South Philly Review

Share this Story:

Keisha Walker was out of work for a month standing up for what she believed was right. While the Temple University Hospital nurse returned to work on Tuesday with a new contract, she was encouraging fellow parents at her son’s school to stand together in support of their children last week.

“Now I’m here tonight standing up for the safety of my son,” the resident of 19th and Dickinson streets said at the April 28 three-hour meeting. “I hate to say this, but Barratt is not an options for my son. That’s just not an option … In September, my son will not be there.”

The School District of Philadelphia has proposed to shutter George W. Childs Elementary School, 1541 S. 17th St., at the end of the current school year due to the building’s age of 116 years and relocate the pupils to Norris S. Barratt Middle School, located four blocks away at 1599 Wharton St. Eight school district officials including Childs’ Principal Alphonso Evans formed the panel that addressed the proposed move — which must first be approved by the School Reform Commission — inside Childs’ auditorium as about 200 residents listened. The district met with Childs’ parents again on Tuesday and has more sessions scheduled leading up to the commission’s 2 p.m. May 26 meeting at 440 N. Broad St..

Regardless, Walker refuses to send her son, fifth-grader Jibril Little, to 16th and Wharton streets as the area is “infested with drug activity,” she told the panel.

“If I have to work an extra day — and some of the other parents are not fortunate — but if I have to work an extra day to put him in Catholic school — another child in Catholic school and I have a child that’s in college — I’m going to do that,” she said. “I can’t sacrifice my son’s safety.”

Students, parents, alumni and area residents firmly stood their ground holding hands as they tried to make a loop around the school and chanted “save our school.”

“We’re just trying to make a chain, trying to make a statement,” parent and co-founder of Concerned Parents of Childs, Kim Smith said.

The chain of approximately 100 people looped more than halfway around the school before the meeting got under way at 6 p.m.

At Barratt next year, the district has proposed that Childs students will be on the first through third floors with Barratt’s eighth grade on the fourth floor. The staff will stagger arrivals and dismissals and they will each have a separate entrance, Danielle Seward, the director of the Office of Grade and Space Planning, said.

“This layout is for one year,” she said. “Barratt’s eighth grade will be there for one year. After June of 2011, when the children graduate, the whole building becomes Childs’ building. You’re only sharing for one year.”

Barratt currently only has 150 students, which makes up the seventh and eighth grades, and next year there would only be an eighth-grade class of approximately 90 students remaining. Childs has 605 students and has rapidly grown closer to the 625-student capacity of its building since the school added middle grades in the ’06-’07 school year.

This winter’s severe weather has caused further wear to the Childs’ roof prompting the facilities and school operations staff to be on site everyday to ensure safety to those inside the building, Facilities and School Operations’ Senior Vice President Jeffrey Cardwell said.

“The building itself has outlived its life cycle,” he said. “It’s at the very end of it. … As we continue to prolong not taking action, there’s a chance something detrimental could happen, so we want to do the right thing at the right time.”

Barratt will have more electrical capacity, science labs, two gymnasiums — both of which are larger than the one at Childs — and a larger cafeteria and administration area in addition to various renovations currently under way, Bill Montgomery, of the Office of Grade and Space Planning, who started out as a teacher at Childs in 1972, said.

Parents were not impressed though as they had fought off the closure more than two years ago and were facing it again with only two months remaining until the school year ends and only a month before it goes before the School Reform Commission. Smith already avoids walking by Barratt at dismissal time and does not want her children near that area either, she told the panel.

“I live across the street from Barratt,” the 15th-and-Wharton-street resident said, “but I walk four blocks to Childs everyday.”

And the violence is already affecting Childs students, Vincena Small, a mother of three of them, said.

“They’re already bullying the Childs children,” the resident of 20th and Tasker streets said prior to the meeting. “Kicking and fighting on them. Imagine if they are all in the same school.”

Small has reason to be concerned as she pulled her now 14-year-old daughter out of Barratt after she was attacked. The eighth-grader now feels safe at Childs where she attends with second-grade siblings, Marc and Monique, both 8.