*Editor’s note: This story is part of our From the Archives series, which reprints old Northside Chronicle stories with only light edits to correct spelling or grammar mistakes. This story is from the September 2011 issue of The Northside Chronicle. Stories are chosen mostly on a random basis, though some are picked for relevancy to current news events.
A large deficit, state budget cuts and decreasing enrollment at Pittsburgh Public Schools has led to a proposal that could close two Northside public schools in 2012.
The Pittsburgh Public School District hopes to transform itself from a system of small schools with varied educational quality to a system with fewer but better schools that operate more cost efficiently. To do this, the school board proposed a plan that would close eight schools, including the Northside’s Oliver High School and Northview PreK-8 The plan proposes that Oliver’s 344 students move to Perry High School.
Special education offices and the McNaugher Education Center would move into the Oliver building. Northview PreK-8 students would be divided and reassigned to Morrow PreK-8 and King PreK-8.
No plans have been announced for Northview’s building.
The plan also proposed that Brighton Heights’ Morrow Elementary split into a PreK-4 in the Morrow building with grades 5 through 8 in the Rooney building, which is currently not being used as a school.
The earliest possible board vote on this proposal would be November 22, 2011. If approved, the plan would take effect for the 2012-2013 school year The proposal is designed to decrease the estimated $41.2 million deficit that the district currently faces and to decrease the number of empty seats in Pittsburgh Public Schools from 10,191 to 5,902.
“I think the thing that we want to emphasize is that, as many people know by now, we have a serious financial situation on our hands,” said Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Linda Lane. “We’re taking a number of steps to address the under-utilization of our schools and classrooms, and if this proposal passes, it will be the first portion of our plan to get our schools to be fiscally stable.”
If the proposal passes, Perry High School will go from being a full magnet, where all students have applied and take more challenging classes, to a partial magnet, where the school will house magnet-program students as well as regular feeder-pattern students.
The district hopes that combining Oliver and Perry would give an advantage to kids at Oliver who Lane said are “capable and willing” to take more advanced classes that are not offered at Oliver because of its small enrollment.
However, the district addressed that there would be challenges to merging Oliver and Perry.
“You don’t lightly go about combining two high schools,” said Lane, who also said that if the proposal passed, measures would be taken to help smooth the transition and to work with the students to help them get to know and accept each other.
Though Oliver High School currently has the smallest high school class sizes in the district, averaging 10 to 23 students per class, only 24.2 percent of students were at proficient or advanced levels on the PSSA reading tests and only 17.4 percent scored proficient or advanced in math last year.
At a special public hearing regarding the proposal on August 22, Oliver High School parent, Deshauna Ponton stood in opposition to the closing of Oliver High School.
She pointed out the school’s positive attributes, such as an award-winning ROTC program, a cosmetology program, family movie nights and evening computer classes for adults that she saw while her son attended Oliver. She also recalled his positive experience there.
“It was not an abnormality to receive a phone call at nine or 10 o’clock at night about my son to say he was doing poorly or doing well,” Ponton said. “My potentially failing student is now a college student who started his first day today.”
Pittsburgh Public Schools currently has over 10,000 empty seats in the district caused by population decreases and parents choosing alternatives to public schools. In the past 50 years, enrollment in the Pittsburgh Public School District has fallen from around 75,000 students to under 30,000.
At a special public hearing regarding the proposal on August 22, City Council President Darlene Harris addressed the possible consequences that school closings could have on the city.
Harris noted that as city council president, she knows the fabric of the city and understands that it is “stretched as far as it can go.”
Though she acknowledged the challenges of budget cuts and population decline, she warned the school board of the cutbacks, if not handled responsibly, may only further these problems because the schools are “a driving force in the city.”
“The more we cut, the more we close, the more population will go down,” she said. “The board holds the city’s future in its hands. We just have to decide correctly.”
The Northside Leadership conference advocated keeping Manchester PreK-8 open and for Morrow to be split into two buildings, both of which were included in the proposal.
Both the NSLC and the Northside Community Development Fund withheld comments regarding Northview until they had the feeder patterns for the neighborhood.
NSCDF Executive Director Mark Masterson requested that the school board “really take a look at the buildings that are closed,” in the Northside.
“Please don’t do what you did last time, as it was detrimental to the community,” he said.
He mentioned that the previous closings, like Observatory Hill’s Chatham Elementary in 2006, were “flawed” because the buildings were left unused.
President of Northview Heights Citizens Council Inc., Valerie Lauw, spoke at the hearing to address the closing of Northview PreK-8.
Lauw noted that she was in “total support of the public school system,” but questioned if closing Northview was the right choice for the neighborhood, which has grown by 200 residents in the past year.
“We all want to be close to our children, especially when they’re being educated,” she told the board, noting that filtering Northview students into King PreK8 and Morrow PreK-8 would limit parent involvement and create the additional expense of bussing the students out of the neighborhood for the district.
There will be a series of public meetings throughout the next three months for community members to address their concerns about the proposal.
“The committee hopes that Northsiders are going to speak up and say what they want and what they don’t want,” said NSLC Executive Director Mark Fatla.
