Mayor Nutter’s Door
Mayor Nutter didn’t come out the front door of his office in City Hall last night. I’m sure mayors have good reason to have alternate exit routes available, and it may be that he uses that other door regularly, rather than just yesterday. I’m not sure, since I’m not in the habit of sitting outside his office. However, I do know for sure that he didn’t come out the front door last night.If Mayor Nutter had come out the front door of his office last night, he would have encountered our group of public schools advocates, which included several parents, a retired teacher, a former principal, the head of the Philadelphia branch of the NAACP, and a 7th grade student at a school targeted for closure. We were sitting outside his office in order to underscore the message that thousands of Philadelphians have been trying to send to him and to the SRC over the last year: that mass closings of Philadelphia’s public schools undermine our children’s educational prospects, compromise kids’ safety, contribute to the drop-out crisis, uproot communities, and destroy jobs and neighborhoods—all for little to no savings.
Earlier in the day, members of the NAACP, Black Clergy, Action United, and Parents United for Public