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.”