The Philadelphia school board voted Thursday night to spend up to $7 million on rental space to house a district high school in Center City.
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The four-year agreement — the district will pay $1.7 million annually for two years, then $1.8 million and $1.9 million in the final two years — covers classrooms and related spaces at 18 S. Seventh St., the longtime home of Constitution High School.
The move comes months after the district voted to close 17 schools, in part because it has 70,000 empty seats in schools across the city. The school system will also merge some schools — like Overbrook High and the Workshop School — as part of its $3 billion facilities master plan, to be enacted over the next decade, but it opted not to move Constitution High into any school with empty space.
Board members voted unanimously to pass the resolution, which noted the district “continues to work through the completion of the Facilities Master Plan to properly identify appropriate space for our students.”
Officials will “review the opportunities that may exist in the coming years that would cause us to re-evaluate the current necessary decision to remain at this location, which accommodates the needs of the students within this program. If the opportunity arises for the school district to consider relocation, the community and stakeholders will become aware and involved in this process.”
Constitution, a citywide admissions school, has been located at its current building since the school opened in 2006 as part of Philadelphia’s small-schools boom. The school was designed with a civics focus, and deliberately located near the National Constitution Center.
The district has moved other schools out of rental properties. It relocated Science Leadership Academy, which had been in rental space near the Franklin Institute, into Benjamin Franklin High. District officials have pointed to that colocation as a model.
Charter renewals, but no mention of missing PSSAs or Kensington asbestos relocation
The board also voted Thursday night to renew two charters: YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter, on North Broad Street in North Philadelphia, and Inquiry Charter, on Belmont Avenue in West Philadelphia.
Both schools received five-year renewals.
YouthBuild’s renewal came with conditions: agreeing to submit a student attendance plan, tracking students’ daily attendance, and divulging supports offered; and promising to ensure the school’s suspension rate is at or below the district’s suspension rate.
No district official addressed two brewing matters: either the asbestos-related relocation of Kensington High students to the former Meehan Middle School building in the Northeast, more than seven miles away, or the district’s missing PSSA scores.
Earlier on Thursday, a Lincoln High parent and a Mayfair resident were attempting to block Kensington’s move to Meehan, a closed district school currently used as swing space to house school populations that need a temporary home.
Meehan shares a campus with Lincoln and Northeast Community Propel Academy, both of which are overcrowded. Parent Harold Brown and Peter McDermott, a former Philadelphia teacher who’s active in Mayfair civic life and city Democratic politics, say moving Kensington onto the campus will harm students.
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They also say placing 400 Kensington students and 90 staff at Meehan violates a Community Benefits Agreement signed in 2019, when neighbors OK’d building Propel to ease overcrowding at other Northeast schools.
No mention was made, either, of the lack of data around Philadelphia students’ PSSA and Keystone exams.
District officials said they won’t release the scores of students’ spring tests — which district officials have access to — because of a delay in Harrisburg.
Though the district did receive preliminary student-level scores, and released limited data to some teachers and administrators in order to correctly roster a limited number of students, they have walled off the data from the vast majority of educators.
A district spokesperson said this week that they won’t be using PSSA scores for the school selection process that admits students to 37 magnet schools. Instead, students can take an alternate assessment the district declined to name or detail.
The scores are consequential in a district where officials frequently state their goal to become the fastest-improving large urban school system in the country. Philadelphia has posted academic gains during Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr.’s tenure and earned national attention for its post-pandemic improvement, but its students still generally struggle.
Citywide, 34% of students score at grade level in English and 23% in math, as judged by 2024-25 standardized tests.
Administration of this year’s PSSAs, given to students in third through eighth grades, was snarled this year by some technical glitches. It was the first year Pennsylvania required students to take the exams online.
Research shows that scores usually dip when tests move online.
Kristin Luebbert, a retired district teacher, urged the board and the district to release the scores.
“Obviously, the administration must have strong feelings about what they show,” Luebbert said of the scores. “At this point, we all know they’re out there, so you might as well release them.”