{Reproduced from WHYY}

• By

• Avi Wolfman-Arent

• November 17, 2020

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The University of Pennsylvania has pledged to donate $100 million over the next 10 years to the School District of Philadelphia, the university and local officials announced Tuesday.

The money will be used to improve building conditions and remediate hazards such as asbestos.

The university and the school district called the donation the “largest contribution to the School District in its history.”

“Nothing is more important than the health and welfare of our children, and few things are more crucial to a community than the safety and quality of its public schools,” said Penn President Amy Gutmann in the release. “When Philadelphia’s schools and school children succeed, all Philadelphia succeeds.”

Penn has been under growing pressure from faculty, students, and others to provide more financial support to Philadelphia’s public school system, which has been under financial distress for years.

Because of its nonprofit status, Penn does not pay property taxes on its considerable West Philadelphia landholdings.

Community members have pushed the university to make payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs), which other Ivy League institutions such as Harvard and Yale already do.

Penn’s donation comes in addition to its work with some of the neighborhood public schools bordering its University City campus. Most notably, Penn makes annual, per-student payments to support Penn Alexander, a K-8 school.

The school district’s facilities crisis has been well-documented.

The district estimates it has roughly $4.5 billion in unmet maintenance needs, an estimate borne from its own attempts to draw attention to the plight of some of its facilities. Scrutiny of the district’s infrastructure woes grew after an investigative series from The Philadelphia Inquirer focused on asbestos and lead exposure in the city’s public schools.

Shortly thereafter, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers began a campaign focused on environmental conditions, headlined by the news that a longtime teacher had a type of cancer caused by asbestos exposure.

After those revelations, the school district temporarily closed and remediated several schools where inspections revealed damaged asbestos. Since 2018, the district says it’s stabilized lead paint in 54 elementary schools and spent millions fixing asbestos-related problems.

“All Philadelphia students deserve high quality and safe learning environments, but we know that achieving this system-wide in our aging school buildings requires significant resources,” said Mayor Jim Kenney in a statement. “I commend the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Amy Gutmann for this historic gift. It will go a long way in accelerating the District’s aggressive environmental remediation work.”

For some university critics, the mere mention of Penn’s pledge as a “gift” or “donation” will rankle. Those critics believe Penn owes the city’s school system some sort of regular, voluntary payment.

“The fact that Penn is making this first step really emboldens us to continue mobilizing to see that it pays what it truly owes, down the road, on an ongoing basis,” said Amy Offner, a Penn history professor and organizer with the group with Penn for PILOTs.

Offner’s group has called on the university to pay $40 million annually to the school district, a number that they say represents 40% of Penn’s exempted property tax obligation.

Penn did pay about $2 million annually to the school district in the late 1990s, but later dropped the initiative. Penn regularly notes that it’s the city’s largest private employer and contributes other forms of revenue — such as via the city wage tax — as a result.

Penn’s latest pledge is worth $10 million per year over the next 10 years, but the announcement does not mention financial commitments beyond the coming decade.

“We are thrilled to have this very generous contribution from the University of Pennsylvania,” said Superintendent Dr. William Hite. “It will be a great support as we move forward to address the immediate environmental conditions in all of our schools. This will allow us to shift our focus to creating 21st century learning environments for all students. ”

This is a developing story and will be updated.