The current budget passed by the commonwealth left the Philadelphia School District looking at a $178 million gap. Fernando Gallard, the director of media relations for the district, says that cuts will be made in operating costs, not in the budgets of the schools themselves. He explained that jobs would be shuffled around, basically realigning the administrative offices.

In the Brewerytown and Strawberry Mansion neighborhoods, schools like Strawberry Mansion High School, James G. Blaine Elementary, Edward Gideon, John F. Reynolds and Robert Vaux High School are already underfunded.

Students have limited access to books and computers. Parents in the area …

Last Tuesday, a groundbreaking ceremony was held for the new West Philadelphia High School.

Located just a few steps from the current building, the new facility will replace what was once West Catholic High School for Boys at 49th and Chestnut streets.

The …

Karla Mota hectically runs back and forth through the Youth United for Change office carrying stacks of statistics. Hurrying to finish up her day’s work before she heads home, Mota, 17, understands the importance of her and her fellow youth leader’s assignments. Mota attends Kensington CAPA High School and has been a leader with Youth United for Change for the past two years, trying her best to improve the high schools in her community.

One can find many problems …

Linn Vaughters is in the last place she thought she’d be when she started her career: North Philadelphia.

As a private school teacher, she held a negative view toward Philadelphia’s school systems that stemmed from her parents, both teachers in the School District of Philadelphia for decades.  So when a friend she ran into by chance at a Starbucks suggested a job teaching Spanish at Community Partnership School.

“I was informed by the awful conversations my parents had at dinner about what went on in their classrooms, …

On a cold and overcast Thursday morning, a group of dedicated students file into a drafty gymnasium on the fourth floor of The Lighthouse, a community organization on Lehigh Avenue. On one side of the gym, basketballs lie scattered across the floor, and a few of the students pick them up and haphazardly toss them into the hanging basketball nets. Other students, meanwhile, head straight to the wooden desks aligned neatly in …

In the concrete jungle of North Philadelphia, amid the broken sidewalks, fading stop signs and aging brownstones, stands a refreshingly out-of-place building. Its small garden peels back from the sidewalks of the quiet block. The refurbished warehouse and former conveyor belt storage unit no longer looks like the industrial building it once was. Instead, the bright rainbow colored “children’s entrance” announces the positive environment that is Mercy Family Community Center.
“We’re just a hidden secret, but we don’t want to be hidden,” said child-care director Barbara Coleman. “The community knows about it, but we want …

Tears fell amidst empty desks and rules of grammar chalk-written on the blackboard.   Candace Morris held back more as she spoke of the Salesian tradition of Northeast Catholic High School for Boys.

“We try to teach our students that you’re not expected to be everything; you’re only expected to be who you are and whoever Christ means for you to be,” said Morris, an English teacher at North …

Computer access can be taken for granted by Blackberry-wielding e-mailers, but for many people, getting to a computer is not so effortless. Libraries, community and recreation centers play a primary function,

giving residents in urban neighborhoods access the Internet as well as many other services.
In Brewerytown, residents have been able to utilize the resources and collective knowledge found within the Brewerytown Community Development Corp. President James Carter plays an integral role in keeping …

The Philadelphia school system has a laundry list of problems. Overcrowding, attendance, dropouts, literacy, lack of extracurriculars and cutbacks that lead to music and arts programs being dropped are just some of the complaints against inner-city schools. Effects last after public education. Twenty-two percent of Philadelphians are functionally illiterate.

There are optimists.

“We just had a kid taken away in handcuffs today,” says James Williams, principal of the  Culinary Arts High School in Kensington. “So many kids are returning …

Officer Raul Ortiz looked like a man completely comfortable in his profession and at ease with his surroundings. As we began our drive through one of the busiest districts in the city, one of the few that has their own radio band, it was only a short amount of time before my feeling of excitement was stomped upon by one of slight fear. “I’m going to take you to the hot areas,” Ortiz said with a smirk.
Truancy and dropping out plague the schools across Philadelphia and those in Hunting Park are no exception. Safety, …