The now shuttered Bon Air elementary sits just down the street from Heather Beveridge, its towering presence a reminder of the school experience her two children could have.
Ms. Beveridge homeschools her 5 and 3-year-old boys — she said people at her church do it, too — but if the school was open, she’d probably send them there. The small Pittsburgh neighborhood has been without a community school since the elementary closed in 2008.
Elementary children in her neighborhood today attend Roosevelt PreK-5 in Carrick, about a 30 minute walk from Bon Air. But Bon Air, and Ms. Beveridge, continue to struggle with the loss of the neighborhood school.
“There are kids here, but it’s hard to see,” she said, her sons running through sprinklers on a hot July day. “If the school was open, I’m sure we’d have a lot more friends.”
Bon Air’s closure was a shock for many. It came in the early 2000s when dozens of schools across the city were shuttered as the district faced a multimillion-dollar budget deficit. But those closures had lasting impacts on the city’s communities, forcing children on long bus routes and leaving buildings empty, some of which have been developed into luxury apartments.
Now, that history is front of mind for some as the district, which today operates 54 schools, once again contemplates closures and consolidations as financial issues and declining enrollments persist. Scenarios for possible footprint changes will be released this month.
“There comes a time when courageous leadership is not just desirable but necessary for the sustainability and the viability of our future,” Superintendent Wayne Walters said in April. “Now is the time.”
Pittsburgh Public’s conversations mirror those taking place across the region — Elizabeth Forward and Moon are considering closing elementary schools — and other U.S. cities are no different. Many have declining enrollments, an ongoing issue caused by shrinking birth rates and that was exacerbated by the pandemic. A Texas district recently closed two buildings and Boston Public Schools is considering closing as many as half of its schools after enrollment dropped 13% since 2006.
“What we’ve seen in Boston is what we’ve seen in every city across the country,” said Will Austin, founder and CEO of the Boston Schools Fund nonprofit, noting that school closure discussions were common in the 1980s through the 2000s due to low performance. “Now it’s a practical concern: We have too many schools for too little kids.”
Like national trends, Pittsburgh Public saw its most drastic footprint changes in the early 2000s.
The problem — Jake Oresick, a 2001 Pittsburgh Public graduate and author of “The Schenley Experiment: A Social History of Pittsburgh’s First Public High School,” said — was that in the years leading up to 2000, the district had done little to change its footprint. In the 1998-99 school year PPS operated 92 schools.
“I use the phrase that you never want to get to a point where you are catching up on 10 years worth of … laundry or cutting the grass or closing schools, to have to do all those things at once,” Mr. Oresick said.
School closures
By the time John Thompson, the district’s first Black superintendent, was hired in 2000 — the district then had a projected $36.5 million deficit — changes had to be made. Mr. Thompson quickly proposed a plan to close 15 schools in 2001 and three others the year after.
He immediately received pushback. The board at the time often disagreed with each other and Mr. Thompson, something many have attributed to racial tensions.
Still, the board narrowly voted in December 2000 to close 11 schools, including Bon Air, Spring Garden elementary in the North Side and Arlington Middle School in Mt. Oliver. But in the months that followed, three board members and then-Pittsburgh Mayor Thomas Murphy, fought to save the three schools. The board voted in 2001 to reopen the schools.
Mr. Thompson left Pittsburgh in 2005 with five months remaining in his contract.
Months later, facing declining enrollments and a budget deficit, the newly hired Superintendent Mark Roosevelt proposed 20 school closings and opening two new schools in existing buildings. In the end, 22 schools were closed including Spring Garden, which today is an early childhood center, and Bon Air. Arlington was turned into an elementary school.
The reclosure of Bon Air “was a gut punch,” Denise Kolenda, whose three children attended the elementary school, said. Bon Air today is home to more than 1,300 people, the majority of whom are white. The median household income is around $87,000, Niche, a Pittsburgh-based company that reviews school districts and colleges, found.
“In Bon Air, the school was all we had,” Ms. Kolenda said.
Today, the school is empty. It was sold in 2021, but it remains unclear what will happen to the building. Some residents are hoping for a green space, preferring that the building be demolished rather than turned into apartments.
“Kids were nurtured, they really were,” said Robin Schoss, a former teacher at Bon Air. She said her students raked leaves for senior citizens and helped put on a neighborhood-wide Halloween party each fall. “We involved kids in what it meant to be a part of a community. I think that’s missing now … you don’t get that in a school you don’t live near.”
Unlike Mr. Thompson, Mr. Roosevelt did not receive much pushback from the board. But many in the community believed his plan unfairly targeted communities of color, a common issue highlighted in school closures. An October analysis from Stanford found that majority-Black public schools are far more likely than others to be shuttered. Factors commonly attributed to the decision — such as declining enrollments and poor achievement — fail to account for the disparity.
“It impacted the poor neighborhoods and of course the African American communities much worse,” Mark Brentley, who served on the school board in the early 2000s, told the Post-Gazette last month. “And in my opinion they're still suffering.”
Knoxville Middle School, which was predominately Black, shuttered in 2008. Today it sits empty, spanning an entire block in the Knoxville community.
“Our reason for moving was that school. … Our kids never got to experience it,” said Kenny Wood, a father who bought a house in Knoxville for the school and the YMCA, both of which are now closed. “It’s not an eyesore, it’s a humanity sore.”
Sharlee Ellison, a former PPS teacher and Knoxville resident, said she doesn’t remember any meetings being held that warned Knoxville was closing. But the impacts, including shrinking populations across the neighborhood, are apparent because “people who have children don’t want to move up here because they don’t have a school to go to,” Ms. Ellison said.
Gary Jackson, a former custodian for PPS, agreed, adding that divestment in predominantly Black schools — whether it be classroom resources or the buildings themselves — leads to under enrollment and disproportionate closures.
“It comes down to money,” Mr. Wood said. “They won’t do it out there in Peters Township, Bethel Park, but they do it here.”
Since the 2000s, the district has closed other schools including Schenley High School, a controversial decision. And in 2021, the PPS proposed closing six schools, although the plan never happened. But as discussions heat up today, many families are already showing up to save their child’s school even before the district releases a final plan.
“Y'all have to stop this game,” Naomi Chambers, a Pittsburgh Public parent, said during an April rally with the advocacy group 412 Justice. “Start to invest in the schools. That’s how you invest in the families, that’s how you invest in education.”
Pittsburgh Public today
Carolyn Davis watched as teachers who spent their careers at East Hills Elementary School grappled with a new reality: the school they had called home for 30 years was closing.
“It was like a funeral,” Ms. Davis, the school’s former principal who spent months trying to save the building, said. “It really was, and we had … to honor how they felt because they opened that school when it was brand new and then they closed it. They went through a big transition.”
The building closed in 2007.
Ms. Davis saw firsthand how teachers and students are impacted by school closures. But she also sees aging buildings — district schools on average are 90 years old — and how resources are disproportionately split between schools (Allderdice in predominantly white Squirrel Hill offers 28 Advanced Placement classes compared to three at Perry in the predominantly Black Perry North neighborhood).
Because of that, Ms. Davis said “I would be in favor of seeing schools close that need to be closed based on finances of the building itself, equity for the quality of what the teachers will get and the quality of what the students would get.”
Ms. Davis was among a group of former PPS administrators who participated in the district’s first town hall meeting in June to collect public input on the ongoing facilities utilization plan.
So far, the district said it wants to streamline the class structure into PreK-5 and 6-8 rather than having PreK-8 and 6-12 schools. As for the actual buildings, consultants said that 37 need moderate or major renovations to make them almost like new.
“I know there’s probably no perfect way to do this work and have this conversation but I do think if we can all assume good intentions, that we can work together to be able to come up with a plan that our students can thrive in their educational experience,” school Director Devon Taliaferro said during a July town hall meeting.
The scenarios will be released in August. Afterwards, further public input sessions will be held.
“I just pray that the parents would begin to see what the district could be,” Ms. Davis said. “They’ve got to let go of their feelings, they’ve got to let go of what they think they want and really say, ‘What does our district look like,’ and ‘How can it become better?’”
First Published: August 3, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: August 3, 2024, 11:30 p.m.
