King PreK-8 is a neighborhood school of around 300 students on Pittsburgh’s North Side, close to the Children’s Museum, surrounded by Allegheny Commons Park. When 90.5 WESA visited on the first day of school, students and staff were excited about the year to come.
Principal Dawn Gordon announced the year’s theme: “Our House Is Under Construction.” Project assistant Destiny Hoffman said she believed the school would begin to see good results under stable leadership and with full staffing. And student Honesty was just thrilled to be in Mr. Taylor’s second-grade class.
Two months into the school year, on Halloween, WESA returned to learn how the school year is unfolding.
On the day of our visit, a group of seventh and eighth grade students played a clarinet-and-djembe concert for lower grade students on the school’s porch.
Many of the students in the instrumental group are student envoys, which Hoffman explains is a district-wide initiative for students with at least 90% attendance and no behavior infractions. Hoffman oversees King’s envoy program, which teaches students social-emotional skills like recognizing their strong and weak sides, and receiving constructive feedback.
“It is an opportunity for them to learn different goals and then share those secrets throughout the school,” Hoffman says.
Students in her envoy program helped her fill candy bags and set up for the school’s fall harvest parade for the younger students.
Jasmine Mitchell is an eighth-grade student in the envoy program. Her favorite class is Leslie Maben’s English Language Arts.
“I like writing and journaling,” Mitchell says. “It makes me feel like I can just talk about the things I experience and it just makes me feel happy.”
Hoffman fills many roles at King, including that of student behavior specialist. She says that two months into the school year, King is also negotiating difficult student behaviors.
“We’re experiencing a lot of violence this year. We’re experiencing a lot of defiance, and earlier than we typically do,” Hoffman says.
Hoffman has developed a social and emotional learning class for some students to cope with negative behaviors. Those students spend dedicated time with her twice a week, during which she sets goals and works to equip students to stay in class without disrupting peers.
“The behaviors that I’m expressing are maybe 20 students out of our 300,” Hoffman says. “Because I’m dealing with that primarily, it’s most of my day. It seems heavy. But when I look around and I see the students that are here just owning being a child and enjoying being a child and following the staff’s directions and allowing themselves to receive care, that’s when I’m like, ‘Okay, I can breathe.’ This isn’t a small problem I can fix on my own. This is going to require some community effort, some legislation effort. I’m just picking my battles and filling in where I can best so that I can be effective this year.”
The day of WESA's visit, there was a fall harvest parade for students and their families. The K-5 kids paraded through the halls in their costumes, trick-or-treating at folding tables staffed by seventh-and-eighth graders.
Assistant principal Colleen Pegher says holidays are joyful for the kids but may also be stressful.
“The day before Christmas break, the day before Thanksgiving, it’s very fun for the kids,” Pegher says, “but it’s also really difficult for some of our kids [for whom] being home isn’t always the most pleasant experience, if, maybe, you have parents who are split up or there’s not enough food at home. And so, Christmas break, especially, we’ll start to see an uptick in negative behaviors.”
School social worker Tanya Ashby says long breaks from school mean a disruption to students’ structure and routines.
“When [students] come to school, they’re guaranteed unconditional love, food and structure,” Ashby says. “They may not get that—we’re not saying they don’t, but they may not get that when they’re home. But they get those three things, guaranteed, from us.”
