You asked, we got answers: A Q&A with the people shaping PPS’ school closure plan

Big changes are looming over Pittsburgh Public Schools. As part of the district’s Facilities Utilization Plan, Boston-based consulting firm Education Resource Strategies presented various scenarios earlier this month that included changes to grade configurations, consolidations and school closures.

The consultants will present final recommendations on Sept. 16 after collecting community feedback, and the board will vote on the recommendations later next month.

PublicSource and WESA released a survey last month asking community members to submit questions they want to ask Pittsburgh Public Schools [PPS] and consultants. We asked Education Resource Strategies [ERS] consultants Angela King Smith and Joseph Trawick-Smith to answer some of those questions.

Their answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

As one teacher put it, the district is doing this because resources are spread thin, buildings are old and [the district] can't fix them all, and money is tight. So what is the monetary impact of this plan?

Trawick-Smith: The short answer is that we don't know yet. Part of what we're going to be sharing with the board in September will include some estimates of financial impact across a few different options that are on the table. In some cases, it may change the staffing mix. In some cases, positions may get displaced but then reinvested into schools. So it all depends on some of the budget decisions that PPS will be making this year. We're working with the facilities team to think about the cost of renovations year over year, which is both a function of what we're trying to do with renovations, but also the district's fiscal capacity in any given year.

There are many renovations mentioned in the proposal. Can you talk about how those renovations were decided and the timeline in which they could occur? 

Trawick-Smith: There's still a lot to figure out about the renovations. The renovations that we emphasized in our board presentation last Tuesday were focused on places where we thought the expansion of school buildings was necessary to be able to increase the size of schools. And then we laid out some priorities around [air conditioning] in every school, which is just something that we've heard over and over again from community members, staff members, given that schools have to close down when the temperatures get too high. That was a baseline recommendation for all schools that we don't really have any plan on changing.

King Smith: I think a critical part of this process was really trying to engage the community in a vision for what they want to see in their schools moving forward. I think that the plan does a pretty good job of making those linkages in terms of some of those amenities, spaces that they want to see, safety concerns that they want to address.

Why revert back to a traditional school model? Many parents we’ve talked to like the communities and continuity the K-8 model has created  — what evidence do you have that it’s not ideal for students?

Trawick-Smith: We're looking at each individual school but we're also looking at how all these changes balance across an entire school district. I wouldn't say that we're intending to say, ‘Hey, a K-8 model doesn't work,’ because there are contexts where a K-8 model might work.

There's a difference between large K-8 schools and small K-8 schools. So large K-8s can be successful because the size of each grade is big enough that you can actually provide the teachers and staff that you need to deliver a real middle school experience in 6-8. When K-8 [schools] start to get smaller, because they have more grades they're serving, the grade size itself gets smaller, and it makes it much harder. So even a K-8 with 400 kids, because they're serving nine grade levels, you're spreading the resources much more thin.

Can you explain what a “neighborhood magnet” is? How is it different from a partial magnet?

Trawick-Smith: Partial magnets and the way that they're working now is largely having a magnet program inside of a neighborhood school. My understanding from lots of conversations is that it's basically creating a school within a school, where students who are magnet students can attend this program and then neighborhood students can attend this other program. But the neighborhood students can’t necessarily access that magnet program in the same way. So the neighborhood magnet idea asks — is there a way to kind of have some of the benefits of the partial magnet, which is that the school serves communities that surround the school, but also gives them access to that magnet programming? You can think of it more like a partial magnet if we were to allow everyone to access that magnet programming because just turning the school into a partial magnet doesn't necessarily expand access in the same way. There's lots of policy details that we have not ironed out about this, but that's sort of like the basic concept.

Many parents at town hall meetings, and since the proposal was released, have expressed concerns about walkability, given that the plan drastically lengthens the distances students would have to go to get to school. What is your response to those concerns?

Trawick-Smith: There are two parts to this. There's the walking and then there's the bus transport. Interestingly, on the walking piece, if you were to reduce the number of schools, you're actually decreasing the number of students that would be within walk zones. So you may be increasing bus transportation for some kids as the result of reducing the number of schools across the district. We're doing an analysis to see where students are living now and how long it takes for them to get to school.

In most cases, the impact on transportation, we think, would probably not be significant. Now there's going to be exceptions to that, and so we also want to look at who are the students that would need to travel the farthest in each of these so we can understand those edge cases as well.

Similarly, multiple survey respondents asked how the district is incorporating concerns about safety into these plans. How does moving schools across the city improve safety?

King Smith: We're having additional conversations with both internal staff and principals and internal leaders. And then coming up, we're going to be having a set of regional meetings and those regional meetings will be an opportunity for people to share their thoughts and ask their questions about what was initially proposed. But specifically related to that, we've gotten a lot of feedback about concerns there, and so we're taking all that feedback in. It's extremely helpful to understand the context for a lot of families and some of the historical challenges between neighborhoods, so we are definitely taking that into consideration for this next round.

One parent whose child has special needs asks: How have you taken into account the needs of students with disabilities when determining closures and consolidations?

Trawick-Smith: One is the way that we're thinking about the spaces in buildings. One of the things that will be really important if you are, for example, relocating a set of autism classrooms, is that the space in the receiving school site exists for that, and that the resources exist to support those kids.

At the end of the day, that also comes down to staffing and making sure that we have the right people with the right capabilities in schools providing those services at a high-quality level, which is related to this portfolio work — but it obviously takes a lot more than just creating the classrooms.

Transition is another thing that we're looking at. I know some folks have raised concerns about, “Are we disproportionately impacting students with disabilities in closure scenarios?” And it's one of the things that we'll have to highlight and talk through with the PPS team because that's going to be really important.

Cameron Croston

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For PublicSource

Another parent asks: How are you soliciting engagement from non-English speaking families during town halls and community engagement events?

King Smith: The PPS team has been going out and they've been conducting pop-ups in communities that we didn't necessarily have huge turnout in. The PPS team is setting those up and conducting those and what they're collecting feedback on is the actual initial proposal that was shared at the board meeting. We're also having some additional sessions with some local community organizations to go into those communities and provide some levels of support and have specific sessions for them. PPS shared the information in the various native tongues of the respective students through their electronic platform around the town halls themselves to get the word out. But I don't think that is the best mechanism. For many of these families, they want to get their information from a trusted, reliable source that they spend a lot of time in. And so these pop-ups and these community-centered conversations are going to be really important for them to understand.

We’ve heard both parents and board members express concerns that the plan will increase charter school enrollment, thus increasing the charter school payments that the district is trying to reduce. How did you take charters into account while determining what schools to close/consolidate? How have you considered impacts on capture rates? 

Trawick-Smith: One thing I will say is that the rate of enrollment decline now, without any change, is quite high. So the number of students that are leaving PPS, independent of any changes that PPS might make to the number and size of schools, is fast enough that from where we sit, the much greater challenge, outside of losing students to a charter, is that we're going to end up with schools that have so few students in them that schools aren't able to provide a basic educational experience. So I think it's a real risk and I think it'll be important to have conversations with charter providers and think about the proximity of closures to where those existing charter operators are. At the end of the day, I know that risk isn’t worth the cost of inaction.

One survey respondent wants to know what elements of the proposed reconfiguration plan are flexible and how will the listening sessions specifically inform the plan.

King Smith: I really think that we've got to make some change, however, we're open to what that could potentially be. And so coming to the regional meetings with some thoughtful ideas about how things could be tweaked is going to be extremely helpful for us as we develop the final recommendations that we're sending to the board in September. There's lots of options and pathways. So we want to hear from the community about what those options are so that we can provide the best plan moving forward.

Another parent asks, how are you considering the implications from the previous rounds of school closures? 

King Smith: What we did in our very first Advisory Committee meeting, was to make time and space to better understand what has happened and transpired over PPS’ history regarding school closures.

Our team then took that information and then compared it with our analysis and data to better understand what has happened. Then we layered it against some past historical maps regarding redlining and some other things that have impacted certain communities. So it has been extremely helpful to have that sort of context and to be able to leverage that information as we've been learning about PPS through this process.

Trawick-Smith: We know that the Hill District, in particular, has been hit really hard. We wanted to show we want foundational programming for every K-5 and it would take consolidating some schools in the Hill District.

So that first pass was really intended to show, “This is the bold scenario that does mean some disruption to communities that have sustained prior rounds of school closures.” In what we're sharing in September, we do want to illustrate options that don't go as far, that are looking at preserving some schools where we know that they have been disproportionately impacted in the past.

I think it's important to kind of explicitly grapple with the trade-offs of avoiding closing schools in certain communities, but also maybe not giving students that sort of full experience that we're aiming for.

Jillian Forstadt is the education reporter at 90.5 WESA. She can be reached at jforstadt@wesa.fm.

Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at PublicSource. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org.

This story was produced in a partnership between WESA and PublicSource.