Past PPS closures still haunt district parents. Families worry they’ll go through it again.

Pittsburgh Public Schools’ last round of school consolidations hit the West Side hard, with three of the seven total closures taking place in Sheraden, Crafton Heights and Elliott in 2012.

Parents like Shayla Penn, of Sheraden, endured those closures just over a decade ago. She now worries her family and community will be affected by the latest proposals for consolidating the city’s shrinking district.

Pittsburgh Public is reviewing a proposal to close 16 schools across the city and reconfigure the grade structure and magnet programs at many others. A revised set of recommendations is expected Oct. 15.

“I know it’s only been 10 years, but it just seems like they just changed everything. Now they want to go back,” she said, referring to the 2012 closures and shift toward the K-8 grade model.

“Why did you change it to begin with if you want to go back?”

Penn’s two oldest children were headed into the sixth and seventh grades at Schaeffer Intermediate, not far from the family’s home in Sheraden, when Pittsburgh Public announced its last round of school closures. At the start of the 2012-2013 school year, their school was to be merged with Schaeffer Primary in Crafton Heights and Thaddeus Stevens K-8 in Elliott.

Most students at the three schools were relocated to a newly reconfigured Langley K-8, which had housed Langley High School until that year.

“I remember the main concern with Langley was having the younger kids in the same building with the older teens,” Penn said.

But she said her fears were assuaged by Langley K-8’s new principal, who held a meeting that spring for families transitioning to the school. Penn recalled how the school’s auditorium filled up — the most community engagement she had seen in her time as a parent in the district.

“But it’s not the same this time around,” Penn said this summer. “I’m really concerned about what the future holds for Pittsburgh Public.”

Consultants at the helm of this latest plan have stressed that many aspects of the proposal could change when they present their final recommendations. The potential shakeup, however, has sparked concern from communities across the city.

For the city’s western edge the proposal suggests closing and consolidating the following schools:

• Whittier K-5 in Mount Washington would close. Students would be split between Westwood K-5 and Langley.
• Langley K-8 would be reconfigured as a K-5 school. Middle school students will go to Pittsburgh Classical 6-8. Magnet programming at Classical would be phased out.
• Carrick High School would close and merge with Brashear High School in Beechview. Carrick would be transformed into a districtwide career and technical education center.

In the city’s east and center regions, six school buildings have been identified for proposed closures. The south and north neighborhoods would each see three school closures if the proposal is passed.

While Penn’s two oldest children have since graduated from Pittsburgh Public, her two younger sons are now students at Langley K-8. That includes her 11-year-old, who is on the autism spectrum and “doesn’t deal well with change.”

She pointed out how transitioning between teachers and individualized education program [IEP] teams is challenging for her son, even within one school building.

“And then there’s a possibility that there’s going to be even more changes,” Penn said, referring to the current proposals. “I’m just like, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on.’”

Paired with other concerns about her children’s education, Penn said the uncertainty has made her question whether she wants to stick with the district at all.

Population loss underlies district ‘right-sizing’ of the 2000s

Longtime Sheraden residents, like Sarah Jones, say their neighborhood is one of Pittsburgh’s best-kept secrets. It’s home to a 52-acre woodland park and is well connected to the rest of the city via the West Busway.

“It’s so convenient to everything — to the airport, to the malls, Downtown,” Jones said.

But she also noted how her community has changed. Jones, who attended Langley High School in the 1960s, said she sees more people renting homes instead of buying there, and most of her kids have moved to the East End and nearby suburbs. The mom-and-pop shops of her childhood have long closed.

Christopher Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh, said Jones’s observations mirror a slow, citywide shift toward more renter-occupied housing — as much as 52.6% of homes in the city are renter-occupied, according to recent census data.

But Briem added that a more telling measure of population change is the decline in the city’s youth population. Pittsburgh’s under-18 population decreased by 13.3% in recent years.

“The number of children in the city of Pittsburgh was tremendously higher, not just even a decade ago, but going back 30 years or 40 years,” Briem said. “The potential children for local schools had a much bigger population base, and that’s been in decline.”

In a preliminary discussion of potential closures last year, the district’s chief financial officer said student enrollment has decreased by 25% since the last time PPS undertook consolidations. Buildings across the district have space for double the number of students they currently serve.

“Infrastructure lasts a lot longer than we expect it to, or at least a lot longer than the need and the number of children that were here in the peak of the baby boom,” Briem said.

In response to that decline, PPS has closed 42 school buildings in the past two decades. The district closed 10 schools in 2004. Two years later, it closed 18 school buildings as part of its 2006 Right-Sizing Plan under former superintendent Mark Roosevelt.

The Right-Sizing Plan reduced the number of schools in the district to 65 from 86. With that, it eliminated about 10,000 of the district’s nearly 13,710 empty seats. The plan was projected to save $10.3 million in annual operating costs.

By 2010, the district reduced its deficit to $7.6 million after peaking at $72 million in 2005.

The plan also expanded K-8 grade configurations in 10 schools, as a way of maximizing resources at smaller schools with fewer course offerings and students. With that, it created eight new Accelerated Learning Academies, a program to transform underperforming schools. Early childhood education programs were expanded, and facility upgrades like gyms and classrooms were added in some buildings.

The plan was intended to increase the racial diversity of the student population in schools. Today, 51% of the district’s student population is Black. However, racial disparities exist in some schools. Less than 30% of students at CAPA 6-12 are Black. At Montessori K-5, only 17% of students are Black. At other schools such as Westinghouse 6-12, more than 90% of students are Black.

Former board member Randall Taylor, who voted to pass the plan, said the decision to close schools based on academic achievement led to an onslaught of closures in Black communities. 17 of the 22 schools closed as part of the right-sizing plan were schools with a higher concentration of Black students.

Looking back, Taylor called the closures during his time on the board “an assault on communities.” Even so, he still maintained it was the right thing to do.

“I knew it was ultimately the right thing to do for students, and I knew that it could potentially open up more resources that could be used in the classroom to support our students,” Taylor said.

“But again, people have to be educated on that in the public, and that is the board’s responsibility to make sure the public is a part of this journey,” he continued.

The Right-Sizing Plan was followed up by a second District Realignment Plan just five years later, when seven school buildings were closed and the new Langley K-8 was opened. At the time, leaders had projected an operating deficit of $100 million by 2015, a defining metric in shaping the realignment plan, along with continuing enrollment decline and an excess seating capacity of 11,165 students.

The plan made changes to feeder patterns, as well as changing the instructional model to emphasize universal access to art, music and physical education offerings, increasing class sizes and staff reductions.

“I regret having had to do it,” said former superintendent Linda Lane, who oversaw the district during that time. “I wish it had been otherwise.”

But Lane said there wasn’t another option, given the district’s continued enrollment loss and subsequent financial hardship.

“In the case of a school, those costs are pretty significant taxpayer dollars,” Lane said. “And as someone who is charged with making the best use of taxpayer dollars, to pay to maintain buildings that are not in use or not in significant enough use is not a good use of money.”

Many buildings the district closed during that time have since been sold or demolished. Schaeffer Primary, for instance, is now a wholesale spice and seasoning store.

Michael McNamara, chief operations officer at PPS, said the district still owns a few of those closed buildings and has no immediate plans to sell them. Those include Northview Elementary in Northview Heights and Fort Pitt Elementary in Garfield. Knoxville Middle School is now being used as a warehouse.

McNamara added that the district is waiting to pass the Facilities Utilization Plan to consider different ideas on what to do with formerly and potentially closed buildings.

Closure effects vary, but impact undeniable

School closures nationwide have historically impacted predominantly Black communities disproportionately. One Stanford study from 2023 found that school closures often fail to account for racial disparities, with majority-Black schools more than three times as likely to be closed.

A 2016 third-party review of PPS’ operations and student outcomes found that the previous school closures had — along with its selective magnet programs — “contributed to disparities in educational opportunity and the unevenness of instructional programming across the district.”

Upon presenting their recommendations in August, Education Resource Strategies [ERS] consultants noted that 24% of the district’s Black students and 26% of Hispanic students would be impacted by the proposed school closures, compared to 18% of white students.

“There can also be broader economic impacts beyond the district itself, into the community,” said Maja Pehrson, a research analyst with the Philadelphia-based firm Research for Action.

In a recent brief on the effects of school closures, Pehrson and her colleagues wrote that the impact on student achievement varies by the type of closure, grade level of students displaced and student scores predating the closure.

One working paper found students who experienced a school closure had lower test scores and worse attendance, and were less likely than their peers to complete college. A study in Philadelphia found the decline in academic achievement was greatest among students in schools with the highest concentration of displaced students.

“The one thing that research has found pretty clearly is that it matters to send displaced students to a high-quality receiving school or the school that they go to next,” said Mary Eddins, a research associate at RFA.

Multiple studies found academic achievement among displaced students can increase when they’re moved to schools with “high levels of teacher attention and trust.”

At the same time, however, school closures are often accompanied by large-scale layoffs and can disproportionately impact teachers of color, who are more likely to have less class room experience. Closures can also lead to higher attrition rates in the years preceding and following them.

“If the motivations for a closure are strictly fiscal, like the district is trying to save money, we know that the savings are the greatest when it's closures and layoffs,” Eddins said.

The 2006 PPS Right-Sizing Plan resulted in 252 staffing positions being cut including administrators, teachers, paraprofessionals, clericals and custodial positions. The Realignment Plan of 2011 was expected to result in the loss of nearly 400 full-time positions; in 2012, staff salaries decreased by $17.5 million.

Lane said the district needs to look at the impact on racial diversity among staff and create a communication plan if it is considering layoffs.

“Often, especially with teachers, you can have a case where your teachers of color are less senior than white teachers, and so are you going to exit them?” she said.

According to the district’s 2010-2015 bargaining agreement with the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, layoffs were based solely on seniority, meaning teachers with less experience in the district were more likely to be laid off first.

Angela King Smith with ERS said that the consulting team has analyzed and discussed past school closures at Pittsburgh Public alongside an advisory committee of parents, community organizers, staff and students convened this summer.

Joseph Trawick-Smith, also at ERS, added that the final recommendations they expect to present in October are likely to be less seismic than those presented in August, and they give more consideration to the district’s painful history.

Trawick-Smith said they were considering options “that are looking at preserving some schools where we know they have been disproportionately impacted in the past.”

The right partners and supports

Shayla Penn’s older son, Sterling Penn, said he initially felt strange back in 2012, when he arrived in seventh grade and found himself in the building he had always anticipated attending for high school.

“I already knew it was pretty big,” Penn said. “But it was just weird because it basically makes every school from all sides of the West Side — and from different areas — all into one school.”

But Penn said he enjoyed getting to know new students from across the city, and he lived only a short walk from the school building. Some of his classmates, on the other hand, were not provided busing, and students coming from Stevens had to commute long distances.

Still, Penn said he would have preferred to keep Langley as a high school unique to his community, with its own sports teams and culture. He remembers hearing about tensions between the students at Brashear and Langley once the two schools were merged.

“There was a lot of South Side versus West Side stuff,” Penn said. “That got cleared up before I even got to Brashear, but I just know it would have been a lot different if I just had definitely went to the West Side school.”

Residents in the southern and western parts of the city have expressed fears that similar tensions could arise if Carrick and Brashear high schools are merged, as consultants proposed.

Research on the link between school consolidations and crime is limited, according to the RFA brief; one Chicago study suggested neighborhoods receiving students from closed schools experience a long-term increase in crime over a larger geographic area.

That same study and others, however, also found that crime reduced in the vicinity of the closed schools, resulting in an overall net reduction in crime.

“In terms of the students, I was proud of how they adapted,” Lane said. “The staff in the schools that were consolidated put their arms around them.”

Lane said it’s essential that the district put additional supports in place to help ease the transition for both staff and students in merged schools.

Similarly, some community members are hopeful that these potential new changes could be successful if well planned and implemented.

Keysha Gomez runs H.O.P.E. for Tomorrow, an after-school program for kids in and around Sheraden and a community partner at Langley K-8. She said she’s optimistic that further changes could benefit city schools and families “if you have the right community partners.”

But Gomez said poorly implemented, short-term change will only rattle families in the West End further. She added many families in her programs have sent their kids to charter or magnet schools because they feel neighborhood schools like Langley aren’t able to provide adequate education.

“I know that this pivot is going to get everybody off their footing, which is unfortunate,” Gomez said. “So if they're going to make that happen, it needs to be long-term.”

Jillian Forstadt is the education reporter at 90.5 WESA. She can be reached at jforstadt@wesa.fm.

Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at PublicSource. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org

This story was fact-checked by Ladimir Garcia.

This story was produced in a partnership between WESA and PublicSource.

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