By Freda Anderson
Like most students and workers drowning in the district debt crisis, I didn’t even realize a school district could be in debt until well after years of wading through its disastrous effects. The very air we breathe and water we drink as educators and students in School District of Philadelphia (SDP) buildings is polluted with indebtedness.
When I finally learned the role debt plays in sucking away nearly 10 percent of the precious little funding we have to work with, I had been in the SDP for more than 14 years, first as a student and then as a teacher. I was already teaching about school funding in my 10th- and 11th-grade civics class. My students and I were living and learning in starved conditions every day, and it was clear that part of my job needed to be helping kids fight back against the poverty-level budget of the SDP.
Continue reading at Rethinking Schools, where you can also find a district debt lesson, a choose your own debt adventure game, and Pennsylvania school funding lesson plans.
Freda Anderson is a loving partner and parent who has been teaching history and activism at public high schools for the last seven years. He/she is also a Zinn Education Project 2024–2026 Prentiss Charney Fellow.
This lesson and accompanying article is in the Summer 2023 issue of Rethinking Schools. Subscribe to the Rethinking Schools magazine today.
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