Deal will keep 25 Northeast schools open after-hours

City and school district officials have  reached an agreement to keep gyms and theaters in public schools open on afternoons and weekends. Cost-cutting plans announced amid the district’s $61 million shortfall included closing the facilities at the end of the school day.

Forty-eight schools will keep their extra-curricular doors open after hours through Saturday, March 17, according to Thursday’s announcement from the city. Twenty-five of those schools are in the Northeast:

  • Baldi
  • Watson Comly
  • Stephen Decatur
  • Hamilton Disston
  • Henry Edmunds
  • Louis H. Farrell
  • Fels
  • Aloysius Fitzpatrick
  • Fox Chase
  • Anne Frank
  • Frankford
  • John Hancock
  • Thomas Holme
  • General J. Harry La Brum
  • Abraham Lincoln
  • William Loesche
  • Thurgood Marshall
  • Mayfair
  • Austin Meehan
  • Northeast
  • Robert B. Pollock
  • Rhawnhurst
  • Solis-Cohen
  • James Sullivan
  • George Washington

Parks & Recreation programs administered through city schools will be consolidated into those 48, with the city paying $175,000 for the deal to help the financially struggling district.

“We really still have easily another $40 million to cut before the end of June,” School Reform Commission Chair Pedro Ramos said in a press conference. “So the net effect of this compromise takes us part of the way there.”

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