A Kensington elementary school was blindsided by recent changes to Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr.’s facilities master plan — and parents and teachers say they have been left with little time to absorb and organize around changes they say could harm their community.
In Watlington’s initial facilities plan, Hackett Elementary was supposed to merge catchments with Moffet Elementary, in South Kensington, and become a K-4 school, with students from both schools going to Moffet for middle school.
But the Moffet community fought fiercely against that plan, marshaling political supporters and, in one instance, even filing a Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission complaint over the move. At the eleventh hour, Watlington altered course, recommending Moffet stay an elementary school and shifting Hackett to a K-8.
Some in the Hackett community are furious, saying that their small school is not large enough to accommodate three extra grades or sustain robust middle school programming.
One parent chained herself to the Hackett fence on Thursday to draw attention to the issue, and roughly 100 people came to a Monday meeting at Hackett to ask district officials pointed questions about the last-minute shift.
“They didn’t ask for our side,” said Jocelyn Garfinkel, a Hackett parent who attended the meeting. “We made it very clear that we are not interested in being a K-8. We don’t have the space.”
Claire Landau, Watlington’s senior adviser and point person on the facilities plan, disputed the notion that Hackett’s building was not large enough to accommodate the added grades.
The new Hackett recommendation lines up with a citywide desire to embrace a K-8 model, Landau said.
“The proposal to have Hackett go K-8 is one that I think is a really strong recommendation,” Landau said. “It’s an opportunity to do some really exciting things.”
The shifting plan
In March, when Watlington’s first version of the plan was still on the table, making both Hackett and Moffet K-8s was suggested by Moffet families as an alternative to combining the schools’ catchments.
“Due to the size of the Moffet and Hackett facilities, this would require prohibiting all out of catchment students at both schools, eliminating specialized diverse learner programs in both schools, and shrinking the Moffet catchment to send additional students to Hackett,” read a slide from a presentation made to Moffet and Hackett families at the time.
District officials now say Hackett, on East York Street, will have to phase out its special-education classes for life-skills students and stop admitting children from out of catchment to accommodate a K-8 school. (About 40% of Hackett students now live outside the school’s catchment.)
Eliminating those learners raises questions about diversity for many Hackett parents, some say. More than 50% of Hackett’s 372 students are white. And the neighborhood has experienced gentrification, “becoming ritzy,” as one community member put it.
Hackett parent Bridget LaRosee said rejecting the Hackett-Moffet plan was “short-sighted and elitist” because combining forces would have led to a stronger, diverse school with additional resources for all. (Many families at Moffet, where the student body is already more diverse, objected to making their families walk more than a mile, in some cases, to school.)
“We could have been a really successfully example of how to address enrollment decline and combine forces,” LaRosee said.
Both Hackett and Moffet now feed into Penn Treaty, a Fishtown 5-12 school also slated for closure. Historically, few children from either school attend Penn Treaty, opting instead for special-admission district middle schools, charters, or private schools. Under the new version of the plan, Moffet middle schoolers will attend Ludlow, in North Philadelphia, which was also initially tagged for closure, then spared.
Hackett will get $6.9 million to prepare for the K-8 transition next year, but officials say adding classrooms is not an option. Instead, the money might upgrade bathrooms and furniture or accommodate other ancillary changes.
Hackett’s planning year will be crucial, Landau said. The school could have a specialized music program, for example, or a science, technology, engineering, and math center. But some Hackett parents said that is a false choice.
“There is no space for three more grades,” said Jason Kuhn, another Hackett parent. “It feels like there is no plan. There’s no transparency.”
Divided communities
The situation has made for tense relations between neighbors, with insults hurled on social media and playgrounds, those involved said.
When the plan was introduced, Hackett families say, they kept quiet so as not to minimize the concerns that Moffet families felt about the proposed changes. Now, they feel burned and that their prior silence is being used against them.
“This has divided communities,” said Alana Bograd, a Hackett parent. “It didn’t have to be that way.”
Bograd, who also sometimes substitute teaches at Hackett, worries about the loss of the life-skills program.
“I know how much it benefits everyone,” Bograd said. “It would be devastating to our community and our school if they cut this program.”
Life-skills students will be allowed to remain at Hackett, but no new life-skills students will be admitted when the changes take effect in 2027. Similarly, out-of-catchment Hackett students will stay through graduation, but future out-of-catchment placements will be limited. (That would also have been the case had Moffet and Hackett merged catchments, Landau said.)
With a little more than a week between the district introducing the new recommendations and the board vote, the Hackett community is asking for more time to plead its case.
“The community and every teacher I had connected with vastly dislikes a K-8 plan,” said Jeff Vaisberg, a Hackett parent. “I think we need to do everything we can to postpone a vote until the school board presents a clear plan, with contingencies, with a middle school option.”
Landau said the district aimed to ease parent frustrations, and said she was approached by a number of Hackett parents after Monday’s meeting who were pleased with the changes.
But Lindsay Lux, a Hackett teacher, is frustrated by what seems like the community “being forced into this very inconvenient circumstance with a building that can’t accommodate what they want it to.”
“We have a great school,” Lux said. “Families love it. But just feels like there’s a big potential for this to be lackluster.”
Cimone Berman, the parent who chained herself to the Hackett gate to draw attention to the community’s anger, said Hackett will rise to the occasion if forced to.
But she is upset at what she said is an imperfect plan being foisted on the school.
“They’re basically starving us and creating a [Hackett] catchment of $800,000 homes,” Berman said. “If I wanted that, I would just move back to Bucks County.”