Project Brief
My current work at Penn Praxis includes creating a counter-narrative to the opacity of the School District of Philadelphia’s (SDP) facilities planning process. The SDP uses school statistics such as enrollment to determine school closure. The effect of these metric-driven decision-making processes is racially and socio-economically defined school closures. To predict which schools might be most vulnerable to closure, we utilize the SDP’s metrics, neighborhood demographic data, data from community stakeholder meetings, and data from sensors at network schools (to determine AQI, pollutants, and temperature) to support activists in mobilizing communities to protect their neighborhood schools. We create a prioritized action plan, which includes findings from geostatistical models based on the vulnerability assessment, to help policymakers understand the school conditions. We also have the opportunity to engage directly with the students through a Youth and Parent Summit organized by numerous West Philadelphia-based organizations connected to PennPraxis.
With the school vulnerability map, local governments are able to identify schools at risk preemptively and plan for the placement of students afterward and the reuse of school buildings.
I furthered my analysis through a studio project titled “School Community Planning for Sayre High School, Philadelphia.”
Through student engagement and data analysis, my team and I developed a Resource Dashboard for members of the Sayre Community. The dashboard contains interactive resources for students and teachers to find professional development tools and funding sources.
