These neighborhood schools are actively recruiting

Mastery's and ASPIRA's Renaissance charters hope to stem the flow of transfers to other high schools.

by Paul Jablow

Avvonya Payne was so determined this summer to get her daughter Alicia into a good, safe school that if need be, "I'd have sold my house and gone into a shelter."

But she was confident that wouldn't be necessary when neighborhood recruiters from Simon Gratz High School spotted Alicia on the street and convinced her this was where she belonged. "Mom," she said when she got home. "This is the school I want to go to."

"It was like the heavens opened up and God answered my prayers," her mother said as she sat in the office of the school's new principal, LaQuanda Jackson.

Payne had been unhappy with conditions at Northeast High School, where Alicia went last year. And Gratz – one of 19 Philadelphia schools on the federal persistently dangerous schools list – ordinarily might not have been considered an escape hatch.

But Gratz's new operator, Mastery Charter Schools, is determined to change both the reputation and the reality. It has been a war waged on two fronts – planning changes at the school and selling those changes to neighborhood residents who might otherwise have their children apply elsewhere. In Alicia's case, they said she would be walked to school if that's what it took.

Similar recruitment efforts are taking place at another neighborhood high school, Olney, under a new operator, ASPIRA of Pennsylvania.

Both were named Renaissance Schools by the District earlier this year and both are trying to attract more neighborhood students who otherwise might have transferred out, or tried to.

"We're trying to encourage more neighborhood kids to come back," says Courtney Collins-Shapiro, deputy chief innovation officer of Mastery.

"By next year we hope the word will be out that we've turned the school around ... that it's a good place to be."

Both Gratz and Olney have used mailings, information sessions, home visits, and neighborhood recruiting to try to fill their enrollments. Mastery paid community residents to recruit and even used paid radio spots and two billboards on Hunting Park Avenue. The schools also worked through community organizations to spread the word. (Officials at a third new Renaissance high school, Audenried, say they expect to fill the school without major recruiting efforts).

Remaking the schools' image is a formidable task. According to District figures for 2010, 60 percent of students in the Gratz catchment area and a third in the Olney catchment area transfer out.

It is a citywide problem. According to District figures, the percentage of students transferring to a school other than their neighborhood school ranges up to 80 percent in the Germantown High School catchment area and is over 50 percent for most neighborhood schools. Gratz is actually in the middle of the pack and Olney has the lowest rate. As students have transferred out, the population of many neighborhood schools has dwindled.

Ideally, District officials say, students would transfer out of their catchment area only if they qualified for a more selective school or specialized school or wanted a program only available elsewhere, such as the automotive technology program at West Philadelphia High School.

In that spirit, Collins-Shapiro says Gratz isn't necessarily trying to attract those students who might get into the most selective public schools but is instead angling for students who might otherwise transfer to other neighborhood or citywide schools strictly on academic or safety issues.

Indeed, both Mastery and ASPIRA see safety as perhaps the key issue. At student focus groups earlier this year, Jackson says she was repeatedly asked, "Are you going to make (other students) stop walking the halls?"

"The halls are just for a transition from class to class," says Jackson, a former assistant principal in Burlington City, N.J., and a recent graduate of the Mastery principal apprentice program.

In each school, teachers and administrators will have hallway stations at the end of each class period.