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Missy Buss, a 9-year-old who can’t walk or talk, endures a 45-minute drive to the closest swing that will accommodate a wheelchair — a treat that relaxes her shoulders and coaxes a smile.
Her mom, Wendy Grossman, thinks there would be more friends around the house if a playground near their Tarentum home allowed Missy to play alongside others.
Norma Carpenter, a nurse and school board member, visited her 82-year-old mother regularly at a personal care home in Indiana County. The two would walk hand in hand through the home, stopping to hug each other.
Jomonna Smith, a 30-year-old woman, held her last job in 2008 as a store cashier.
She is a single mother of three children, making ends meet with government assistance, styling hair on the side and a bit of family help.
Nearly 23,000 people live in limbo as they wait for public housing in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County.
The shortage of low-income housing is so bad that, for the first time in 17 years, Pittsburgh’s city housing authority recently closed its waitlist.
In the fall, an unusual request came my way. Renee Patrick, an English teacher at Winchester Thurston High School in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside, wanted PublicSource staffers to talk with two classes about media bias.
I was surprised. Junior and senior high-school students were studying media? Which media? Don’t they get all their news from twitter, Facebook and Jon Stewart? Do they read the legacy media? Have they even heard of the 80 or so online news sources across the country like PublicSource that do in-depth news?
In April 2010, the Pittsburgh City Council unanimously passed an ordinance to protect motorists from aggressive tow-truck drivers.
Richard VanHalanger, 83, was independent when he walked into the Cedars of Monroeville nursing home in 2006 for two weeks of rehabilitation before heart surgery.
What causes the Pennsylvania Department of Education to suddenly investigate a teacher who was accused of inappropriate conduct 14 years ago?
I knew soon after I moved to Pittsburgh a year and a half ago that it was a city rich with great photographers.
Pennsylvania has more amusement park rides than any other state, with 9,300 registered rides. And its parks are unmatched in safety, Gov. Tom Corbett said in a June press release, because of the state’s rigorous ride-inspection program.
But a PublicSource investigation shows that the state agency that oversees amusement parks doesn’t track the safety inspection reports that parks are required by law to file each month the park is open.
State records show that more than half of Pennsylvania’s permanent parks and water parks did not turn in all of their safety inspection reports in 2012. The agency had no reports at all for 12 of the state’s 117 permanent parks and water parks PublicSource analyzed.
