• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

New School Closing Plan Caps 10 Years of Struggle

Posted on: Friday, 25 November 2005, 21:00 CST

By Eleanor Chute, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Nov. 25--For about a decade, Pittsburgh Public Schools have wrestled with which schools to close, which programs to offer and where to send students.

By the time new Superintendent Mark Roosevelt presented his vision earlier this month, most schools in Pittsburgh had been on one list or another to close, receive students from a closing school, get a new program, or change a feeder pattern, which is the area from which a school draws students.

It has been a gut-wrenching decade as parents -- sometimes repeatedly for the same school -- have fought to save their schools, through strategies ranging from vocal crowds wearing school T-shirts and children pleading at public hearings to individual board members being persuaded behind the scenes.

Now, faced with declining enrollment and growing deficits, Mr. Roosevelt says, "We need to get this done and get it behind us."

This time, he says, emotion won't rule.

Any changes in the plan will be made by Mr. Roosevelt -- the board has agreed to vote his final recommendation up or down in February -- based on whether the changes meet his goals of improving academics and cost-effectiveness. A special public hearing is scheduled for Tuesday at board headquarters.

Mr. Roosevelt took a new approach in his "right-sizing" plan, adding academic performance to the equation. But he still has to deal with old problems of excess seats and aging buildings.

So his list includes some perennial favorites that have survived other closing attempts as well as some new closings, particularly of low-performing elementary schools.

One new idea is closing the Schenley High School building in Oakland because costly repairs are needed and moving the students to a renovated Reizenstein building in Shadyside. Reizenstein would close as a middle school in June and reopen after renovations with the name Schenley in fall 2007.

Other newcomers to the school closing list are these elementary schools: Burgwin in Hazelwood, Chatham on the North Side, East Hills, Friendship, Madison in the Hill District and Morningside. Some had been discussed before but never made a formal list. Burgwin just last year was approved to expand to a K-8 one year at a time. Morningside was closed, reopened in 1996 and then expanded to a K-8.

Some of the perennial favorites include all three elementary schools that were saved from closing last fall: Bon Air, Mann and Schaeffer.

The amount of overlap in school closing plans is most obvious comparing recommendations made by consultants in 1997 at a cost of $510,000 to the school district. Using a bricks-and-mortar approach, they recommended closing 21 buildings, opening nine new ones and renovating 31 others over 10 years.

The board balked at implementing the ideas. "I don't see much of this happening," said then board member Evelyn Neiser at the time.

Most of the new schools were never built.

But when it comes to closings, all but four will have been closed by next fall -- nine tumultuous years later -- counting Mr. Roosevelt's plan and other school closings that already have taken place. A few of the closed buildings, though, have been transformed into other schools.

The four remaining that still will remain open are McNaugher, a special education center on the North Side; Spring Hill Elementary on the North Side; Woolslair Elementary in Bloomfield and Roosevelt Elementary in Carrick, which moved to a renovated Catholic school in recent years.

The math on the number of school closings isn't easy because some school buildings have closed and reopened or become another school. New schools have been started in new or existing buildings, and some programs have been moved.

But the cuts that have taken place since 1997 coupled with Mr. Roosevelt's proposal are deeper than those envisioned in the 1997 report. At that time, considering new schools to be opened, there would have been a net loss of 12 school buildings.

Last year under the leadership of then Superintendent John Thompson, the school board voted to close 12 schools, two of which remain open. Mr. Roosevelt is proposing 20 school closings and opening two new schools in existing buildings.

But the bottom line is there are to be 25 fewer schools -- and 28 fewer school buildings -- than there were in 1997 when the district had 93 schools in 90 buildings. Roosevelt's plan would reduce the current number of 86 schools in 80 buildings to 68 schools in 62 buildings.

The move toward changing schools and their feeder patterns -- called redistricting, realignment or resource reallocation over the years -- began in the mid 1990s with a push for neighborhood schools.

The district operates feeder schools, where students are assigned based on residence, and magnet schools, which students attend by choice. Magnet schools are intended to be racially balanced and typically use a lottery if too many students sign up. The district also has some special schools, such as those for special education.

During the 1990s, changes focusing on neighborhood schools resulted in the dismantling of portions of the district's desegregation plan, particularly requirements that some students had to cross a river to attend a feeder school.

The changes also resulted in altering the grade levels in some schools and creating some new schools, including South Hill Middle in Beechview and Rooney Middle in Brighton Heights.

For many years, the district has struggled with deficits, but the situation has gotten worse as it now faces a $47 million budget deficit next year.

In addition, enrollment has been steadily declining, from its recent high of 40,181 in 1997-98 to 31,148 this fall. The district also has 1,381 children in pre-kindergarten and Head Start. Mr. Roosevelt said he has considered the growing needs of pre-kindergarten education in the plan.

Richard Fellers, the district's chief of operations, said the district didn't dust off the 1997 report because so much had changed over the decade.

But he said the 1997 report "started us really looking hard at the fact we weren't being very efficient in the way we operated our schools."

Mr. Roosevelt and his team reached conclusions similar to the 1997 report about closing seven buildings: Bon Air, Schaeffer, McCleary, Miller and Morningside elementary schools; Washington Polytechnic Academy, a magnet middle school; and Boggs Avenue administrative building.

There are some differences in where the students would go, and Mr. Roosevelt wants to use the Washington building, this time for alternative education programs.

Those programs are now in the Baxter building in Homewood, which the 1997 report proposed closing and briefly closed after the Pittsburgh High School for the Performing Arts moved from there to a new facility Downtown two years ago. Now Mr. Roosevelt would close the Rogers building in Garfield and move the middle school magnet for creative and performing arts to Baxter.

While portions of Mr. Roosevelt's plan weren't suggested by the consultants in 1997, his plan also includes some ideas that have been in school closing plans proposed by Dr. Thompson and others but never flew.

Mr. Roosevelt would add a new K-5 school to the Arsenal Middle School building in Lawrenceville, which would continue to house grades 6 to 8. The idea is similar to a plan approved in 2000 -- and later rescinded -- that would have closed McCleary in Lawrenceville and opened a K-5 in Arsenal in 2002.

Mr. Roosevelt also would close Greenway Middle and open a new K-8 school there.

In 2004, Dr. Thompson unsuccessfully proposed closing Greenway and moving its students to a wing of Langley High School, much as South Hills Middle is in a wing of Brashear High School. Greenway would have become an administrative building.

Mr. Roosevelt's plan appears to lay to rest any suggestions that middle schools wings should be put in unused space within high schools, as was approved in 1998 but never done at Allderdice and Peabody high schools.

The new plan instead favors expanding K-5 schools to K-8, as it proposes for 10 schools.

The 1997 consultants report was done by a team of then Ingraham Planning Associates; Kingsland, Scott, Bauer, Havekotte Architects; Eichleay Engineers; and Timothy Engineering.

Education facilities planner Dan Dancu of Ingraham Dancu Associates of Butler and South Carolina was glad to see many of the changes suggested in 1997 have been enacted or proposed.

"This will save Pittsburgh residents a lot of money by doing this, if it's done right," he said.

-----

To see more of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.post-gazette.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

More News in this Category