We would like to extend the warmest of welcomes to our new principal from FoCA and all of our neighbours in the Arthur community!
The Wildcat Workshop was transformed this December with the installation of a WhisperRoom Recording Booth that is now home to Chester Arthur’s very own podcast studio!
The Chester Arthur Schoolyard Case Study has been published by the Landscape Architecture Foundation. The case study involved a Pre-Construction Site Assessment in 2016, a Post-Construction Site Assessment in 2017, both done by our landscape architect, SALT, and then data evaluation, analysis and presentation. We've been told the Landscape Architecture Foundation has a rigorous review process for their Case Studies and so it's an accomplishment to be approved by the organization. This work was funded by the William Penn Foundation grant that we secured for the Schoolyard.
We are extremely proud and excited to announce that Arthur's School Redesign Initiative proposal was accepted by the District! The rest of this school year will be spent in the design phase where we'll work closely with Science Leadership Academy to learn more from their best practices around project-based, inquiry-driven learning and will determine how to best adapt their model to Arthur.
This summer, Arthur is playing host to a hands-on science camp that attracts students of color from around the region to Arthur’s campus. The camp is one of 12 in the country run by the National Society of Black Engineers, and seeks to give interested students a chance to learn from mentors with similar backgrounds. Most of the camp instructors are college and graduate students looking to give back with their summer vacations.
From the mayor’s desk to the principal’s office, from grassroots parent activists to teachers aiming to transform instruction and assessment, from the superintendent’s seat to a boldly reimagined vocational academy, here are the stories of Penn alumni trying to carry out the increasingly embattled mission of public education in Philadelphia
A new report released by the Pew Charitable Trusts projects over half of 20-34 year-olds will be leaving Philadelphia in five to 10 years. This is taking into account this age group increased by about 100,000 between the years of 2006 to 2012. The so-called ‘millennials’ are concerned about putting down roots because of the poor condition of public school education, safety, career challenges and other factors. How does the City of Philadelphia keep its youth? Are the millennials to blame? Did the ‘Baby Boomers’ and “Generation Xers’ pave the way to the suburbs? We’ll talk to LARRY EICHEL, Director of the Philadelphia Program at The Pew Charitable Trusts; MATT OLESH, a parent who’s staying in the city; and ELIZABETH SPENCER, who just moved from South Philly to North Carolina, with her husband and infant, for better work.
Once your kids hit the age of 5, it's time to move to the suburbs. Or at least that's how it has gone for generations of middle- and upper-class parents in Philadelphia.
Most of the news out of Philadelphia schools lately has been the kind to lead city parents who have the option to start lining up a moving van: deficits, school closings, teacher layoffs, cheating scandals.
But these days some Philadelphians are taking a different approach. In neighborhoods from Graduate Hospital to East Falls to Fishtown, they're vowing to stay put, pitching in to help their neighborhood school improve. And they're doing this well before their children are ready for kindergarten, or even before they're born.
Consider Ivy Olesh, a 30-year-old resident of the Graduate Hospital neighborhood who has become for many Philly parents a go-to source of advice on grassroots school-building.
