Rayette Bosley (left) and her daughter Raynae stand outside Beeber Middle School in Wynnefield. They campaigned to save it when it was threatened with closure.
Dimner Beeber Middle School was headed for extinction.
Since it was barely a quarter full and posted poor academic indicators, the District planned to close it and send a few hundred Beeber 7th and 8th graders to nearby Overbrook High School.
But for Raynae Bosley, a rising 8th grader, Beeber was working.
In 7th grade, she said, “all of the teachers didn’t give up on me and they kept getting me up to the next level.”
“I really didn’t want the school to be closed at all.”
She was not alone. The Beeber community, including Raynae and her mother Rayette, launched a fierce and successful campaign last spring to keep the school open.
But the Bosleys are still concerned about the school’s future because Beeber’s rescue came with a catch. They were never formally notified that the middle school would be sharing the building this fall with the first cohort of 9th graders attending a new satellite campus of Science Leadership Academy, a popular special admission high school.
“I believe a lot of the parents were hoodwinked because we weren’t told until after the fact … that there was going to be another school pretty much renting space with our students,” said Katherine Stokes, another Beeber mother.
Stokes believes SLA is moving into Beeber’s Wynnefield neighborhood to test the location for expanding its enrollment and ultimately push Beeber out.
“I truly believe this is probably the last year for this building and this school as Beeber itself,” Stokes said.
“We fought long and hard to keep this school open, not knowing that this was in the works. So we basically saved the school for someone else.”
Superintendent William Hite focused attention on Beeber on opening day in September, when he chose to escort one of its students to school in the morning.
A study in contrasts
Beeber, in a stately and sturdy 1930s building, started out as a junior high school, with a 7th, 8th and 9th grade. This is just what it will have next year, although in two distinct schools with different demographics and different educational approaches.
The building sits in a pleasant, almost bucolic neighborhood, surrounded by neat twins and row houses and just a block away from parts of Fairmount Park. Nevertheless, it has the statistics associated with a failing urban school.
Test scores have been mostly below those of the District as a whole, although 7th and 8th graders did better than entering 6th graders. (This year, the school no longer has a 6th grade.)
Beeber was once on the city’s persistently dangerous schools list, and last year almost all its students – 95 percent – qualified for free and reduced price lunch. Its enrollment, almost entirely African American, has been plunging, largely due to the lure of charter schools. Since 2010-11, it fell from nearly 500 students to just over 250 last year. The building can hold 1,100.
SLA, on the other hand, which operates in partnership with the Franklin Institute, has become one of the District’s most popular schools in the eight years since its founding. It is known for its interdisciplinary, project-based curriculum, in which students pose and answer essential questions. Its test scores are high, and its student body encompasses the races and ethnic groups of the city as a whole.
SLA is gaining a national reputation – Microsoft founder Bill Gates has visited the school – and it holds a major annual conference on educational technology called EduCon. It has far more applicants than slots in its Center City campus, which enrolls fewer than 500 students.
“The whole impetus for [SLA@Beeber] was that so many kids were coming and interviewing and we had so few seats,” said SLA founder and main campus principal Chris Lehmann. SLA had 800 students on its waiting list – students deemed suitable and qualified for whom there was no room.
Plus, Beeber’s location in West Philadelphia makes it easier for more students from other parts of the city to get there.
Sonia Giebel, a Haverford College senior, was an intern at the Notebook this past summer.
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