Demonstrators outside Benjamin Franklin High School this morning. Photo: Emily Babay/Philly.com
By Dustin Slaughter
As students head back to school today, they face swelling class sizes, a serious lack of education resources, and low morale.
Philly.com reports this morning that many students are very hesitant about returning to classes.
“We barely have books,” 17 year old sophomore Brian Burney told reporters. “We have 30 to 40 kids in the class. We have no school supplies.”
Approximately 40 parents, teachers, and children were demonstrating outside of Benjamin Franklin High School this morning.
Dawn Hawkins, a parent leader with Action United, said she was concerned about safety, class sizes and building maintenance as her son starts high school at Strawberry Mansion High School today.
“What, are they going to have children cleaning the schools? The teachers?” she said.
Her son “didn’t really want to go to school today,” because he didn’t know what conditions would be like, Hawkins said.
Over 1,000 teachers and school staff face layoffs if a $2 cigarette tax isn’t approved by the state legislature this month.
The Philly Declaration 
[…] Philly students were back in class this Monday, and even the most generous observer of the Philadelphia school system would allow that there exist many “curriculum deficiencies” as an apparent result of the School District’s insolvency. Complaints filed with the PED include “alarming levels of overcrowding such that teachers can no longer walk between desks to interact with individual students; increasingly limited curricular offerings; a distressing lack of counselors; and squalid and insufficient toilet facilities.” […]
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