As Pittsburgh Public school closures loom, parents try to pump the brakes

Pittsburgh Public Schools parents gathered at the district’s administration building in Oakland on Monday night to protest what they are calling a rushed process to close 16 schools.

Their calls come in response to a plan consultants for Pittsburgh Public Schools presented to school board members last month. The Boston-based firm Education Resource Strategies (ERS) is suggesting the district permanently close nine school buildings and repurpose seven others.

Jazlynn Worthy has two kids at one of the buildings proposed to permanently close, Woolslair PreK-5 in Bloomfield. The 127-year-old building draws students from the surrounding neighborhood and around the city for its partial magnet program focused on science, technology and art.

“It’s important, especially for the kids that look like my kids, Black and brown, because this plan — it disproportionately affects Black and brown students [and] those with disabilities,” Worthy said.

According to the consultants’ proposal, 24% of the district’s Black students and 26% of Hispanic students would be impacted by the proposed school closures, compared to 18% of white students.

In the weeks since that plan was introduced, representatives with ERS have solicited feedback on the specific closures suggested. They are expected to present an updated, potentially scaled-back version of their proposal on Oct. 15.

Consultants pushed back the date for their final presentation to allow for more community input, but many at the rally said there still hasn’t been sufficient time given to the process.

Teresa Parra manages youth programs at Casa San Jose, a resource center for Pittsburgh’s Latino community, located in Beechview. She told rallygoers that the center had worked with PPS to schedule a community meeting on the school closure process, but the meeting was postponed after the district said it could only provide virtual interpretation services.

Casa San Jose members will instead meet with the district on Oct. 8, though Parra worries that doesn’t leave the district or its consultants enough time to meaningfully consider the Latino community’s input.

“This community is one of the communities that is fastly growing, and it is not fair that the voices are not being heard from these parents, from these students, that are being affected by this,” Parra said.

Community members like Cheryl Morris urged other rally attendees to demand their school board representatives vote against any reconfiguration plan that doesn’t promise evidence-based results.

Morris attended Westinghouse High School in Homewood, and her children attended the since-closed Schenley High School in Oakland.

“We demand equity audits that identify who are the true winners and who are the true losers in this plan,” Morris said.

A community-driven proposal

As concerns about a lack of community input abound, parents like Sarah Zangle have taken matters into their own hands.

Zangle, whose second-grader attends Woolslair PreK-5, is working to develop a community-driven proposal to serve as an alternative option for the school board.

“I think the only way to have our voices heard is to stand up as a community and say, ‘What about this option?’” Zangle said. “And the only way I knew how to do that was to offer to spearhead it and lead it.”

Unsatisfied with ERS’ initial recommendations and related community engagement efforts, Zangle said she is working with other parents to review district data and compile a proposal that can be presented alongside ERS’s final recommendations on Oct. 15.

Though it’s early in the process, Zangle said she has been contacted by roughly 70 parents since introducing her idea at a PPS town hall earlier this month. With many of those families having students at Colfax K-8 in Squirrel Hill and Montessori PreK-5 in Friendship, Zangle said more voices from the city’s northern, southern and western neighborhoods are needed.

School board president Gene Walker said he’s willing to present the outcome to his fellow board members but expressed skepticism that a solid plan could be developed in a month’s time.

“I think it's an interesting idea for the community to just think through this in some sort of systematic way that might lead to a proposal,” Walker said. “I just don't know, based off of where we are in the process, if they'll be able to pull some things together in time that would be useful for us as we make decisions here in the next month or so.”

State mandates apply to certain closures

While it’s unlikely the board will vote to enact any school closure before January, Walker said there could be an opportunity for board members to give the district’s chief financial officer “enough direction to have an idea of what might come first.”

That way, he said, district leaders could think through the financial implications of any decisions likely to be made while going through the state’s required three-month public hearing timeframe for school closures.

District officials are currently drawing up the district’s next annual budget, which is typically presented in November and voted on before the end of the year.

“I think there's some opportunity — if the first stage of this plan is not the largest part of the implementation — for him to make those determinations as a contingency,” Walker said.

While Pennsylvania’s school code requires that public hearings be held no less than three and a half months before a district votes to permanently close a school building, districts can vote to repurpose a building without that mandate.

Such is the case with seven of the 16 schools that would be closed if ERS’s initial recommendations were adopted. Under the plan, UPrep Milliones 6-12 in the Hill District, for instance, would be dissolved, but the building would become a 6-8 middle school affiliated with Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy in Oakland.

“And so all of these school closures, consolidations, grade configuration changes — they don't need a three-month process,” former school board member Pam Harbin said Monday.