Yo, Philly in the News

• The latest on Philly school district problems: unless it receives lots more funding from city and state (which is just as unlikely as it sounds), it'll need to make $67 million in program cuts next year. Despite the grim outlook, the district says it will have a preliminary plan for a balanced budget by Wednesday. The charter school movement could apparently take the brunt of the cuts.
• Meanwhile, in other school news, there was another violent incident on Wednesday morning, this time at West Philadelphia High, in which a nonteaching assistant was sucker-punched in the hallway by a student. The student was at large Wednesday night, but the principal was removed at the end of the day; it was unclear whether him leaving was connected to the incident.
• Those campaign contribution limits are in danger of being wiped out again, this time by a Commonwealth Court. The argument is that, according to state law, the city didn't have the right to enact campaign finance limits.
• It wouldn't be a news post without an update on the mayoral race! We're happy to see that the Inquirer is profiling the two other, lesser known mayoral candidates, and the Daily News has a profile of one of them in particular: religious candidate Jesus White.
• Philadelphia is producing godless money! The US mint in Philly started producing George Washington dollar coins last month - the first in a series of presidential dollar coins - but on an unknown number of the coins (possibly thousands!) they mistakenly left off the edge text ("In God We Trust... E Pluribus Unum... P 2007"). The mistake makes the dollars more valuable to collectors. Interestingly enough, this is the first time the mint has struck words on the edge of coins since the '30s, and they used new technology to do it - technology which is obviously not perfected yet.
• SEPTA announced their worst case scenario plan Wednesday. If they don't receive additional state aid, they'll "raise fares by an average of 31 percent, cut service by 20 percent, and lay off 300 to 400 employees. SEPTA estimates that it would lose 20 percent of its riders, about 40 million passengers a year." Ouch.

Image Credit: Flickr user espanol