For school superintendents, it’s a learning experience

School district superintendents are on the front lines of the battles, the sweeping challenges and the opportunities facing commonwealth schools – and are leading the way forward, from reimagining facilities and updating curricula to putting all that funding to good use. To find out more, City & State spoke with leaders of the commonwealth’s three biggest school systems – Tony Watlington of the School District of Philadelphia, Wayne Walters of the Pittsburgh Public School District and Carol Birks of the Allentown School District – as well as Francis Redmon, who heads the Keystone Central School District, the state’s largest geographic district, covering municipalities across a nearly 1,000-square-mile stretch of Clinton, Centre and Potter Counties. 

These conversations have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

What are some of the specific post-pandemic challenges you’ve dealt with in your district?

Francis Redmon: One of the things that dropped off during the pandemic and after is engagement with school. Students feel less committed to the idea of education – or they feel it is less relevant, less important.

During the pandemic, we had lots of conversations about this being an opportunity to rethink how we're doing education to better match the changing needs of our young people. Most of us came back and did school similarly to how it was done before the pandemic, but the students came back with different attitudes and ideas. I see that as one of our biggest ongoing challenges – understanding how we need to adapt to a changing landscape.

Carol Birks: Gaps exist because students cannot collaborate in class in real time … One solution is to work on students’ academic abilities, and another is to provide more support to nurture what we call students’ affective developmental skill sets.

We’ve organized a mental health task force that Rep. Mike Schlossberg is a part of, working collaboratively with community partners, including hospitals. We also have on-demand mental health services for our students – partnering with Hazel Health, as well as a program in which students can text with a therapist. We’ve also partnered with The Cook Foundation to arm families with tools that coach parents through supporting their child’s mental health needs.

Tony Watlington: The children of the schools that were closed in 2020 – their academic achievement and their chronic absenteeism increased. But we've implemented new math and reading curriculums … The Education Recovery Scorecard found that the School District of Philadelphia had the second-best rebound performance in third- through eighth-grade reading. Our high school career technical exam scores are up by double digits; our four-year cohort graduation rate is up by nearly 7 percentage points.

However, the number of teachers graduating across the country has declined by 50%, – and that phenomenon is more stark in this commonwealth, which has seen a 71% decline. Therefore, we have had to be very creative in how we recruit, develop, and retain highly qualified teachers.

One of the biggest challenges across the commonwealth is aging facilities – and changing enrollment patterns complicate the picture. How is your district coping with these issues?

Wayne Walters: We have the same number of schools we had 12 years ago, and we lost a quarter of our population – so something has to change. When you have schools with fewer than 200 students, it’s not efficient. I believe larger schools create more opportunities for students to have access to more courses and lectures, and more community.

Last year, we started a facilities utilization plan – an opportunity to illuminate a larger picture around enrollment, programming, access, opportunities, efficiency, and aging infrastructure. It was also an opportunity to address the inequities in our district and illustrate pockets of excellence: Sometimes, they show up in marginalized communities. And the fact that so many of our buildings are not air-conditioned – when it’s too hot, it’s not safe.

Birks: We have, as a district, approximately $300 million worth of deferred maintenance, and we have some very aging schools; one is 151 years old.

We want to really value and honor our large Latino student population – roughly 75% –  so we’ve reimagined one of our buildings, the Sonia Sotomayor School, to become a dual-language immersion academy where 50% of the students are non-Spanish speakers, and 50% are students who are Hispanic. It’s the first non-charter, non-private one in the Valley. It's a really great model … We're at pre-K-2 right now, so we'll grow the school out to fifth grade.

Watlington: Given that our school district has school facilities with an average age of 73 years – many in excess of 120 – I'm really pleased that we're addressing that challenge through a facilities planning process that began in 2023, with the adoption of a five-year aggressive strategic plan, Accelerate Philly, to become the fastest-improving large urban district in the country.

For the first time in a decade, our student enrollment is up. We believe that more parents are choosing the School District of Philadelphia because they see that we are getting better faster … That said, we don't have enough modern classroom spaces. We are not providing enough high-quality arts, music and physical education.

When you look at the number of seats that are available relative to enrollment – we need to address that imbalance. We can do a better job of optimizing our facility usage to provide more pre-kindergarten opportunities, more rigorous course offerings across our schools, better career and technical education.

The 2024-25 state budget included a historic $1.1 billion increase for K-12 public education funding – including roughly $526 million in so-called adequacy and equity grants for Pennsylvania’s most disadvantaged school districts. How has this impacted your district?

Redmon: We have more students who are coming to us whose families don't speak English in the home. We also see many more students who need social, behavioral and emotional support. The resetting of the funding formula helped us continue those programs that we were able to start through the support of the extra funding from COVID. There is still a gap between what that extra funding has brought to us and what the actual needs of the school are.

Birks: We’ve made huge investments in the arts; we've hired 39 staff members with the additional funding. We also added mental health services to support students’ needs. When I entered the district, we had one social worker, and to date, we now have approximately 18 – in two years.

We also made huge investments in our HVAC systems throughout the district. Now, all of our schools have air conditioning … we upgraded all 26 of our facilities to have it.

And we really want to increase what we're paying our staff – because right now, education is, unfortunately, not the No. 1 choice of profession. We’ve also created pipeline programs to address our staffing needs, including a partnership with Hampton University; employees have access to online education at no cost. We also designed our own pipeline to build the capacity of our paraprofessionals ­via a partnership with Bloom Forward, so members of our community can earn their associate's degree while they still work, and then go and earn a bachelor’s degree.

Watlington: Thanks to Gov. Josh Shapiro and the legislature's leadership, we've got an additional $238 million this year. And because of Mayor Cherelle Parker's leadership, the district will get up to an additional $250 million over the next five years by her changing the percentage of the property tax that comes to the school district … It will take us time to overcome the challenges to historic underfunding, but I believe we're turning the corner.

All of our kids will have access to algebra in the middle grades instead of just a small number of schools at present. That's a specific goal …Another is to increase access to advanced placement and International Baccalaureate classes. Across our high schools, there's a pretty significant disparity at present …We'll have more robust art, music and physical education at the elementary grades.

Walters: More money always makes a difference. We keep our ears to the ground with any grant opportunities, because even with the increase in funding, the need is so great.

The extra COVID-era funds really put us in a position to do something. But now that that funding is gone, it’s really left a hole … Post-COVID, schools have evolved into more community-based spaces. The needs are different with staffing, building and infrastructure.

How is your district addressing artificial intelligence in education?  

Birks: About 150 leaders throughout the district and more than 300 teachers have received comprehensive professional learning about AI. We’ve been engaging multiple stakeholders – families and our students, though focus groups and surveys – around a shared vision and how we put safeguards in place to protect privacy rights, data and academic integrity. We want to make sure that everyone understands as much as possible, right down to the level of how much AI students can use in their coursework, to ensure transparency and accountability, and have an impact on this policy.

Redmon: Technology is changing every day, and it’s hard to keep up as we try to make sure that what we're doing in the classroom is preparing our kids to be happy, healthy and independent. AI is certainly a piece of that. We're hearing from our business partners in industry that their expectation for new hires is that they know how to navigate and use AI to help improve their workflow. It's certainly been a challenge figuring out how to ensure our teachers are as up-to-date as possible – and help the students understand what's out there.

Walters: AI is here to stay, and it's revolutionizing the way that we work and function. So, I embrace it. I have used ChatGPT – I manage a lot of communication, and there are times when I need some help with efficiency. I think we should not hide that from students.

AI is so broad; it’s not just ChatGPT. There are so many opportunities to support efficiency, clarity and impact in spaces where the workload demands have shifted. I look at artificial intelligence as an opportunity to build the capacity of our students. We also need to build capacity with those who are serving our students and our staff beyond “Are the students going to just cheat?” so that there's comfort and understanding, and they can shape the task in alignment with resources and opportunities. We need guidelines to support the educational institution.