The Spruce Hill Community Association (SHCA), an integral player in the formation of the Penn Alexander School more than 10 years ago, agreed last night to draft a statement  calling on the school to admit every child in first grade and above who lives in the school’s catchment area.

Parents new to the neighborhood and those with young children have been dismayed about the refusal of the school to admit many children even though they live within the school’s coveted catchment area. Several people who attended last night’s SHCA board meeting, as well as one association board member, shared stories about children who were not admitted and their frustration about not knowing how to proceed for the coming school year.

School and district officials have said that the school’s lower grades are at capacity, prompting them to advise many parents, even those with siblings already attending the school, to investigate other options. The SHCA board agreed that the policy was unjust.

Longtime Spruce Hill Community Association board member Barry Grossbach said it is the association’s obligation to pressure the school to accept any child who lives inside the catchment boundaries.

“I think we need to be very clear that kids who live within the catchment area need to go to the school,” Grossbach said. “This was the expectation that we had when the school was formed and that is the expectation we have now.”

Board members hope that the statement will help prompt a more open discussion about the enrollment policy, which so far is a mystery to most parents.

Most parents have tolerated a kindergarten enrollment cap because kindergarten is not required in Pennsylvania. But now the cap is being applied to the lower grades. Registration for those grades begins August 15 and many parents new to the neighborhood are unsure if their children will be admitted.

West Philly resident Monica Calkins spoke at the meeting on behalf of a new community organization confronting the enrollment issue at the school. The group, Advocates for Great Elementary Education (AGREE), officially formed last month after several parents commiserated about the lack of information coming from the school.

Like many parents who live in the Penn Alexander catchment, Calkins wants answers.

“We have a lot of questions,” she said.

Some of issues the group hopes to have clarified:

• Extent of the overcrowding at the school.
• The process for determining an enrollment cap.
• Penn’s position on the overcrowding issue.
• Whether other measures, such as temporary classrooms, have been considered.

A key question that many are asking is whether the influx of students to the school is a temporary surge in the population that might be relieved by temporary classroom space similar to what is being done at some crowded schools in Northeast Philadelphia.

AGREE also echoes many residents’ fears about “downstream effects” of the enrollment cap, including a drop in real estate prices.

Property sales, which surged after the school was built, have reportedly already begun to reflect the confusion and anxiety over admission to the school.

Realtor Melani Lamond told SHCA board members last night that if the enrollment policy is not cleared up soon real estate sales will likely drop further and prospective homebuyers will look to buy elsewhere.

“I guarantee you this will be a one-time problem if there is no guarantee that their kids will get into the school,” said Lamond.

School officials have advised some parents to investigate other neighborhood schools, including Henry C. Lea School (4700 Locust St.), which has seen a surge in community interest in recent months.

Many parents who live inside the catchment have said that they would consider Lea, but first want a definitive answer to whether their child might have a chance to get into Penn Alexander.

Today’s issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer details the situation around Penn Alexander school.  As reported earlier by Westphillylocal, the school may not be able to provide spots for new students in lower grades because of overcrowding.

According to the Inquirer article, the school’s partnership with Penn was renewed for another 10 years last week.

Several questions have arisen since the publication yesterday of the story about the Penn Alexander limiting enrollment.  We have been pursuing two things today:

One is a legal clarification on what exactly a catchment area means. More information on that is included below. We have also offered an official from the school or the University of Pennsylvania to write a note to parents and community members advising them on further steps for enrollment that we would publish. So far we have not received a reply.

Here is a list of questions to continue the conversation and some answers (Any comments or further clarification are greatly appreciated. Please leave a reply below):

• Is there no school that is obligated to take our kids?

This is where some clarification on the law probably would help. Some have asked if a class-action lawsuit is possible. The wording on the Penn Alexander Home and School Association website about what a “catchment” means is a reflection of the School District of Philadelphia wording: “Any school-age child living within this area is eligible to attend the school.” “Eligible” is the operative word. An education lawyer and former teacher from West Philly (apologies for the anonymity) wrote us that:

The district is under no legal obligation under state or federal law (short of potential mandates under the IDEA or mandates for schools that are under desegregation orders) to place any student in any particular school within its boundaries.  Under state law, a district must “enroll” every eligible student within its boundaries in “a” school, but there are no legal mandates giving students an entitlement to a particular school.

There are rights, he continued, to transfer out of “persistently dangerous” schools, but there are no legal requirements for the District to maintain a “neighborhood” school.

• If we don’t get a spot in our neighborhood school (PAS) we’re just supposed to apply to other schools and hope for the best?!

“If I wanted to apply to charter schools or apply to other neighborhood schools I would not have moved into ‘the catchment,’” one reader wrote. Parents with school-age children in the area who want their kids to stay in their neighborhood (to “walk to school”) have the option to send their children to the Henry C. Lea School (4700 Locust) or the Alexander Wilson School (1300 S. 46th St.). West Philly Local is not in business to recommend schools to people, but it should be noted that a tremendous amount of activity has been happening recently at the Lea School. It has a Home and School Association that is growing and the West Philly Coalition for Neighborhood Schools, which now includes nearly 200 parents and community members, is devoting much of its resources and efforts to the school. The website PhillySchoolSearch.com has an excellent primer on the transfer process.

My children may have to attend separate schools?

Penn Alexander officials have said that there will be no provisions made for siblings. As for other schools, again it depends on where you look.

Are there no future plans to expand PAS in the future?

So far, no.

How will enrollment for kindergarten happen if not a lottery?

A Penn Alexander official we talked to was emphatic that there would be no lottery. So in the near future it looks like lining up for the 50 or so spots is the only way. In March January the line-up began the night before registration began. The same school official said preference for first grade for next fall would be given to those students whose parents lined up but did not get a spot in kindergarten, making the fate of those who have to wait for the August 15 registration date even more precarious. This whole process is obviously not sustainable, but an alternative has not been announced.

How much of a dip in our home’s value should we expect?

No one can answer this for sure. Home prices have tripled within the catchment area since the school opened and everyone knows about the catchment premium on houses within the bouadaries (sometimes speculated to be as much as $100,000). It would seem logical to assume that this news will prick the housing bubble in the catchment boundaries. Real estate agents have capitalized on the catchment (see photo above). But home prices near the catchment have also appreciated greatly and if the Lea school keeps improving, there is reason to believe that home prices near it will continue to rise. One question is how many who have been on the fence about selling might be interested in selling right now?

Enrollment at the vaunted Penn Alexander School at 43rd and Locust has increased every year since it began with 75 students 10 years ago. Now, School District of Philadelphia and Penn Alexander officials have announced, the school’s lower grades are full and many new students will likely not be admitted next year even if they live in the school’s catchment area.

Rumors have been swirling for months that the school, which has operated cooperatively with the University of Pennsylvania since opening in 2001, was at capacity in its lower grades. The District has confirmed that special arrangements have been made with Penn Alexander to limit the number of new students, a break from the District’s usual requirement of reserving spots in neighborhood schools for students who live within the school’s catchment boundaries.

The school’s lower grades, particularly 1-3, are at capacity and students who live in the school’s catchment area, where housing prices have tripled since the school opened, are no longer guaranteed spots.

District spokeswoman Shana Kemp wrote in an e-mail to West Philly Local:

Penn Alexander is at capacity in the lower grades. It typically is the policy that a school must take a student who lives in a catchment, however, once a school reaches capacity, the District can make the decision to assign students elsewhere in order to relieve overcrowding. This is what we have had to do at Penn Alexander. The school was founded in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania, in part, in order to provide enrollment relief to the Lea and Wilson schools, so it is important that we not create a situation of overcrowding there.

A school official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that there were “no guarantees” that students not already attending the school’s kindergarten would be admitted to the first grade. Some grades beyond first are full as well, the official said. Even siblings of students already attending the school are not guaranteed admission.

Penn provides $1,330 per student annually to keep average class sizes at about 23 students. Currently, the school’s lower grades far exceed that number, with some classes as high as 30.

Registration officially begins on August 15, but District officials recommended that parents of students not currently enrolled at the school investigate other neighborhood schools.

The District estimates that Penn Alexander is at 72 percent of capacity. That number reflects a lopsided enrollment where the classrooms in lower grades are at or above capacity and the upper grades (6-8) are under capacity. The school is designed to accommodate 815 students. Last October, the District reported that 587 students attended the school.

The school official who asked not to be named said an admission lottery is not an option. Likewise, expanding the school’s capacity by using trailers or other temporary classrooms was not planned. The line to sign up for kindergarten at Penn Alexander, which is now the only way to guarantee that a student will be admitted to first grade, began forming this year long before registration began at 8 a.m., requiring parents to spend the night outside the school in freezing temperatures to get a spot.

“I wish we could accommodate every child but we can’t,” said the school official.

Alternatives for those living in the catchment include Samuel Powel Elementary (301 N. 36th St.), which serves students in grades 1-4. But Powel is even more crowded than Penn Alexander. The district reports that, as of October 2010, 236 students attended the school, which has a capacity of 199.

Another alternative is the Henry C. Lea School (47th and Locust), which in recent months has drawn interest from parents who live just outside the Penn Alexander catchment. Lea serves students K-8 and is at about 72 percent capacity, according to the District. Parents who want to improve other schools in the neighborhood have formed the West Philadelphia Coalition for Neighborhood Schools, which has become active at Lea in particular.

The announcement from school and district officials is likely to send parents who have flocked to the neighborhood in recent years scrambling to find school alternatives for their children. The Penn Alexander official sympathized.

“When this school opened we never imagined this would happen,” the school official said.

The University of Pennsylvania is proposing a multi-million dollar partnership with Henry C. Lea School – the K-8 public school located four blocks west of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (aka “Penn Alexander”) School, their first partnership school in West Philadelphia.

The proposed Penn-Lea partnership is for five years, during which the university will be making a total grant commitment of $816,500 per academic year, totaling $4,082,500. A portion of these funds will be in the form of services provided by individuals who are paid by Penn.

Concerns about rising home values, gentrification and displacement have followed the announcement. Home prices in the Penn Alexander catchment rose exponentially since 2000. Continue Reading

Penn Book Center, the 58-year-old indie book store at 34th and Sansom that was saved from imminent closure last summer, recently got a new name from its new owners. Since December, it’s been called People’s Books & Culture, and also has a new logo (see photo).

The new name was chosen from a public poll and has the same initials as the previous name (PBC), which was very important to the new owners.

“We had all kinds of interesting answers, but keeping the PBC initials was central to the store’s branding and community name recognition,” Duquès told Billy Penn.  Continue Reading