City of Pittsburgh owes Pittsburgh Public Schools $120 million? (Manchester, Bloomfield: fit in, neighborhoods)

[amy11bee]

Hi,

I live in the city and my kid goes to a PPS school. He’s doing awesome and loves his classmates and teachers

I just learned about how PPS is $26 million in debt, and they are planning to vote to close schools and lay-off teachers, unless parents and people push back and stop it.

But I also learned:

In 2005, PPS had a surplus! and the city of Pittsburgh entered Act 47. PPS agreed to help the city, and instead of 2% of the earned income tax going to the school district, they changed it to 1.75% went to PPS, and instead of 1% going to the city, it changed to 1.25%.

The city of Pittsburgh left Act 47 designation in 2018?! Yet the city of Pittsburgh continues to collect the extra .25%, which is $20 million dollars a year. So from 2018 to 2024, a total of $120 million dollars kept going to City of Pittsburgh, instead of funding PPS, and now PPS is resorting to closing schools and laying off teachers.

I’d rather the city of Pittsburgh realize what they’re doing is going to hurt our neighborhoods. PPS did the city a favor in 2005, lending them a helping hand. The city and PPS need to work together to resolve this. These kids shouldn’t have to be split up, lose their school building, lose their teachers, lose their friends.

Some of these kids classes have been together for years, this is their family, their close friends. Don’t split them up when you can resolve this another way, right?

The next PPS Public hearing is Feb 26, so I’m heading to that. I’d be interested to hear from other PPS parents, what is your experience? What are your thoughts?

Thanks for listening ☮️

[Knepper3]

I'd be curious on the level of schools and teachers over the past 5 years? Enrollment overall has dropped almost 18% over that time, I would expect less teachers/schools would be needed given almost 4000 less students needing services but maybe they have also been slowly cutting over that time. Yes though, city should recognize their impact too

[eschaton]

Another PPS parent here. I do think you make a good point regarding the financial situation. As of the City's last audit (from the end of 2022, the 2023 audit is not yet available) it had fund reserves of $414 million, including $167 million in its general fund. So it's certainly the case the city has enough money to address PPS's current shortfall.

That said, the district's classroom footprint is just way, way too large now. By the district's own measures, the district overall is at roughly 50% capacity. This is due to a number of factors, including the district never fully addressing earlier overcapacity issues, continued loss of enrollment to charters, a decline in the number of children in the city overall, and the gentrification of the East End pushing many lower-income black families into the suburbs.

All of these half-full buildings have a real financial drain on the district, since heating, air conditioning, building maintenance, etc. is a flat cost regardless of the number of students. The district tried to do a round of closings/reconfigurations back in 2021, and outcry about it happening in the depths of the pandemic stopped it. But we've reached the point where something needs to happen.

Of course, school closings will be rife with controversy. The reflexive thing that districts do is to close failing schools, and migrate the students into schools which are performing better. But this is massively unpopular within local communities. In addition, it can have negative effects on the new schools. When PPS closed the elementary school in Hazelwood around 10-15 years ago, it moved the students to Minadao, which then triggered a mini white flight from the Squirrel Hill school, contributing about half of the district's student decline in a single year. Given the District has been talking about converting the school into a middle school for the more successful Colfax, it seems to have given up on any hope of turning it around.

The district also can't really predict what will happen to these schools in the future. Only five years or so ago, Wooslair was a failing school with only around 100 students left which barely survived a round of school cuts. It has been converted into a partial STEAM magnet, and now has above-average enrollment for the district, and is on an upward trend.

Another aspect is both my students schools, although desirable within the magnet system, are under capacity (Dilworth at 83%, and Obama at only 55%). This is striking considering the number of kids who attempt to enroll at each during the lottery process only to be turned away. I know for a fact at Obama the school has been fighting hard to not increase enrollment much past 800 students, despite the wishes of the district. But I can't see how they can continue to do so if more of the middle and high school options elsewhere vanish.

Still, some schools will have to be on the chopping block. And unfortunately, given the past history of the district, they'll engage in some sort of opaque private assessment and then announce the plan, giving parents (or even the school board) little input in the matter.

[amy11bee]

“That said, the district's classroom footprint is just way, way too large now. By the district's own measures, the district overall is at roughly 50% capacity.”

So this is exactly the issue us parents have signed a petition asking the school where they got their numbers from to calculate that 50%. Because the district’s numbers literally don’t match up with what teachers and principals can fit in their classrooms.

We sent a petition with over 300 signatures asking, please show us the data for each school. We were denied. So now we’re filing an information request.


For example, You mentioned Woolslair, which is my neighborhood school. The district has told us to be at full capacity, we would have to add 100 more students. But teachers literally don’t have the physical space for 100 more students. We already have art on a cart, our enrollment is up each year, we have a strong STEAM program, our PTO raises money for the school, our teachers reply to the survey “is this school a good place to work and learn” with 100% yes in the yearly report, yet we end up on the list each year.

I'd also like to point out that they often don't use growth or school climate when defining what a "failing" school is. The reason why Woolslair was such a small school back then is two fold: First, the last couple rounds of school closures fed TONS of students into Woolslair without any supports. This had disastrous consequences and led a bunch of parents to leave our school and damaging the school's reputation. Then, the feeder pattern was further changed to feed neighborhood students out of Woolslair and into other schools. The decline Woolslair faced was not due to the quality of education our students received by staff, but by poor planning and implementation from the district's closure and consolidation plans.

The whole reason why the program in general (not just at Woolslair) continues to grow and bring families back to the district is because of the plan parents, teachers and community groups developed. The district cannot create a plan, especially with their history, and expect the parents to buy in without our implicit participation.

The current plan does not have enough community input to be implemented and it paints the issue with a broad brush as opposed to looking at school’s individually and engaging with individual communities about thoughtful consolidation. This is where solutions can be found!

It also helps if we could simply have access to the same data PPS is using to calculate numbers to decide to close schools.

I’m literally being told “we have to close your school because numbers”
And when I ask “may I please see the numbers?”
They reply “sorry no”

[eschaton]

IIRC from looking at Woolslair (I used to live in Lawrenceville, so I observed the situation closely) what spurred the low enrollment was a combination of gentrification pushing out lower-income families and some redistricting.

Historically, the feeder pattern for Woolslair was the Strip District, Polish Hill, Lower Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, Friendship, and Shadyside. Shadyside was moved to Colfax around a decade ago. At the same time, gentrification reduced the number of families in all of these neighborhoods (both black families and working-class white families). When I moved to Lawrenceville back in 2007, for example, there was a Somali population of several hundred who lived in the area, but they've all since dispersed, either into the suburbs or moving to Northview Heights.

But, as often happens with neighborhood schools that have had historically poor reputations, but are full of gentrifying areas, a small shift (like the introduction of the STEAM curricula) coupled with a critical mass of a parents deciding to go with local schools was enough to make a difference. Each additional child helped raise the PSSA scores (and in turn make the school look better on Greatschools and the like) which creates a virtuous cycle which causes more parents to consider the neighborhood school as a possibility. The exact same thing is now happening with Sunnyside K-8 closer to us now.

Regarding your point on "capacity" - I don't know what the district means. The district is (in)famously opaque. I will say that my son's fourth-grade class in Dilworth only has 17 students, which seems a bit under-enrolled to me (I remember classrooms with close to 30 kids when I was that age in the 80s).

FWIW, I do think that the District has given up on the idea of closing Woolslair now. Since it's a successful school now, and it's only under-enrolled (according to the district) by around 90 kids, aside from maybe adding a neighborhood to the feeder pattern (maybe part of Oakland?) I don't think they're going to mess with it much - unless it's to just move it into a new school building, as has been floated with Montessori.

On the other hand, I have a hard time believing that schools listed at "30% capacity" are not under enrolled. I do think the district is going to have to consider what they do with schools like Milliones, Weil, Manchester, and King.

And Linden, which hurts because it was where my daughter went to school. When she started kindergarten the school had 400 students, and it's now down to 128 and still falling. She's long-since out (in ninth grade), but a series of poor choices made there (eliminating the German program) and a former principal who did little to stop fights in the upper grades did it in. I hope they can save the Mandarin program by moving it into Fulton (which has also been on the chopping block recently), but we will see.

[gmagoo]

Originally Posted by Knepper3

I'd be curious on the level of schools and teachers over the past 5 years? Enrollment overall has dropped almost 18% over that time, I would expect less teachers/schools would be needed given almost 4000 less students needing services but maybe they have also been slowly cutting over that time. Yes though, city should recognize their impact too

What is surprising is how many people are on school payrolls, who aren`t actually teaching. Each school building has a psychiatrist in my former school district and I assume that it`s the same everywhere. The psychiatrist is just the tip of the iceberg.

https://www.highlandhs.org/about/staff-directory