PublicSource (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 tension-filled dynamic between the Pittsburgh Public Schools and the Propel Schools network took on a new twist when the Pittsburgh board denied Propel's application to merge its 13 schools into one unit.
Some area school districts, including Pittsburgh Public Schools, Mt. Lebanon and North Allegheny, are using mindfulness practices to reduce stress and anger among staff and students, to improve mental health and to create a calm and compassionate atmosphere in their schools.
Hamlet’s push for wholesale change has generated excitement and complaints among district employees, students, community members and others with a vested interest in Pittsburgh Public Schools.
The disastrous decision that Megan Fahey made as she was trying to care for her fictional family after being abandoned in poverty by her husband was to spend her last $10 on food rather than bus passes.
The Steel Valley School District operates two elementary schools in a shoulder of the Monongahela River. One school enrolls mostly black students. The other, 2 miles away, is majority white. When Terrance Frey learned that his son’s school, Barrett Elementary, is 78 percent black and Park Elementary is 84 percent white, he was shocked. “It was kind of insulting.
We selected five questions you asked and got the answers for you, based on information from the state Department of Education and charter school operators.
Jack McCabe has been scanning books, among other duties, at the Goodwill Donation Processing Center in Lawrenceville since 1992. Darci Landa has a decade’s worth of experience at the center, and today she was sorting through piles of donated clothes. And while they are veterans at their duties, McCabe of Upper St. Clair and Landa of Baldwin just became full-fledged employees this summer — their job titles are production associates. McCabe, 46, and Landa, 31, were previously regarded as clients of Goodwill’s sheltered workshop program.
If you’re looking for logic or consistency in the salaries of charter school leaders in comparison with their traditional school district counterparts, it might be hard to find.
If you’re a charter school teacher, chances are your salary is lower than your counterparts in a traditional school districts.
In the last three school years, 12 of the state’s 14 cyber charter schools spent more than $21 million combined in taxpayer dollars promoting their schools, PublicSource found through Right-to-Know requests.