as “poorly trained” and “dangerous,” citing “the actions and the images that came out of Minneapolis” in recent weeks.
Narberth’s resolution came on the heels of a Jan. 30 incident in which two people were taken into custody by ICE during a traffic stop in Penn Wynne.
Following the arrests, Lower Merion affirmed in a public statement that the township does not participate in 287(g) and encouraged residents to call 911 if they observe law enforcement activity with no Lower Merion police officers present.
This suburban content is produced with support from the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer’s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com/donate. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org/supporters.
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