Fully in crisis-mode amidst a $1 billion budget shortfall, school district officials have resorted to closing schools and flipping them for desperately needed cash.
“It’s an opportunity for revenue,” said Superintendent William R. Hite Junior, “we are trying to sell these properties as fast as we can for as much as we can get for them.”
While the entire portfolio value of the 27 buildings has been estimated at $200 million, the leading offer is currently half of that. Predatory development companies are seeking to exploit the school district’s desperation by offering to buy all of the properties all at once, and stand to turn a huge profit if the deal goes through.
While district officials cut deals with private enterprise, thousands of school employees have lost their jobs and students are being crowded into fewer and fewer schools with fewer and fewer resources. Teachers who have suffered severe pay cuts in recent months are barely holding together classrooms bursting at the seams, and without nurses, librarians, janitorial staff and guidance counselors lost to massive layoffs, students are practically fending for themselves.
This sort of “restructuring” represents a coordinated attack on the working-class. For poor and working people, schools are a vital resource in the community, and so-called “reforms” that allow for their closure and sale should be called what they are: a tactic of class warfare.
Moreover, school closings have disproportionately targeted Black and Latino neighborhoods, and although Black youth represent 54.5 percent of the district’s total students, they constitute a disproportionate 80 percent of those whose schools were closed. This represents a massive attack on the most oppressed.
As their schools are shuttered around them, what is clear is that the students of Philadelphia, their teachers, their communities and all poor and working people need a better system that doesn’t consider the land that school buildings sit on more valuable than the students who fill them.
Socialists believe that education is a right, and with socialism, a free and fair education would be made accessible to all people everywhere. Schools are integral structures in the community and the education they provide is vital service to a progressive society. With socialism it would be impossible to close and sell schools for profit. What is needed in Philadelphia and elsewhere are not reforms, but a complete overhaul. What is needed is a new system.
