Pittsburgh Public Schools leadership has deemed all of the proposed school closures floated to them by consultants last fall “feasible.”
Tuesday’s presentation to the PPS school board on 14 proposed school closures and recommendations to permanently shutter 10 facilities follows administrators’ months-long feasibility study of recommendations from Education Resources Strategies.
The district paid the Boston-based firm $250,000 to evaluate its footprint, engage community input and draft multiple proposals last year. District leadership appeared to endorse the full slate of proposals consultants with Education Resource Strategies presented to the district in October.
The only recommendation administrators did not support was a suggestion to relocate credit recovery services currently offered at the Student Achievement Center in Homewood to a building in Carrick, noting that these services could instead be provided within district high schools.
District leaders also noted mixed support about reopening Northview Heights PreK-5 on the North Side, citing financial concerns.
"The building has been sitting vacant for quite some time, and so there's significant costs with renovating the building," said superintendent Wayne Walters. "And so it's not that we don't support a school in that community, but we also had to consider what the cost would be to really, maybe in some cases, start from scratch."
Under PPS’s closure plan, the district would reduce its footprint from 54 schools to 43. All but CAPA — the district’s 6-12 performing arts magnet school — would be reconfigured to support traditional PreK-5, 6-8 and 9-12 grade structures.
Doing so would increase the number of traditional high schools from four to seven, and all of the district’s 11 K-8 schools would be restructured or closed. A facility closure would permanently close a building, while a school closure refers to buildings housing programs that might be discontinued and replaced with another serving students year-round.
Other notable changes within the district include renovating Manchester PreK-8 to host a new middle school program for all North Side students to attend, and reopening Milliones UPrep 6-12 in the Hill District as a STEM-focused middle school feeding into Oakland’s SciTech 9-12 — currently a 6-12 magnet school.
The district also plans to open three professional development centers for educators where classroom space is freed up. Leaders noted that human resources officials look to collaborate with the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers — which represents much of the district's 4,500 employees — to establish "protocols for staff adjustments in response to school closings, openings, status changes, or reconfigurations."
A clear communication plan about preliminary assignments and relocations will be established by December 2025, Walters said. He added that a particular emphasis will be put on ensuring the district’s middle schools are fully staffed to offer an expanded number of electives and world languages.
Administrators said these and other changes align with its strategic efforts to ensure every student has equitable access to foundational programs, elective courses and support services.
“Our city can't afford a system that does not educate all of our children well. We can't afford it,” Walters said. “Our city's too small to have some well-educated and some not.”
Questions about feeder patterns remain
The feasibility study, however, left key questions about attendance zones and student transportation under the closure plan unanswered. While the plan models feeder plans for some schools, administrators said they want to hire a demographer this spring to determine exactly where each school would draw from, down to the street level.
A WESA investigation into the district’s attendance zones found school placement was largely determined by a patchwork of sometimes non-contiguous shapes and jagged lines. Ted Dwyer, the district’s chief accountability officer, said addressing “legacy inefficiencies” in this system requires a “data-driven approach.”
Walters said looking at feeder patterns gives the district a chance to “create some balance in spaces where there's been imbalance, where students are driving past other schools for whatever reason they've been made in the past.”
Administrators plan to ask school board members to open the public comment period in March, as well as select a demographer. But some school board members voiced their hesitance to push forward a plan before more data is available, particularly related to feeder patterns and school size.
“It's not clear to me why some of the recommendations that we deemed feasible here are desirable,” said director Emma Yourd. She cited the wide variety in school capacity under the plan: while schools like Sunnyside would increase their enrollment to over 90% of its capacity, Westinghouse would shrink to 28% full.
Walters said more weight was given to considering a building’s amenities and students’ needs than an ideal school utilization benchmark.
“Some communities just don’t have that capacity,” he said, pointing to small and isolated schools like Mifflin PreK-8.
Charting the course
Fully implementing all of the recommendations would help save the district $3 million annually — about 10% of the district’s current $28 million operating deficit, according to Tuesday’s presentation, as well as a $50 million reduction in facility costs.
District leaders said the savings would overall lead the district toward long-term financial stability, though they added some of the suggested building changes would require additional renovations not already budgeted.
But little information on the cost of closing each school was offered beyond that, nor was there conversation about what would happen to buildings that are closed permanently.
“We haven't had any conversation about what we do with 14 schools, or 10 school buildings, that we physically close,” director Devon Taliaferro said.
PPS is currently holding on to four previously closed buildings: Fort Pitt Elementary in Garfield, Northview PreK-8 in Northview Heights, Bon Air Elementary and Knoxville Middle School.
“I know we might have to teach the teacher centers in those spaces, but we already have existing buildings that we have never addressed, and I have been on the board for almost six years now,” Taliaferro continued.
But administrators said focusing only on financial responsibility could limit equitable improvement, and vice versa.
“If we prioritize only educational excellence by investing heavily in dynamic, innovative learning spaces, we must ensure that we are not compromising our long-term financial sustainability,” said chief of staff Lamar Blackwell.
Still, many parents have voiced concerns that the district has prioritized financial feasibility over the well-being of some of its most marginalized students.
Under the current proposal, students at Conroy Education Center — the district’s autism-specific program — would be relocated five miles to a building in Pittsburgh’s Brookline neighborhood that currently hosts both a traditional middle school, South Brook 6-8, and Pittsburgh Pioneer, the district’s center for students with disabilities who require more comprehensive care.
Consultants said locating Pioneer and Conroy together would allow for staff and programming to be shared, benefiting students at both schools. But Conroy parents like Emily Alder told the school board during its public hearing Monday, ahead of the presentation, that doing so would remove students from a building intentionally designed to accommodate them.
“Through time and experience, Conroy has been designed and custom built around these students’ dignity and respect, access to sports, life skills development, sensory accommodations, educational tools and community engagement,” Alder said. “Understand and respect the value of that history before dismissing teachers, parents and the students for not wanting to start over in a new location with less.”
“My son is relying on you to make the hard decision about what his school is going to be able to offer him and his peers for their future, and he needs you to protect these integral resources in order for him to succeed,” she added.
Parents at Conroy and other schools recommended to close or reconfigure say they will fight to keep their schools open if the board votes to proceed with the closure plan.
Pennsylvania requires school districts to open a three-month window for public comment before any school closures can take effect. The district must also hold a public hearing before board members vote to finalize any changes.
A timeline presented Tuesday sets the board to vote on a final plan and feeder patterns in August. While no school changes will take effect until after the 2025-2026 school year, administrators hope to begin transition planning in the fall, ahead of the magnet lottery process.
To concerns about a lack of data and new ideas, Walters said the board’s go-ahead would give administrators the greenlight to innovate beyond what was presented in the study.
While school board president Gene Walker agreed with his colleagues that more data is warranted, he warned against stalling the process altogether.
“We can follow the path of school boards in the past and say we don't want this on our hands and so we're just not going to do anything,” Walker said. “In which case, five years from now, we're in the same spot, doing the same thing, having the same conversations — but our kids are worse off potentially than they are today.”
