Concerned parents and neighbors raise funds for a new auditorium and awareness of mayoral candidates’ positions.

Over the course of four days and nights, Neighbors Invested in Childs Elementary (NICE) was very busy. From a Progressive Dinner Party with three stops throughout Newbold on Saturday to Tuesday evening’s Educational Mayoral Debate at G.W. Childs School, 1599 Wharton St., 2013 South Philly Review Difference Maker Megan Rosenbach has been busy.

The resident of the 1500 block of South 15th Street hosted the entrée course of the Dinner Crawl at her home on Saturday and introduced WHYY/Newsworks senior education writer as the debate moderator on Tuesday in the Childs auditorium. In circular fashion, NICE is in fact currently raising money to improve the auditorium and bring it up to 2015 standards of technology, and it’s where five mayoral candidates spoke on issues facing Philadelphia’s struggling schools.

NICE recently raised funds with volunteer power to create and establish a much-needed library at the K-8 building. Now they’re turning their eye on a slightly larger project – the auditorium.

“Our motive is to always be listening and listening to what their needs are,” Rosenbach told her packed living room, and celebrated Kim Smith, a resident on the 1200 block of South 15th Street, an alumnus of Childs who’s sent her two children through the school.

Smith also directs assemblies and arts performances with directing and arts education experience.

“She runs basically any performance. She is the center of all the school performances that happen there and we want to make sure that the students have space,” Rosenbach said.

The $11,000 project is reportedly $3,000 under way, half of which came from 2nd District City Council candidate Ori Feibush.

“I found out the Councilman’s office is going to be helping us with capital, too,” Rosenbach reported.

“We don’t have any technology,” Smith said, noting that the electric in the room doesn’t reach the stage and their current projector is falling apart and barely mobile.

She explained they have an outside agency that visits the school to teach strings, drums, horns, saxophone and flutes, “all of that,” she said. But they get music or art once a week for 45 minutes and, come fall of the ’15-’16 school year, they’ll be choosing one over the other.

Smith is running a “Youth Job Ready Workshop” for ages 14 to 22 with 2nd District City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson Saturday at the Dixon House, 1920 S. 20th St.

Jonathan Fineman, a fifth grade teacher from the 1500 block of South 15th Street, says the Childs principal Eileen Coutts is doing great things, including bringing 250 hours of volunteer services care of Comcast and initiating a community-inclusive garden project. Noting NICE’s library success, Fineman said “We can see the fruit of this already and now we have a wonderful library for the kids to use – it’s exceptional and I’m happy to be a part of it.”

It’s these friends groups that are keeping neighborhood schools alive and thriving despite plummeting public school funding, budget crises and a tenuous relationship with the School Reform Commission.

Dare Henry-Moss, a resident of the 1500 block of South Juniper Street and member of the Friends of Jackson School group, says she and her husband hope to send their 1-year-old son Simon to Andrew Jackson School, 1213 S. 12th St. But that’s not her only reason to get involved.

“I’m definitely hoping to send him to Jackson school but even more than that I’m hoping to give support to all the neighborhood schools and watch them be successful,” she said. “I really believe the heart of the community is the neighborhood school and the health of the school is the health of the community.”

It was these community organizations supporting schools that sponsored the mayoral debate on Tuesday night: NICE, Friends of Jackson, South Philly Schools Coalition and Ciudadanos públicos para niños y jóvenes to name a few. PCCY helped to prepare questions for the debate, which ranged from charter schools, the SRC, funding formulas, what a mayor can do for schools in Harrisburg and standardized testing. Jim Kenney, the 23-year City Council vet and longtime South Philadelphian, along with Doug Oliver, Mayor Nutter’s former press secretary, and state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams seemed most even, knowledgeable and invested in communicating their goals. Milton Street and Nelson Diaz met with little favor, and Lynne Abraham did not attend.

All the candidates unanimously rejected Mayor Michael A. Nutter’s proposal to raise property taxes by nine percent and, with the exception of Diaz, said they’d help the District’s request to bridge the funding gap.

Perhaps of most interest is the question of charters, and the candidates are mostly mixed. Oliver said “I can see there are a lot of parents that like choice,” but said pitting charter versus district schools is not the answer and that charters should “only open in neighborhoods that don’t have a quality education choice.”

“If we could fix charter reimbursement, I would have less of a problem with charters,” Kenney added, noting his involvement in Independence Charter. “I am not an enemy of charter schools, I am a fan of public schools.”

As for the SRC, Diaz says it “has become another patronage mill and the voucher system is a profit-making system.” Oliver said it should work like the FDIC or the TSA, saying the SRC should function like a regulator.

“I don’t have to worry about which bank I put my money in, and I don’t have to kick the tires before I get on a plane,” he explained.

When talk of securing funding from the state legislature arose, Street gave one of the most provocative quotes of the night.

“There are 75,000 blacks and 25,000 Hispanics [in the District]. Go to Harrisburg, and ask white legislators to give their white taxpayer dollars to educate some black people,” he said. Then he added “wake up and smell the veggie burgers.” Diaz also offered one of the most outrageous suggestions of the night – “open bars for millennials 24 hours” to collect more of their tax potential.

Standardized testing provided some derision, as well. With a newly introduced set of Keystone exams necessary to pass for graduation, the candidates are split on the topic. Kenney called it a “testing-industrial complex. It is a business. Teachers spend more time teaching to the test than worrying about teaching to the students.” Oliver called testing “antiquated at best and useless.” Diaz and Williams seemed to support it, suggesting they got to where they are today perhaps because of their performances on them.

Williams trumped a statistic of “a quarter billion dollars” he’s secured in his tenure for the District since ’10 at least a half-dozen times, saying “I perform it. It was my legislation. It’s mine so I take credit for it.” And Street wants to “stop the violence” so badly that he repeated the mantra at least a dozen times.

In closing statements, Kenney said “teachers and principals are not the problem” and the “poverty to prison pipeline is something that we want to see stop.” Oliver concluded, “I want to give you my word and my promise that I will fall down on my face to make sure that our kids are educated and bridge the gap between this very divided city that we have right now.”