Mayor Nutter “Drops the Mic” on Schools; Teachers Ready to Compromise


We told you that Mayor Nutter really doesn’t like that ad accusing him of shirking his duty on funding city schools. On Tuesday night, he took his case to Twitter—but, perhaps, only compounded his problems by doing so.

Drop the mic? Apparently the mayor is Eminem, and just won his first rap battle on 8 Mile Road.

Now: There’s nothing wrong with the mayor defending his record on school funding. What’s weird is for him to put the emphatic hashtag that indicates he’s won a final victory on the matter … while the school funding debate is still raging all around him. To be fair, Mayor Nutter kept tweeting about the need for everybody to come together for our schools, etc. etc., but the #dropthemic move was one that stopped a lot of people short, and maybe even worked against his aim. It was tone-deaf. Even when he’s right, the mayor can sometimes do it wrong.

Ultimately, he backtracked a little bit … picking the mic up off the floor, if you will:

At least he spawned this hilarious Reddit thread:

While we’re here, why don’t we get the rest of our school news out of the way for the day, huh?

KYW reports that the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers is ready to accept a pay freeze and start paying into teachers’ health care plans in order to get a contract for the school year.

Concerned that schools will open September 9th without adequate staffing, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan is ready to budge at the bargaining table.

“I am prepared to make a recommendation to our members at our meeting on Monday evening that in order to restore the services to the schoolsfor the children, that we will propose that we accept a pay freeze,” Jordan says the union will also offer to begin making contributions to their health care premiums — something the union has never done.

Will that be enough to get Gov. Tom Corbett to release some state money to the district? We’ll see.

• Finally, the Daily News tracks down the mother, Kia Hinton, who stars in the aforementioned ad Mayor Nutter hates so much.

“I’m just a concerned parent, and I want to make sure my kids have a quality education like I received,” Hinton, a 36-year-old mother of four, told the Daily News yesterday inside her two-story Southwest Philly rowhouse. Three of her children attend public schools. Her eldest son, 17, is at Abraxas Academy, a detention program. “Schools are not being fully funded,” she said. “I don’t see the resources there for them to excel.”

Hinton, who said that she was not paid for appearing in the ads and that she did not vote for Nutter in either mayoral election, saw the ads as an opportunity to voice how she feels. “We have a lot of power when it comes to our children’s education and their schools,” she said. “I want to get that message out to folks.”