The William Penn Foundation is donating $1.5 million to help restructure the Philadelphia School District, officials announced today. 

Inquirer schools reporter Kristen Graham takes your questions and comments on the Philadelphia school system. The chat starts at noon. On a mobile device? Click here to join the chat.

Lost in the shuffle of a six-hour Philadelphia School Reform Commission meeting Thursday night: resolution A-13, a $1.4 million, one-month contract with to Boston Consulting Group, Inc.

That’s right — $1.4 million. And the Philadelphia School District still has a June deadline for trimming $38.8 million more from a budget that’s already lost thousands of employees and withstood deep cuts to individual schools’ funds.

But SRC Chairman Pedro Ramos said he did not expect the money to come from district coffers. The SRC has had conversations with philanthropists and nonprofits and the full funding should come from them, Ramos said.

And — in what seems to be a nod to the failed $905,000 donor-financed buyout of Arlene Ackerman, which fell apart over public furor over anonymous donations — the names and contribution amounts of the donors will be made public, Ramos said.

The contract is for “professional managerial and financial consulting services and expenses” in three areas — advising Chief Academic Officer Penny Nixon on a decentralized academic program model; examining the district’s current central office setup on the business side and how that should be revamped for the new decentralized model; and identifying and implementing new gap-closing measures for both this fiscal year and next.

Why the need for high-paid consultants? And why act now, before the nonprofit/philanhropic funding is finalized?

“Our financial battle here is a battle literally being fought in days,” Ramos said. “Because [Chief Recovery Officer Thomas] Knudsen’s ready to move with a decision today, we didn’t want to delay that.”

Plus, Ramos and Knudsen said, this is a job that requires outside expertise - it's simply beyond the district's internal capacity.

The district put out a request for qualifications before choosing Boston; Knudsen said four of nine respondents qualified.  Boston, he said, has experience with this kind of work.

On its website, the company bills itself as “the world’s leading advisor on business strategy” and says that “by taking a holistic, analytical approach to our clients’ most challenging issues, we are able to develop solutions that deliver lasting value.”

Knudsen said that this work would take the “muscles of this system” and make them work better. 

The district is a large and in some ways antiquated bureaucracy, officials said.  Bus routes, for instance, are still mapped out with grease pencil, Knudsen said.

And then there’s the question of how schools will operate going forward.  Principals will have much more autonomy — this means the end of centrally-mandated, nearly universally-reviled scripted curricula, for instance — and central office will be restructured to try to support that better.

The few audience members who remained when the discussion was going on, at about 11 p.m., seemed startled — wait, the decision to decentralize the district is already done?  It’s being executed?

Commissioner Lorene Cary said the decision was effectively made a long time ago, by others, that this SRC is just acknowledging the district’s reality — it has a system of diverse schools and types of schools, and must manage them better.  Status quo won't work any more, for a lot of reasons, they said.

All this to say: stay tuned. It’s going to be a very busy, transformative race to the end of the school year. 

What do you think about the consulting contract?  About the looming decentralization?

Facing a $38.8 million budget shortfall, with a deadline to make a decision on closing schools looming, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission meets at 5:30 p.m.

On a mobile phone? Click here to follow along.

More news from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia:

The effort to save Monsignor Bonner-Archbishop Prendergast High School just got a serious shot in the arm - officials reached their goal of raising $5 million to save the school. It is one of four high schools the Archdiocese of Philadelphia has ordered to close in June, but officials are appealing the decision.

The archdiocese will rule on all school closing appeals on Friday.

Rev. James Olson confirmed the news Tuesday, just after he told the students at the Drexel Hill school.

The school already has $1.4 million in the bank - money raised from parents, students, alumni and community members, Olson said.  Last week, an anonymous donor said that if the school raised $2.5 million, the donor would kick in another $2.5 million.

Yesterday, Olson and principal William Brannick met with another donor group who pledged to make up the difference between the $1.4 million the school already has and the $2.5 million they need to reach to get the match.

When Olson and Brannick left the meeting, they were stunned.

"This is not what we do - talk to people about millions of dollars," Olson said today.  "We said to each other, 'Did that just happen?'"

Later, Olson called one of the donors to make sure he had heard right.  He had.

"This is the real deal," he said.  "We have $5 million."

Olson said he's hopeful the fundraising will help sway the committee deciding appeals.  He's also hoping that a newly-created partnership with Chestnut Hill College will help the school's chances of staying open.

Chestnut Hill will start offering Bonner-Prendie students college courses on location at the high school in the fall.  The courses will be offered at a deep discount, Olson said, and open to juniors and seniors who can accumulate as many as 18 college credits before graduating from high school.

The college will also offer courses to the public at the high school, Olson said.

Tonight, the School Reform Commission will meet in a new "strategy, policy and priority" session to talk about Post-Secondary Success.  Commissioner Wendell Pritchett chairs this committee.

The meeting includes presentations on curriculum, college readiness and career and technical education.  Find those presentations here. The meeting will be livestreamed here.

I'll be live Tweeting the meeting - follow along here, or on Twitter @newskag. On a mobile phone? Click here to join the live tweet.

Join Inquirer schools reporter Kristen Graham for a live chat today starting at noon. On a mobile device? Post your questions and comments NOW!. Click here to join the chat.

The Philadelphia School District has said that it will investigate the cheating allegations reported to The Inquirer by Cayuga Elementary School staffers and parents.

The state Department of Education and Inspector General's Office are also investigating, but district officials said that in light of the new allegations, they would launch their own investigation.

Penny Nixon, the district's chief academic officer, stressed that the district takes the allegations "very, very seriously."

Complaints of alleged cheating at Cayuga have been made in the past and were the subject of district investigations, but could not be corroborated, officials said.

Cayuga is one of 13 Philadelphia district schools flagged for suspicious results in its 2009 state exams.  The district has said it will wait for the state to complete their investigation before it looks into the matter further or takes action; the Cayuga investigation will be launched separately because of the teachers' allegations made in The Inquirer, officials said.