Lea got a lot of Penn money
In January 2022, the School District of Philadelphia and Penn announced that Penn would be drastically increasing its financial support for Lea Elementary School in West Philly - $4.1 million over the next five years. I live nearby so I was pretty interested to learn more about this. When Penn donates millions of dollars, are there conditions or is it no-strings-attached? What do they think about the optics? So I submitted a RTKL request to the district. It took forever (…about a year), but I did finally get responsive documents from the School District, which included a bunch of emails and draft agreements.
The School Board had publicly posted an action item that it voted to approve. But that wasn’t the actual agreement that got signed. Here are three drafts of the actual agreement between Penn and the School District:
And here’s the final version approved by the School Board:
Some of the provisions in this agreement that I found interesting and surprising:
If the principal leaves, Penn will be heavily involved in searching for and recommending their replacement.
Lea has to cap class sizes at 24 kids for 3rd grade and under, and 25 kids in grades 4-8.
The $816,500 per year is conditioned on Lea providing a progress report on “milestones established jointly by SDP and Penn.”
Earlier drafts are between the School District and Penn. Later drafts add the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers as a party.
I also found this e-mail very interesting… the School Board apparently votes on contracts it doesn’t actually read. They just get someone’s description of a contract - the one page summary “action item” - and say “sounds good” and then vote? This raises serious questions about the kind of oversight the Board actually provides. It seems similar to the School Board approving a $450k contract for a consultant for new Superintendent Dr. Watlington - they approve contracts after they've begun, without making any real inquiry.
Penn was already providing about $300k each year to Lea. Of the new $640k in funding, more than half is for “improving instruction”, which includes Penn paying for two more teachers to keep class sizes down. (this is from a draft proposal - I don’t know if the final numbers are a little different)
It’s hard to gauge how much of an effect this has had and will have on home prices in the neighborhood. For the year before this Penn money was announced, sub-3% interest rates were probably fueling a lot of bidding wars. Shortly after this partnership was announced, interest rates started creeping back up, which is probably keeping sale prices in check. But that will be interesting to watch.
Here are all the emails I got:
Here are links to several hundred more pages of emails:
https://www.scribd.com/document/636688469/Gutman-2223rtkl152-Emails-Orig
https://www.scribd.com/document/636688476/Jd-Combined-Redacted
https://www.scribd.com/document/636688489/Joanne-Mitchell-2223rtkl0155-Email-Orig-Redacted
https://www.scribd.com/document/636688501/Overton-2223rtkl0155-Orig-Redacted
https://www.scribd.com/document/636688522/Pgrossman-Redacted
https://www.scribd.com/document/636688531/Rashene-Davis-Bowe-2223rtkl0155-Email-Orig