Dear Members of the Pittsburgh Board of Education:

As Pittsburgh Public School parents and community members, we respectfully request that you put forward and pass a resolution extending the timeline for voting on the District’s Facilities Utilization Plan.  

It is necessary to extend the timeline for voting on the District’s Facilities Utilization Plan (FUP) for the following reasons:

• Community Buy-In:  Our public school system is only as strong as its families and staff.  The district has struggled with plummeting enrollment numbers for years, and a hasty, half-baked decision to restructure the district will do nothing to stem the tide.  The FUP is an opportunity for transparency and building trust, elucidating common goals and clear, relevant decision-making criteria.  If the District rushes this process or is unclear in its messaging, it runs the risk of alienating families that are currently committed to the district and hurting its ability to attract new families.     

 

• Clear Criteria For Closures: Determining an appropriate set of criteria to support the Districts’ goals is a painstaking task that requires more time.  Further, once criteria has been identified, the supporting data must be located, validated and analyzed.  At present, the district seems to be considering infrastructure above all else.  We believe strongly that, at a minimum, academic achievement, community engagement, attendance rates, enrollment, and other factors critical to student success, should be critical criteria for decision making.

 

• Process Efficacy & Data Validation: As stakeholders in the PPS community we expect the District to employ a robust and effective process when making high-stakes decisions, such as those contemplated by the FUP. The District will require more time to gather and verify all relevant data points, including asking schools to verify the outdated facility data the District appears to rely upon, gain true feedback and insights from the community, and thoughtfully weigh and assess multiple restructuring options. Many of us who spend time in our buildings on a regular basis see substantial inaccuracies in the presented utilization and capacity numbers. In addition to that, more information made public after the last RTK request revealed inaccurate and inflated construction estimates that did not include any scope of work data. If this data is the basis for high-stakes decision making, the District must provide time to validate it. This concern has been expressed time and again by the community at all the public hearings and town halls. Several Board Directors echoed her sentiments and concerns about effectively being able to engage with the community/ To refresh your memory, here are some words used by you and your peers in that same meeting;
  
  • “If the timeline is going to be the enemy of this process, we may need to revisit the timeline and not allow it to undermine this opportunity. I understand that there are state requirements and recommendations, but we may need to go back to that subject and see how we can get around the obstacles. We would be wasting a lot of time and money if we allowed the timeline to be the major obstacle that it seems to be." -Sala Udin 
  • “There has to be a board conversation around the pros and cons of the current timeline. So, that’s why when the proposal was written it did adhere to a particular need of the board, in trying to inform a decision for budgetary decisions in December, however it is the will of the board to change that timeline, understanding what the ramifications of those decisions may be.” -Dr. Walters
  • “That is why I suggested the adjustment to the timeline, that it would allow us to engage in some more authentic dialogue before going into the public hearing space, because there are limitations within the public hearing space.” - Dr. Smith
  • “It seems like the ask of the board to consider delaying the vote, maybe we have talked around it, but I think we should just say how we feel about it. I think that if in your expertise in building out what you need to be able to do in order to do your job in this process, if it would be helpful to delay our process in voting in order to be able to extend our community engagement then I am supportive of that.”  - Devon Taliaferro 

 

• Long Term Plan: It will be wildly disruptive to close or restructure schools within the District*.  Any positive outcomes will be dwarfed if we find ourselves back here in four years, considering further closures.  The District should not close schools that have been fixtures in our communities for generations, without also implementing a plan to address the underlying issues that led us to this moment.  At present, the District seems to be ignoring the underlying problem: declining enrollment and increased payments to charter schools. The FUP may save money in the short term but unless it is finalized through a thorough and thoughtfully planning process and coupled with action from the District, it will only exacerbate the problem. Closing schools should not be a solution to which we readily resign ourselves.  Our children deserve access to quality education and it is disheartening to see the District behave as though it is willing to cede the District to charter schools.

We share the Districts’ desire to see PPS thrive and reach its full potential while meeting the diverse needs of the communities it serves. However, we are plagued by concerns about the process being employed for the FUP.  At present, it appears that the District is seeking data and input that validates a plan they have already developed—a plan that strongly resembles the hastily-crafted, hastily-abandoned school closure plan introduced in 2018 and 2021. 

The town hall meetings currently being hosted around the district are not formatted in a way to elicit sincere and genuine feedback and input from the community, or to provide clear and transparent information on the data the District has gathered. The District seems singularly focussed on using facility age and condition data to inform their decision without connecting the dots between old buildings and academic achievement. Even Mr. Udin echoed our sentiments in an Education Committee meeting, “The emphasis still seems to be on the facilities and not on performance and I think we have to change the emphasis from facilities and those physical resources…..those things are important but they are not as important as how well the students are learning.” We could not agree more with those sentiments. The District has not explained its fixation on infrastructure, rather than other factors more critical for assessing the quality of education children are receiving: academic outcomes; growth and achievement; absenteeism rates; parent, student and teacher satisfaction; and community engagement. Without these factors considered, the District is simply chasing a solution to a symptom—a looming financial deficit—rather than solving the broader problem and building a thriving district. 

More time is needed to address this problem thoughtfully, and with true community input and buy-in. We urge you to consider a resolution to extend the timeline on this process.   

With Hope For The Future,

Concerned families, students, and community members

*A list of articles and research on the topic of the impact of school closures on students and communities:
https://www.populardemocracy.org/news-and-publications/devastating-impact-school-closures-students-and-communities
https://consortium.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/2018-10/CCSRSchoolClosings-Final.pdf
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/post/school-closures-disproportionately-affect-disadvantaged-communities