It was mostly about education for Councilwoman Cindy Bass at a Mt. Airy-Nippon-Bryan-Cresheim Town Watch meeting at coordinator Steve Stroiman's house Thursday night.

Bass, who just introduced a bill that's intended to encourage the city to look at alternative ways to support the school district, spoke to a room of about 20 people at the meeting. She was invited by Stroiman, who was there to hear about Bass' ideas for the district, both large and small.

The new councilwoman—she's now been on the job for about a month—said her office is often the first to open and last to close in City Hall.

"This district needs a lot of work," she said. "It's needed a lot of work for quite some time."

She talked about her plan to consider the 8th District schools a mini school district of sorts.

Bass also had some tough words for Gov. Tom Corbett, saying he's part of the reason schools are underfunded right now.

"The biggest problem we have is this governor," she said. "I think he just doesn't care about Philadelphia."

She received murmurs of assent from around the room. Stroiman, for his part, said that people generally move out of his neighborhood for one reason only—because of the poor performance of the schools nearby.

Residents brought up issues that had to do with parking nearby (they'd like more of it) and landscaping at Allen Lane Station (they don't think it's being done well by SEPTA and its contractors).

Bass said she would follow up on both of those issues. She also talked about crime throughout the district.

Residents said early on in the meeting that packages were now being stolen from off of people's front porches.

The councilwoman acknowledged that there were crime problems in the town watch area (which encompasses several blocks near Allen Lane Station). She called them, for the most part, "nuisance crimes."

In other parts of the district, she said, the crime gets worse. "The issues at that end of the district become more survival issues," she said.

Bass said she has met with Commerce Department officials to try and come up with a plan to benefit Germantown's commercial corridor.

"We could be even better, or we could just be a place that nobody wants to go to. We could be a Camden," Bass said, referring to the hard-on-its-luck New Jersey city. "I don't want to see that happen."