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PENN CHARTER'S QUAKER ROOTS
William Penn Charter School has been in continuous operation since its founding in 1689, although it has changed names, locations, and curriculum during that time (the original name was the Public Grammar School), the Quaker roots have remained constant. What follows is a brief look at the school's founding and migration from Center City Philadelphia to East Falls in 1924 based on excerpts from the essay "Beginnings and Growth Through Two Centuries" by Walter R. Myers, and Edwin B. Bronner's introduction in the book …better than riches, A Tercentennial History of William Penn Charter School, 1689-1989.

When William Penn wrote to Philadelphians in 1689 urging Friends to organize a modest school on the bank of the Delaware, he could not have envisioned the institution we call the William Penn Charter School.

In response to Penn's suggestion, his fellow Quakers opened a school later that year under the leadership of George Keith, a Scottish scholar, and in 1698 the Overseers were granted a charter for the school by Lieutenant Governor William Markham. For three centuries the 'Overseers of ye publick School, founded by Charter in ye town & Country of Philadelphia' have operated a variety of schools, culminating in the William Penn Charter School in 1874.

What we know of Philadelphia today is not what William Penn found when he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682. The "city" was actually a thick forest of trees on the banks of the Delaware River, and poverty and lack of housing plagued the newcomers. "Because public charity was a basic rule of Quaker life, William Penn specified that poor children in Pennsylvania were to be educated for free."

Penn was interested in education in his first letters to the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania. "On November 11, 1683, he proposed that 'Care be taken about the Learning and Instruction of Youth, to wit: a school of arts and sciences.'" The first head of school was a friend of Penn's, George Keith, who Penn considered a "classical scholar, and Quaker theologian."

Penn Charter, while created by Penn, the provincial government of Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting did not stay "under the care" of a specific Meeting, but was run by a board of 15 overseers.

The school's first location was the South Side of High Street, now Market Street, west of Second Street. A small wooden building, it was for elementary-age boys and girls, although girls and boys were kept separate, and the curriculum for girls and boys differed slightly. The curriculum consisted of reading, writing, mathematics, and, for the older boy only, Latin. As early as 1697 the Overseers established a fund so that the children of the poor could attend.