PublicSource | News for a better Pittsburgh (https://www.publicsource.org/author/mary-niederberger/)
Mary Niederberger is a longtime Pittsburgh-area journalist who started her career with a decade at The Pittsburgh Press. After freelancing and teaching at local universities for several years, she joined the staff of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she spent 18 years covering community news, general assignment and education. Her work has taken her to nearly every community in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area, and her stories in recent years have focused on education issues, specifically under-resourced schools and the students they serve. She received the Golden Quill Award for education coverage from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania in 2014, 2015 and 2016. She is also the recipient of the Robert L. Vann Award of Excellence for investigative/enterprise reporting from the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation in 2011 and 2015. Also in 2015, Mary and a colleague from the Post-Gazette received first place in the Pennsylvania Society of of Professional Journalist Spotlight Awards for their coverage of the ghost job held by the state's special adviser on higher education. Mary holds a bachelor's degree from Duquesne University and is a lifelong Pittsburgh-area resident.
The longitudinal study is a major undertaking that aims to identify opportunities and assets that lead to positive change for youth.
The issues facing Pittsburgh Public Schools — chronic absenteeism, racial achievement gaps, underrepresentation of Black students in gifted programs and significant overrepresentation of Black students among those suspended — aren’t new.
And while those trends are outlined in the statistics of A+ Schools 125-page report to the community released Monday morning, the major focus of Executive Director James Fogarty’s presentation was on schools that are making progress in reversing the negative trends.
Board member Lisa Rutkowski said there is nothing wrong with the real estate relationship, while Superintendent Gene Freemen questioned a reporter’s motives for asking about it.
Fox Chapel Superintendent Gene Freeman’s contract provides more vacation days than all other superintendents in Allegheny County with no limits on the sell-back of days, along with a retirement payment of 80% of his salary.
The Pittsburgh school board will vote next month on a revised memorandum of understanding between the district and Pittsburgh Bureau of Police that appears to give city officers less authority to arrest students at school for past offenses than a previously proposed memorandum.
Schools are using hands-on exercises to show how greenhouse gas emissions contribute to temperature changes that affect weather and ecosystems.
In the continuing saga over shredded documents in the Fox Chapel Area School District, the board voted Monday to hire a special counsel to review the shredding investigation of previous special counsel Thomas Breth.
But the special counsel who investigated said the documents in question were already destroyed when he was hired.
A child custody court document reveals that the deputy superintendent of the Fox Chapel Area School District was accused of strangling his wife and daughter on the night of the couple’s separation in June 2018.
Pittsburgh school board members heard disappointing news about student test performance Tuesday night. Scores for several grade levels fell, and the district continues to have wide achievement gaps between black and white students.
