Expect a tentative Philly school closure list next fall. But some buildings can find new life as community hubs.

Which public schools in the city are recommended for closure? Which ones could get new buildings, or move to other school buildings with lots of extra space?

Philadelphia School District officials said they will complete a preliminary plan by October of next year, then hold public hearings and come up with a final plan in 13 months, in December 2025. There will also be updates in January, May and August.

“This is an aggressive timeline,” said Oz Hill, interim deputy superintendent for facilities, who said similar processes in Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis took place in 18 to 24 months, not the year Philadelphia is promising. “What we’re doing that they didn’t do well is the data and community engagement.”

That timeline — previously unclear — was revealed during the first public listening session on a facilities planning process that promises to dramatically transform the nation’s eighth-largest school system, which has 64,000 empty seats in district schools and 6,000 unused seats in charters run by the neighborhood are managed. schools in district buildings.

When the Philadelphia School District formally began its community listening sessions Monday evening at a health care facility in Northeast PhiladelphiaHill said he understood the city still bore scars from 2012 and 2013, when the district closed 30 schools to save money.

That process was deeply flawed, Hill said.

“Although we saved $24 million annually, the performance of the students who were moved to another school, and of the students who received these displaced students, declined,” Hill said. “That turmoil, that instability that came with that move and the manner in which we undertook that process did not produce the academic performance improvement and achievement that we wanted.”

In addition to school closures, new buildings and co-locations are also possible, Hill said, but he promised that district officials have no preconceived ideas about which schools might be targeted as they enter the process. The district has an estimated $8 billion in unmet facility needs; the average age of the 216 schools is 73 years.

“This is not a political decision we are making,” Hill said. “This is a data-driven process.”

If the schools close, Hill suggested the district’s first choice is to “repurpose those buildings for uses that benefit the community” rather than “selling them for just pennies on the dollar.”

German city High, for example, was closed in 2012 by the old School Reform Commission. The massive, once grand building sat for nearly a decade before being sold to a developer.

“It’s about improving student achievement and also improving our community through the use of facilities,” Hill said.

On the academic side, the costs of having a number of small schools, or schools with hundreds of empty seats, are an uneven distribution of preschool programs, elementary school playgrounds, and high-level courses.

Consider the hypothetical situation where there is one school that has enough students to offer Advanced Placement courses, and another school that is short-staffed and under-enrolled. The second school cannot offer AP courses.

“By figuring out how to be more efficient with our usage, the goal will be to ensure that every student has access to that teacher with advanced courses,” Hill said.

Officials emphasized the importance of community involvement and feedback from parents, students and staff, but only five members of the public showed up for the pre-Election Day hearing: three parents and two students.

The district has made a plan several dozen more listening and learning sessionssome in person and some virtual. Hill also asked people to raise their hands to join advisory groups that will meet between January and May to help study conditions in the districts and provide feedback that will shape the plan.

Applications for these advisory groups will open on November 13.

Melanie Silva will monitor the process closely. Her daughter is present Rhawnhurst Elementary, a school that recently won a prestigious National Blue Ribbon from the U.S. Department of Education.

But Silva attended the meeting because she was concerned about conditions at the Rhawnhurst building, which had been promised a major upgrade to the building and which now appears to be stalling, although even school staff have no information about what is happening, Silva said.

Meanwhile, the school had to evacuate several times last year due to concerns about a gas leak, she said.

And while some schools in the district have hundreds of empty seats, Rhawnhurst, like many schools in the Northeast, is bursting at the seams, with one classroom in a trailer and even more students in an outbuilding that needed to be replaced. Each of the three second-year classes has 39 children, with a fourth teacher floating between all three because there is no room for an additional classroom.

“Thirty-nine is just absurd,” said Silva, who added that students in the school’s English Language Learner program have to sit on the hallway floor because there is no other place to put them. “The occupancy is definitely a problem.”

Silva also asked district staff to consider her own experiences as a district student; she graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts in 2002, shortly after it moved to its current building, a grand building on South Broad Street. Learning in a building with state-of-the-art facilities was magical, she said.

“We didn’t want to leave that place, and that building had a lot to do with it,” Silva said — very different from “what my daughter is in at Rhawnhurst.”

Horace Clouden, a former district construction engineer and longtime community activist, said the district needed to address the region’s “education deserts.” West Philadelphia and a general failure of the school system to provide black children with a good education. Clouden believes the district should bring back middle schools.

“It doesn’t work for at least 80% of these K-8s,” Clouden said.

Lisa Haver, a retired district teacher and founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, vividly remembers hearing students, parents and community members cry when the district closed their schools a decade ago.

“If you say this is not political, I have to take issue with that,” Haver said. “This is absolutely a political process.”