A lost year at West Philly High

Five different principals in the span of a year.

A serious spike in assaults, incidents of disorderly conduct, thefts, and arsons – all of which had been steadily declining.

And a teaching staff that turned over by 40 percent one year, then almost 90 percent the next.

All of this, was part of the price that West Philadelphia High School paid to be “turned around” during a dispiriting 2010-11 school year.

“It was a lot of chaos,” said D’Atwan Nelson, a current senior at West who helped organize a student walkout to protest conditions at the school last year.

While the new brand of federally mandated school turnaround seeks to shake things up by design, what happened at West during its painful, protracted involvement in former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman’s Renaissance Schools initiative took disruption to a whole new level.

After the turnaround process was set in motion, District officials rejected the recommendation of the volunteer panel it had created to help choose West’s future. Instead, the District launched a questionable investigation into four of the parents involved on the volunteer panel. In the resulting fallout, District officials then removed West’s popular principal and dismantled much of what she had built at the school, replacing her with a series of retired former principals.

Though these decisions severely hampered West’s ability to function for much of last year, officials now refuse to account for them.

“We feel the school community only deserves specific answers about where West is heading,” said District spokesperson Fernando Gallard.

The problems at West began in earnest in spring 2010, when Ackerman and the School Reform Commission convened a volunteer School Advisory Council of parents and community members to recommend a new manager for their school.

Despite contention, the SAC had made its choice. But at the last minute, on the word of an anonymous tipster, the District shut the process down and announced that its Inspector General was investigating four parents on the SAC for an alleged conflict of interest. The parents had accepted small stipends to drum up parental engagement in the school from a local nonprofit that had worked with the approved provider.

Almost a year and a half later, the District still has not released the full findings of that “investigation” or revealed the identity of the tipster. In response to continued requests from the Notebook, a District spokesperson said only that the inspector general had found “that there was ‘no violation of the Pennsylvania statute on conflicts of interest’” at West, but that “there was an appearance of impropriety.”

Reached by a reporter with word of those findings, Jennifer Funderburg, one of the parents involved in the controversy, initially had a one-word response: “Whatever.”

Still disillusioned by her experience, Funderburg says she was never contacted by the inspector general during the investigation, and the District never informed her of its outcome.

“I’m still hurt from the whole fiasco,” she said.