Pittsburgh Public Schools may need to close schools to improve student outcomes and save costs, a developing strategic plan suggests.
Martha Greenway, an education strategy consultant who is steering the plan, last night told PPS board members under-enrolled schools are driving inequities and tying up resources that could otherwise boost education and other programming.
“None of the how [of school closings] has been predetermined, but the current configuration of schools is not allowing you to offer the programs and services in an equitable fashion,” said Greenway. “And that’s the problem to be solved.”
Greenway stressed the district would not approve any closures without public input, and the plan, as it stands, does not propose any specific recommendations.
Greenway said student input gathered during the process shows many are aware of the uneven experiences offered at the district’s schools.
“They see the inequitable access to academic and non-academic programs, and the unequal financial investment in magnet schools, as things that get in the way of their success,” Greenway said.
The strategic plan, commissioned in April at a cost of $110,000, will continue to evolve in the coming months. The plan is intended to solve a range of longstanding issues at PPS, where Greenway noted test scores skew low, racial disparities are rampant, and many students report feeling unsafe in and around their school communities.
The next stage involves soliciting broader public input before locking in details on implementation – such as which, if any, schools should shutter – resulting in a plan that’s ready to mobilize in 2024.
The plan has so far sought input from a range of stakeholders – including student and parent focus groups – but Greenway said it won’t move forward without broader community buy-in.
“We will need to hear the voices of the entire community on our draft framework to get it right,” she said.
Consolidating schools is just one part of the strategy that also seeks to improve instruction and programming, cultivate a more inclusive culture, and strengthen ties between the district and the community.
Over the years, PPS has gone through four rounds of school closures, going from 93 to the 54 schools it has today. With that, the district has also consistently lost students.
In the last five years, PPS enrollment has dropped by more than 3,000 students. By 2031, the state Department of Education predicts, the district will lose another 5,000 students.
The last round of school closures happened in 2011 when the district closed seven school buildings and opened Langley as a K-8 school.
In October, the district leadership and board resumed talks about another round of school closures, citing increasing instruction costs, overhead costs for aging building facilities, surplus capacity in their buildings and declining enrollment.
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During a public hearing on the 2024 budget earlier this week, parents expressed concerns school closures might arise as the district grapples with withering revenue streams. Defenders of one school with fewer than 200 students gave the board a sense of the reaction they may get to school closing proposals.
Annette Hall, a parent with two children at PPS Woolslair K-5, said her kids love their school and are “petrified” that it might get shut down.
“Woolslair, in my opinion, is doing a great job at including everybody and getting a quality education,” said Sarah Zangle, a parent and vice-president of the Woolslair PTO.
The district’s pending budget proposal projects an operating deficit of $29 million during 2023-2024. The district, which currently enrolls 18,380 students, is operating at 54% of its building utilization capacity and has an excess seating capacity of nearly 17,000 students.
As the district continues to lose students, pandemic relief funds expire and mandatory expenditures such as charter school and debt service payments rise, its financial difficulties will increase.
In February 2021, the district proposed closing six school buildings — Morrow, Fulton, Woolslair, Montessori, Miller and Manchester over two years, as reported by WESA. Nearly three years on, these schools remain open.
Linda Lane, the district superintendent when PPS closed schools in 2011, thinks it might be the right time to consider more closures.
“When there’s been a significant enrollment decline, you have to look at it,” she said. “And when a building gets below a certain level of enrollment based on its size, it’s eating up resources that could be used for teachers and teaching and materials for kids that you prefer to spend it on.”
School closures might happen nationwide. More than a million students did not return to public schools after the pandemic, according to the Hechinger Report. However, closing school buildings has disproportionately affected Black and Brown students in the past and if PPS decides to close schools it might further exacerbate the inequities in the district.
Research from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University showed that school closures are generally targeted at low-achieving schools with a majority of Black and Hispanic students and less than half of those students displaced landed in better schools.
Lane said community engagement and input will be crucial if PPS is planning to close schools. She added PPS should assess the impact of closures based on racial equity for students and staff and on schools located in low-income areas of the city.
Greenway said decisions will ultimately rest with the community.
“We are not coming to this with an agenda to close any schools,” she said. “…Those are things that we need to hear from the community regarding.”
Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at PublicSource. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org.
Jamie Wiggan is the deputy editor at PublicSource. He can be reached at jamie@publicsource.org.
The Fund for Investigative Journalism helped to fund this project.
