August 5: Germantown-King football and beyond | Pennsport’s missing elementary schools | Mother Bethel AME cemetery | Energy benchmarking ahead | PGW RFQ released

Welcome to the working week, Streeters. August is off to a beautiful start and the next few days should continue that trend, so be sure to make time to enjoy it. Also: don’t forget that work in Center City’s SEPTA trolley tunnel began Friday, which means trolley service stops at 40th and Market for the route 11, 13, 34, and 36 trolleys. Full service is scheduled to resume August 12 at 12:01am.

The New York Times had a deep profile of the forced merger of Germantown High School and Martin Luther King High School’s rival football teams amid uncertainty that there would even be football this fall given the deep budget and staff cuts. The piece does call Philly “provincial,” but it’s also an intensely human portrait of an uneasy merger, the role of coaches like Germantown High’s Mike Hawkins and playing sports in the lives of kids in Germantown, college hopes against tough odds, and how the ripple-effects of Philadelphia’s public school crisis is shaping the lives of so many.

How will Pennsport, a neighborhood that now has no neighborhood elementary school options, continue to draw young families? NewsWorks looks at what it means to be a neighborhood without an elementary school.

How should the Mother Bethel AME cemetery, for decades buried beneath the Weccacoe playground in Queen Village be memorialized? The Daily News reports that Mother Bethel parishioners and interested members of the public saw artifacts unearthed during an archaeological excavation and learned about the cemetery that could hold the remains of 1500 people. The playground is supposed to be renovated, but it is unclear how to honor the site’s past as a significant African and African-American burial ground.

Starting in October big buildings in Philly will need to disclose their water and energy usage, pursuant to the city’s energy benchmarking law. NewsWorks explains what the Building Energy Benchmarking Law will mean for the city’s roughly 2,000 buildings that are more than 50,000 square feet.

And speaking of energy, the Business Journal reports that the City took another step toward privatizing the Philadelphia Gas Works issuing a Request for Qualifications on Friday. The RFQ responses will be used thin the field of potential PGW buyers to those with enough operational expertise and financial capacity to run the utility.

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