Jason Boll sees Pittsburgh Public Schools\u2019 sweeping reconfiguration plan as a chance to serve city students better.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis plan is coming, and we mourn the loss of some really great places and spaces where people have memories,\u201d said Boll, a Perry High School teacher, during a panel discussion on North Side schools Monday night at the New Hazlett Theater.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we have this opportunity that\u2019s in front of us to build something that is better than what we\u2019ve had and not as good as it will be 10 years from now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The meeting, focused on the future of public education in the North Side, drew about 60 people.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do not want more families to choose to leave the city schools,\u201d said Chris Sweeney, co-chair of One Northside\u2019s education committee, which organized the event. \u201cThere is amazing potential for North Side schools if we can figure out how to tap into all the resources we have currently.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under the school district\u2019s Future-Ready Facilities Plan, approved by the school board in May, nine schools and 12 buildings will close.<\/p>\n
A number of North Side schools are affected. Allegheny 6-8, King K-8 and Manchester K-8 will close at the end of this school year. Allegheny PreK-5 will relocate to the King facility and become a dedicated, neighborhood elementary school. Morrow will also become a dedicated elementary school.<\/p>\n
The Allegheny building will become the new home of Schiller 6-8 neighborhood middle school.<\/p>\n
A new, early childhood center will open in the Allegheny Annex, beside the school, and the district is renovating its Northview Heights facility to serve as a kindergarten through fifth grade elementary school and English Language Development center in the 2029-30 school year. When Northview opens, Spring Hill will close.<\/p>\n
The plan, as a whole, has faced significant community pushback, with concerns over equity, student disruption and its execution. <\/p>\n
Monday\u2019s meeting struck an optimistic tone.<\/p>\n
Sweeney said the One Northside group did not advocate for or against the school closure plan.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see this as an opportunity to provide input for schools remaining open \u2014 how can we make these schools the best they possibly can be?\u201d he said of Monday\u2019s meeting.<\/p>\n
Middle school<\/p>\n
Boll is excited for the neighborhood middle school at the Allegheny building. Unlike now, middle school students will be under one roof from sixth to eighth grades before attending Perry for high school.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope people take away that this is the moment, this is the time to push on people that our voice is being heard and to create something better than what we have, with all due respect to what we have,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Parent Hallie Thyben, of Marshall-Shadeland, agrees that the middle school has great potential. Her son, Arthur, 10, is in fifth grade at Allegheny.<\/p>\n
Still, Thyben has questions and concerns over how the plan will shake out, and plans to be involved in the process as much as possible. She hopes the schools can lean on help from community partners through the transition.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe middle school has such an opportunity to be a model for other middle schools in the state and further, if we do it right,\u201d Thyben said. \u201cWe have 10 months \u2014 you want it to be the best middle school it can be.\u201d<\/p>\n
The director of curriculum and development in the Burrell School District, Autumn Turk, was a panelist at Monday\u2019s meeting.<\/p>\n
A reconfiguration of the Burrell schools last year created the opportunity for \u201cstudios,\u201d personalized-learning classes that cater to students\u2019 interests instead of traditional arts and humanities courses.<\/p>\n
As a result, those students and teachers are more excited to engage in coursework and attend school, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter we got past that hurdle of things being a little hard, some beauty started to emerge,\u201d Turk said. \u201cOur teachers were really excited and rejuvenated about teaching again. Kids were really excited because not only did they have these studio-based experiences connected to the real world, they had choice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Changing the narrative<\/p>\n
The panel also touched on the realities and inequities in North Side schools.<\/p>\n
The North Side schools have a 42% capture rate, meaning 2,382 students who live in the North Side attend a public school there, said James Fogarty, executive director of A+ Schools, an educational advocacy nonprofit focused on city public schools.<\/p>\n
Perry\u2019s enrollment has grown from 2020 to 2025. Still, Fogarty said, smaller Pittsburgh Public schools don\u2019t offer the same opportunities others do. King, Manchester and Morrow did not offer Algebra I classes.<\/p>\n
At the high school level, Perry in the 2023-24 school year only offered four Advanced Placement classes, Fogarty said, while Allderdice in Squirrel Hill had 30. However, Perry is now offering four college in high school classes through a partnership with the University of Pittsburgh, he said.<\/p>\n
Fogarty said the statistics have ripple effects: In the class of 2019, less than 10 graduates from Perry, Westinghouse and UPrep (Milliones) went on to complete college or trade school.<\/p>\n
Dawn Gordon, King\u2019s principal, said many of her students are faced with food insecurity, housing instability and trauma all before they arrive at school. About 84% of King students are considered economically disadvantaged.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy priority at Pittsburgh King has really become: \u2018How do we service the child as a whole, and how do we provide not just the students with what they need, but also the educators who are in front of them to be able to service them?\u201d Gordon said.<\/p>\n
This year, King started the Healing Project, which provides trauma-informed care with teachers, Gordon said. In turn, that will better train them to educate students.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are an educational institution first, but we also know before we can even get to that part, we have to address the challenges that our students are walking into school with,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
At King, 13% of students in the 2024-25 school year were proficient on the English Language Arts state assessments, according to state reporting. Just less than 3% were so on state testing for math.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough those are what our test scores look like \u2014 and they give me chills every time I see them \u2014 it\u2019s not a matter of our kids cannot read, or our kids can\u2019t do math,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cWhat are the challenges and the distractions that they\u2019re dealing with, when they go to those math classes or they go to the reading classes, and that\u2019s really what we\u2019re trying to focus on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gordon is also trying to reverse the narrative that King is a \u201cbad school.\u201d She highlighted the district\u2019s Welcome Wednesdays initiative, where parents can schedule a tour of the school during the school day, tutoring and student-teaching partnerships with Duquesne and Point Park universities, and the school\u2019s step team performing with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.<\/p>\n
Those are examples of how community organizations can work together with schools, said Dennis Henderson, executive director of the Manchester Youth Development Center. He hoped the meeting was the launch of organizations intentionally working together with public schools.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re very fortunate to have such a diverse plethora of resources for kids in this region,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of times, though, we fail to recognize the tremendous amount of resources we have for youth right here on the North Side.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prior to becoming King\u2019s principal, Gordon worked at UPrep, in the Hill District, and Westinghouse, in Homewood.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see myself doing a lot of comparisons of, \u2018The East Side had this, but the North Side didn\u2019t have this,\u2019 \u201d she said. \u201cMy hope in the next five years with the transition is that the same opportunities and access that I\u2019ve seen my East Side students having access to, my North Side students will have access to, and that we\u2019ll start to see equity within our schools on both the East Side, the North Side, the West and the South.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jason Boll sees Pittsburgh Public Schools\u2019 sweeping reconfiguration plan as a chance to serve city students better. \u201cThis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-291289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}