PPS could begin public hearings on 10 proposed school closures as soon as next month

Pittsburgh Public Schools board members will vote next week on whether to move ahead with the steps required before it can finalize plans to permanently close 10 of its buildings.

The schools in question are Friendship's Montessori PreK-5, Fulton PreK-5, King PreK-8, Miller PreK-5, Morrow PreK-8 (only primary grades), Schiller 6-8, Spring Hill K-5, Woolslair PreK-5, the Student Achievement Center and Conroy Education Center.

Pennsylvania law requires school districts to hold a public hearing on any school closures considered at least three months before a decision is made. Hearings must also be publicized at least 15 days ahead of time, bringing the total lag time to three and a half months.

Once that process is complete, board members will be able to cast their votes to reshape the district’s footprint, potentially as soon as this summer if hearings are scheduled this spring. PPS leaders have made clear that none of the schools proposed to permanently close would be shuttered until after the end of the 2025-2026 school year.

Board members Jamie Piotrowski, Emma Yourd and Devon Taliaferro indicated that they would not vote to move forward in the process without additional information about the financial implications of the plan, as well as new attendance zones and feeder patterns.

“It's more than just people being mad because we're closing schools at this point,” Yourd said. “It's more that people are going to be mad because they have been demanding the same answers for the last year from this board and from this administration, and we have not done our own due diligence to provide those answers to them.”

The district’s feasibility study, released in February, did not outline attendance zones and feeder patterns in the Hill District and East End. To that end, PPS published a request-for-proposals earlier this month to hire a demographer who can determine exactly where each district school would draw from, down to the street level.

According to the RFP, the person hired will be tasked with analyzing 10 years of demographic shifts within the district to establish attendance zones and feeder patterns that align with Pittsburgh’s “historical, cultural, and geographical considerations.”

But that work can take up to 90 days to complete, and the board will not vote to approve any demographer contract until next month at the earliest.

“I can anticipate, as Ms. Yourd pointed out, a lot of these questions that we're going to be getting during these hearings,” Piotrowski said. “What is this going to cost? What's my new feeder pattern? What is transportation and staffing going to be like?”

“And we have to sit there and say ‘I don't know,’ again — doing us no favors — because this demographer's work has not been done,” she continued.

But among board members Gene Walker, Tracey Reed and Yael Silk, another camp emerged. The three voiced support for gathering additional information, but warned that delaying the process to do so would only prolong the district’s ongoing equity and financial issues.

“By the time we actually get to a [final] vote, it will be 18 to 19 months since we started this,” board president Walker said. “I think it would be highly irresponsible if this collection of board members did not make a decision one way or the other on what to do with this plan and leave it for someone else — just like the last board did to us and the board before that did to them.”

Both Reed and Walker are among the school board candidates running for reelection. Reed also emphasized that any more delays could leave students in schools where resources are concentrated unequally.

“Our hair is on fire,” Reed said. “We need to make some decisions and create the district that our kids deserve, because that’s not what they have right now.”

In the feasibility study released last month, district administrators OK’d all of the proposed school closures floated to them by consultants from Education Resource Strategies last fall, including the 10 facility closures.

In addition, district leaders expressed their approval of 14 proposed school closures, in which a school’s current programs would be dissolved and redesigned.

Those plans include turning Manchester PreK-8 into 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 overall changes would reduce the district’s total footprint from 54 schools to 43, and most buildings would be reconfigured to support traditional PreK-5, 6-8 and 9-12 grade structures.

Since conversations about the latest round of school closures resumed in October 2023, district leaders have repeatedly stated that consolidating schools would allow PPS to regain financial stability and ensure every student has access to abundant resources — from electives and counselors, to advanced courses and services for English language learners.

But some parents have pushed back on that notion, arguing that the district could become more equitable without subjecting students to a tumultuous transition between schools. The district has closed more than 40 schools in the past two decades due to declining enrollment, and a 2016 third-party review of the district noted past closings have “contributed to disparities” in the district’s educational offerings.

In a statement Wednesday night, State Senator Lindsey Williams (D-Pittsburgh) urged school board members to vote against starting the public hearing process without answers to questions about feeder patterns, transportation and access to special education services.

She expressed particular concern about closing Fulton K-5, located in her district, and Conroy Education Center, which serves students with developmental disabilities and on the autism spectrum.

"Moving forward without answers to these questions will further erode trust in PPS and our public schools when we need civically engaged communities more than ever,"
said Williams, who serves as minority chair of the Senate Education Committee.

"I’m especially concerned about the closure of Conroy, which would disrupt the education of students with the most complex needs at the very moment the Federal government is effectively ending enforcement of their rights."

In October, a parent group shared with the board an alternative plan that would still result in 10 school closures, but suggests instead turning half of those buildings into community hubs that host teacher training and after-school activities. The plan also emphasized a feeder pattern that allows families to choose between schools with different thematic programming, from the environment to African American culture.

While district administrators said the community-driven proposal plan embodied many of their shared goals, they also voiced concern that a “regional school choice model” would reinforce existing inequities mirrored by the district’s current magnet program.

“This can disproportionately impact students whose families are less familiar with or able to navigate the school choice process, leaving them concentrated in under-resourced schools with fewer academic and extracurricular opportunities,” the district’s feasibility study stated.

School board president Walker has repeatedly voiced concerns that the alternative plan came from a limited cross-section of district families without the same kind of broadly-solicited input gathered by the consultants.

School board vice president Taliaferro, however, flagged some of Walker’s criticisms as a dismissal of vocal constituents — many of whom attend schools she represents.

“Those are the people that I represent. Those are the voices that I hear every day that are like, ‘What the hell is gonna happen with my child? I do not know,’” Taliaferro said. “That is real concern. And I think when we just dismiss it because it's like, ‘Well, those people, they're just gonna be upset and people are gonna be upset,’ that bothers me.”

But Walker said he would ultimately base his vote on all the community input he receives, not just that of the most vocal stakeholders. He said he’s heard from community members outside of the district’s public hearings who are in favor of the closures.

“We have a responsibility to finish what we started,” he said. “We've been at this for 14 months. If 14 months is too fast, I'd hate to see the alternative.”