Histories that root us: neighborhood, place, and the protest of school closures in Philadelphia

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore how neighborhood stakeholders invoked a school’s history in protesting the closure of local schools in two Philadelphia neighborhoods in 2013. By situating the protest of school closures within a theorization of the politics and production of place, this article illuminates the ways stakeholders’ defense of local schools was embedded in constructions of place identity, with implications for claims to belonging. Invoking a school’s history in protesting school closures rooted schools in place, expanding the framing of schools’ significance beyond the school district’s metrics for school closure and revealing ways that closure decisions reproduced historic place-based inequities. School closure decisions have broad implications for communities that extend beyond narrow considerations of school administration, implications that should be taken into account in school closure processes. I draw on video and transcription records of public meetings as well as subsequent interviews with neighborhood stakeholders.

KEYWORDS:

• Neighborhood
• place history
• place identity
• school closure
• protest

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to James DeFillipis for his encouragement and guidance as I developed this article and the larger research project from which it stems. I also thank Bob Lake for a set of insightful comments provided in response to an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The 45 schools marked as recommended for closure in Figure 1 are slightly higher than the numbers reported most often in the press. Determining how many schools were recommended for closure is definitionally complicated, as the District’s proposal included significant restructuring of programs, moving programs from one building to another, and colocating multiple programs in the same building. Included in this map are instances where a building was recommended to close, a program was recommended to close, and/or a program was recommended to move to a different location.

2. The SDP held 13 such public meetings. For this analysis, I reviewed only those meetings held in parts of the city close to the Germantown and Mantua neighborhoods.

3. Community meetings video retrieved from http://webgui.phila.k12.pa.us/offices/f/facilities-master-plan/community-forums. Video records of SRC meetings retrieved from http://webgui.phila.k12.pa.us/offices/c/communications2/broadcast-operations/. Official transcript of City Council hearing retrieved from http://legislation.phila.gov/transcripts/Public%20Hearings/education/2013/ed021213.pdf. Official transcripts of SRC hearings retrieved from http://webgui.phila.k12.pa.us/offices/f/facilities-master-plan/src-hearing-materials.

4. For direct quotations of spoken words in this paper, an ellipsis in brackets indicates omitted words.