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Meagan Ehlenz
https://geoplan.asu.edu/people/meagan-ehlenz
Early Friday morning, January 18, 2013, adults
began forming a line outside the Penn Alexander School (PAS) in Philadelphia’s University City
neighborhood. By nightfall, more than seventy people had literally set up camp
with tents and sleeping bags extending down the block to guard against the
twenty-nine degree (F) chill. While this scene may be familiar to concertgoers
or video gamers the night before a big release, the inhabitants of this
encampment were different. They were all parents of 4 year olds with a single
goal: to enroll their children in kindergarten when class registration opened
on January 22nd, four days later.
When
PAS opened its doors in 2001, few anticipated the
implications of its first-come, first-serve enrollment policy. The Penn-sponsored public school had been
conceived in 1998 at a time when West Philadelphia was plagued by crime, families were fleeing
the neighborhood, and the public school system was in disarray. In response and
conjunction with neighborhood associations, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) had fostered a relationship with the
Philadelphia School District to establish a neighborhood
elementary school. The university donated the land for the K-8 facility and invested
substantial resources into its construction and operations. These investments
were a key component of Penn’s broader neighborhood revitalization
strategy, the West Philadelphia Initiatives (WPI), which aimed to stabilize neighborhood
conditions, improve property values, and attract and retain residents.
