Expect a preliminary list of Philly school closings next fall. But some of those buildings might get new life as community hubs.

Which city public schools will be recommended for closure? Which communities might get new buildings, or relocate into other school buildings with lots of extra room?

Philadelphia School District officials said they will complete a preliminary plan next October, then hold public hearings and come up with a final plan in December 2025. There will be updates in January, May, and August, as well.

“This is an aggressive timeline,” said Oz Hill, interim deputy superintendent for facilities, who said similar processes in Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis happened in 18 to 24 months. “The thing that we’re doing that they did not do well is the data, as well as the community engagement.”

» READ MORE: Philly is starting on a process that will likely lead to school closures, new buildings. Here’s what you should know.

That timeline — previously unclear — was disclosed at the first public listening session on a facilities-planning process that promises to dramatically alter the nation’s eighth-largest school system, which has 64,000 empty seats in district-run schools and 6,000 unused seats in charters run as neighborhood schools in district buildings.

As the Philadelphia School District formally kicked off its community listening sessions Monday night at a health facility in Northeast Philadelphia, Hill said he understood the city still bore scars from 2012 and 2013, when the district closed 30 schools to save money.

That process was deeply flawed, Hill said.

“While we saved $24 million annually, the performance of the students that were displaced into another school as well as those students that received those displaced students — their performance suffered,” Hill said. “That turmoil, that instability associated with that move and the manner in which we undertook that process, it did not produce the academic performance enhancement and achievement that we wanted.”

In addition to school closings, new buildings and colocations are also possible, Hill said, but he promised that district officials have no preconceived notions of which schools might be targeted. The district has an estimated $8 billion in unmet facilities needs; the average age of its 216 schools is 73 years old.

“This is not a political decision that we’re undertaking,” Hill said. “This is a data-driven process.”

If schools do close, Hill suggested the district’s first choice is to “repurpose those buildings for utilization that will benefit the community” — health clinics, food co-ops, or even housing for teachers — rather than “selling them for mere pennies on the dollar.”

Germantown High, for instance, was closed by the old School Reform Commission in 2012. The huge, once-grand structure languished for nearly 10 years before being sold to a developer.

“It’s about improving student achievement and also about improving our community through the use of facilities,” said Hill.

On the academic side, the cost of having a number of small schools, or schools with hundreds of empty seats, is an inequitable distribution of prekindergarten programs, elementary school playgrounds, and high-level courses.

Consider the hypothetical of one school that has enough students to offer Advanced Placement courses and another that has staffing shortages and is under-enrolled. The second school can’t offer AP courses.

“By figuring out how to be more efficient in our utilization, the objective will be to make sure that every student has access to that teacher with advanced courses,” Hill said.

Officials stressed the importance of community engagement and parent, student, and staff feedback, but just five members of the public showed up to Monday’s pre-Election Day session — three parents and two students.

The district has scheduled a few dozen more listening and learning sessions, some in-person and some virtual. Hill also asked people to raise their hands to join advisory groups that will meet between January and May to help study district conditions and offer feedback that will shape the plan.

Applications for those advisory groups will open Nov. 13.

Melanie Silva will be paying close attention to the process. Her daughter attends Rhawnhurst Elementary, a school that recently won a prestigious National Blue Ribbon from the U.S. Department of Education.

But Silva attended the meeting because she’s worried about conditions in the Rhawnhurst building, which was promised a major upgrade that now seems stalled, and even school staff have no information about what’s happening, she said.

In the meantime, the school had to evacuate multiple times last year because of concerns about a gas leak, she said.

And while some schools in the district have hundreds of empty seats, Rhawnhurst, like many schools in the Northeast, is bursting at the seams, with one classroom in a trailer and more students in an annex that was supposed to be replaced. Each of its three second-grade classes has 39 children, with a fourth teacher floating among all three because there’s no space for an extra classroom.

“Thirty-nine is just absurd,” said Silva, who added that students in the school’s English Language Learner program must sit on the hallway floor because there’s no place else to put them. “Occupancy is definitely an issue.”

Silva also asked district staff to consider her own experience as a district student; she graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts in 2002, shortly after it relocated to its current building, a grand structure on South Broad Street. Learning in a building with state-of-the-art facilities was magical, she said.

“We didn’t want to leave that place, and that building had a lot to do with it,” Silva said — a far cry from “what my daughter is in at Rhawnhurst.”

Horace Clouden, a former district building engineer and longtime community activist, said the district needed to address “education deserts” in West Philadelphia and a general failure of the school system to educate Black children well. Clouden believes the district ought to bring back junior high schools.

“It’s not working in at least 80% of these K-8s,” Clouden said.

Lisa Haver, a retired district teacher and a founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, vividly remembers listening to students, parents, and community members weep as the district closed their schools a decade ago.

“When you say that this is not political, I have to take issue with that,” Haver said. “This is definitely a political process.”