Consultants with Pittsburgh Public Schools say they “guarantee” future plans for the district will involve “more than just school closures.”
PPS is considering changes to address its declining enrollment and aging facilities. Joseph Trawick-Smith, a consultant with Education Resource Strategies hired by the district, said Thursday that several proposals will be presented to families and revised next month before consultants take their recommendations to the school board for a vote.
“It will not just be a list, for those of you who think that that might be what's coming. It will be sort of a modeled-out future version of what different neighborhoods’ feeder patterns could look like,” Trawick-Smith told roughly 50 attendees at Thursday’s virtual town hall.
The district held 10 town halls in June and July to gather input and answer questions about efforts to address the district’s financial woes, as well as continued disparities in student outcomes, through possibly seismic changes.
Angela King Smith, another consultant with Education Resource Strategies, said the district will soon have more information about August feedback sessions on several proposed “scenarios.”
“A scenario is basically showing for each part of the city, what could the future footprint or the future location, configuration and size of schools in PPS look like,” Trawick-Smith explained.
He said consultants may show residents maps of consolidated schools, revised feeder patterns and transition plans. Consultants are planning to share data on the number of students impacted, as well as the demographic composition of students impacted.
“Do we see that Black families are disproportionately impacted in ways that we know has been true in the past? And that's feedback for us that we need to keep iterating on these scenarios and thinking about other options,” he said.
Trawick-Smith said his firm is looking at how these changes could impact individual Pittsburgh neighborhoods, and how the district could work to minimize harm.
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When asked whether the proposed changes could include increased class sizes, consultants said that will depend on how the district chooses to reorganize its staff.
“There is that risk, of course, especially if PPS is saying we need to mitigate a deficit or close a budget gap,” Trawick-Smith said. “That could be on the table, but that's not inherent to increasing the size of schools.”
