Update 4/16/25: This story has been updated with the number of backlogged cases and people currently assigned to reassignment rooms.
The School District of Philadelphia is overhauling its process of sending teachers to reassignment rooms during misconduct investigations, Superintendent Tony Watlington said Tuesday. The changes come a few months after a City Council member pushed for a hearing to look into complaints about the holding facility's conditions and the amount of time and money that's wasted by having educators sequestered there for months.
Teachers facing allegations of wrongdoing are sent to empty, windowless classrooms, also known as rubber rooms, in the district's building on Broad Street as they await a ruling on their case. They are fully paid, as are their substitutes, but aren't given anything to do during the ongoing probe.
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"In a school, when there is a significant disruption relative to student discipline, sometimes you have to neutralize conflict until you can get your arms around it, investigate it," Watlington said.
Following an investigation, teachers will either return to their classrooms, be transferred or recommended for termination, although some choose to resign. Due to a backlog of cases, some teachers were in the rooms for over a year. Watlington said he plans to double down on monitoring and tracking active cases to avoid anyone slipping through the cracks.
Backlogged investigations — which are cases that take longer than the allotted 60 or 90 days to complete, depending on the allegations — dropped 87% from 46 to six between July 2024 and January 2025, Watlington said. In total, 75 people are currently in a reassignment room.
Watlington said the reduction is largely due to a "deep dive" by human resources. Since 2022, the district has improved the intake process so teachers know why they're in the room and how long they might be there, set up a tracker for updates on the status of cases, established a weekly monitoring process to make sure investigations are taking place within that two to three month time period, conducted regular inspections of the rooms and improved communications with the teachers' supervisors.
Watlington also said the district intends to enforce the expectation that staff complete the investigations in a timely manner.
In January, Councilmember Isaiah Thomas (D-At Large) called for a hearing to look into rubber rooms after complaints about communication, processing issues and even bedbugs inside the facility. He said the most alarming grievance from teachers was that many didn't understand why they were in the rooms or the length of time they'd be there.
However, Thomas, who co-hosted Tuesday's news conference, said he is no longer planning to push forward with a hearing. In response to complaints about the waste of time and money for putting educators in these rooms, Thomas called it a "casualty of war" of conducting an investigation.
"No one wants to pay someone $90,000 to come to work every day and look at walls and draw pictures," Thomas said. "That's not what we want to do, but I'm not quite sure what the alternative is. … This is the unfortunate consequence to a system we're trying to rectify."
The district has about 19,000 total employees, including teachers, but only five people to review investigations. There is an open position for a deputy chief of investigations, Watlington said, but he doesn't plan to do any additional hiring until the district can complete a further analysis.