After a long evening spent with other dissenting writers in 2001, I hailed a rickshaw to take me home. Previously, a ride late at night in my hometown, Barishal, Bangladesh, would not have worried me, but this was an anxious time. 

A few months prior, two political parties, the Jamaat-e-Islami and Bangladesh Nationalist Party, unexpectedly formed a coalition government around Islamist, nationalist principles. Just 16, I was among an angry younger generation who knew the Jamaat-e-Islami as an Islamist party that helped the Pakistani army kill hundreds of thousands of people during the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh. 

Now the party controlled our beloved country again. They committed some barbaric acts, such as burning houses belonging to Hindus, a minority religious group in Bangladesh. I began publishing a literary magazine with editorials criticizing the new government, and the local Jamaat-e-Islami members took notice.

As the rickshaw pulled onto the street where my family lived, a group of men with handkerchiefs covering their faces were waiting for me. The rickshaw driver vanished in fear, and I felt a sharp pain from being stabbed on my left side. I ran toward our apartment, banged on the door and screamed in pain as the group fled the scene. Though my clothes today conceal the 5-inch scar carved into me that night, the memory is still fresh.

I’m not alone among refugees in having such nightmarish memories, nor in my decision to share them. As war, political unrest and climate change drive ever-larger numbers of people to flee their homelands, it’s easy for societies on the receiving end of the flow to wonder: Why don’t people stay home? Why don’t they fight to improve their countries?

For me, the answer is: I tried.

Kidnapped at gunpoint

Being attacked didn’t stop me; I recovered and fervently published more. I wrote for other magazines across the country. A few years passed, and the looming general election bred hope that the final days of the dual-party coalition government were drawing near. 

On a chilly night in 2006, I was again reminded that my writing was not considered appropriate by everyone. While walking home, I was kidnapped at gunpoint by a government law-enforcement agency.

The commanding officer put his 9mm pistol to my head and asked, “How cold is it?” Then his team blindfolded me, beat me with wooden sticks and squished me in the back floorboard of the car. 

I remember the painful pressure as they pushed their feet on me. I assumed they would take me to their headquarters, but they drove me out of town, removed the blindfold and told me to get out of the car. As I looked around and saw a field, I heard someone say, “The last moment of your life has arrived.” I tasted blood, and though my mouth was bleeding, I could not reach up to wipe as my hands were tied behind my back. 

I next remember them driving me to their heavily militarized station with tall brick walls, where I was continuously beaten for the next four hours. Hog-tied, my hands were restrained in front of me, and my legs were lashed to a metal pole. I was interrogated about my writing; they wanted to know why I was mad at the Islamist leadership. Toward the end of the questioning, a doctor entered the room and gave me some medicine. I did not trust him, so I discreetly spat the pills out after he departed.

I could not sleep the whole night as I watched the sky from my tiny prison window. I remember understanding that night the value of art in a time of emergency, and I promised myself I would never be compromised in this regard. The next evening, they left me on the street and told me to leave the town before the election.

On an al-Qaida-related hit list

But I didn’t leave because I had important university exams to take.

The elite force returned to my house a week later. I was afraid, so I went into hiding in a neighboring town. Using a pen name, I continued writing newspaper articles advocating for a more secular Bangladesh.

After the coalition government lost the election a few months later, I felt it was safe and returned to my hometown. I continued writing and publishing and reading my poetry at public gatherings, marches and candlelight vigils as part of a nationwide effort led by activists and bloggers in 2013 pushing for a trial against prominent Islamist leaders accused of war crimes dating back to 1971.

Fundamentalist groups started counter-protests and declared war against the activists and the bloggers. In 2015, a local al-Qaida-related militant organization published hit lists, and one for my hometown included three poets, myself included. I went to the police for protection, but they made copies of my writing. Feeling unsafe, I went into hiding.

I went to my relatives in a nearby village, but they had seen the list on TV and in newspapers and were terrified. I spent one night with them and then went 10 hours away to Chittagong, the second largest city in Bangladesh, and lived with a friend. Later, when I realized someone had started following me, I left and moved through four different cities. 

I received news that two different militant groups attacked two publication houses at the same time. One publisher was killed, and three other people were injured. During these attacks, the publishers’ pictures were broadcast in the media, and old video footage of me speaking was included, putting me at even greater risk.

From disorientation to blending in

Like fellow writers being persecuted in Bangladesh, I applied to the International Cities of Refuge Network in Norway. I was very fortunate that soon after, Carnegie Mellon University invited me to be a visiting scholar, and City of Asylum invited me to join their Exiled Writer and Artist Residency Program. I left Bangladesh in 2016 and moved to Pittsburgh’s North Side. During the month I arrived, I learned that four writers were killed in Bangladesh and I received additional threats, so I decided to apply for asylum.

I was depressed that I had to leave behind my life, my family and my belongings, but I was relieved that I didn’t need to look behind my shoulder to see if an assassin was following me. The support from the City of Asylum was life-changing as I was provided a stipend, a quiet, furnished house and other support as needed.

I felt safe and secure in this house, and it enabled me to complete a poetry manuscript in which I shared my experiences in exile, and my debut book, “Exile Poems”, published in 2022 by Pittsburgh-based press Bridge & Tunnel Books.

I also wrote my first novel, about the persecution of the Hindu religious minority in Bangladesh, which I was unable to write when I lived in Bangladesh because of the fatal consequences for writers who question religious-based oppression. Though I miss my friends back home, I am fortunate to have made good friends here with whom I can share my thoughts and concerns. My neighbors have been welcoming; even those I don’t know will often wave hello as they pass by. 

I had never left my home country before I came to Pittsburgh, and moving to an unknown place where people speak a different language and share different customs felt disorientating when I first arrived.

Local organizations that help immigrants navigate life in Pittsburgh, such as Literacy Pittsburgh and Jewish Family and Children’s Services, offered me long-term English classes, computer training and other career development services. I received a grant to translate my works from Bengali to English from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, which enables me to continue writing as I connect my former life as a dissident in Bangladesh to my new identity in Pittsburgh, thus bridging my own culture with my audience here in Pittsburgh. 

Though coming to Pittsburgh provided me with safety and protection, standing up for literary and political freedom required me to physically separate myself from my family and homeland — an immense pain that I feel every moment. My initial culture shock has lessened over the years, which suggests to me I have become more blended into American society.

At a recent poetry event in Pittsburgh, Jason Irwin read his poem, “Darién Gap,” which describes the dangerous journeys of asylum seekers who cross the jungle in Panama to reach the United States. Though I had a different path, I relate to their experiences, and I know that I will continue to fight for the freedom of expression because it’s worth risking everything to ensure basic human rights are protected. 

Tuhin Das is a Bangladeshi writer who lives in Pittsburgh and former writer-in-residence at City of Asylum and can be reached at dastuhinbd@gmail.com.

The post Facing tyranny, I tried to stay and fight with my pen, but had to flee for my life to Pittsburgh appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Appeals of Allegheny County property assessments, unleashed by a lawsuit, are starting to bite into the revenues of governments, notably in already strained Mon Valley communities. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, has stayed above water, because rising residential value has outstripped slashed skyscraper tax bills — so far.

Unbalanced
How property tax assessments create winners and losers

As thousands of pending appeals threaten to upend municipal and school budgets, County Executive Sara Innamorato is taking a cautious path on one of her key campaign planks supporting routine countywide reassessments.

A reassessment would come with political costs for Innamorato and monetary costs for some individual property owners. (It could also cost her personally, by boosting the low tax bill on her Upper Lawrenceville house.) But experts say it’s the cure for a defective system that currently overtaxes some and undertaxes others.

Even with most of last year’s appeals as-yet undecided, some municipalities saw a drop in taxable assessed value in the last two years, with much of the downturn coming in Mon Valley communities that are hurting economically. Fifty of the county’s 130 municipalities lost taxable value since the start of 2022; Homestead (10%), West Homestead (6%) and Clairton (4%) saw the biggest percentages of their tax base disappear.

Property owners filed an unusually large number of assessment appeals last year. That’s because a court ordered a change in the math used to calculate assessments determined by appeals, making it more favorable to owners.

Owners of large commercial buildings appealed en masse and are expected to win significant cuts to their assessed values, lowering their tax bills. Already, three of the dozens of Downtown towers have won appeals and seen significant tax relief. 

When big property owners saw the new tax math, “they jumped on it,” said Dominick Gambino, a local government consultant who managed the county’s assessment office from 2001 to 2003. He added that yet another change in the tax math, taking effect this year, could cause a fresh round of appeals.

While Pittsburgh’s assessed value rose 1.87% from 2022 to 2024, a PublicSource review found, a decline has already begun Downtown. 

Assessed value in the city’s 2nd Ward, which spans much of Downtown and the Strip District, dropped 3.73% during that time period, shedding more than $112 million in assessed value. Using current tax rates — measured in mills — that $112 million represents more than $900,000 in lost tax revenue for the city and $1.2 million for the city school district. And appeals for dozens more commercial properties are still pending. 

So far, value has increased enough in residential neighborhoods to make up for Downtown’s problems. The 6th Ward, in Lower Lawrenceville, saw a whopping 30% increase in assessed value ($130.2 million in taxable value). The 5th (Hill District), 16th (South Hills) and 17th (South Side) wards each increased between 9% and 13%.

But the math is unlikely to favor taxing bodies for much longer.

Looming crisis

The successful Downtown appeals are “just the beginning” of the wave of assessment cuts Downtown, said Chris Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research. “I think what’s in the news of late of the percentage declines in these big buildings are probably typical of what most Downtown buildings will get in the short term.”

Six-figure tax bill decreases for dozens of commercial properties would have a devastating effect on the city and school district. The city is facing a razor-thin budget in the near future with an operating surplus of just a few million dollars. The school district is already operating at a deficit and is considering plans to close school buildings to cut costs.  

“One way or the other, property values Downtown are coming down,” Briem said. “It’s probably going to force a millage increase on everyone else.” That would effectively raise tax bills on property owners throughout the city to make up for the lost revenue coming from Downtown.

While Downtown owners will see lower tax bills, Briem said they are hardly winners in the situation. 

“They’ve lost, they’ve lost a lot and they’re going to keep losing,” Briem said, because decreased demand for office space since the start of the pandemic has crushed commercial building revenue. The assessment cuts are “reflecting that reality.”

Pittsburgh Public Schools solicitor sounded the alarm in a January interview.

“If these large reductions that have occurred Downtown and will continue to occur, they simply do not have financial wherewithal to sustain that,” solicitor Ira Weiss said.

Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey’s office took a less dire tone. 

“Budget wise, the team forecasted the possibility of reduced real estate tax revenue,” said city press secretary Olga George. “Currently, Finance and [the Office of Management and Budget] are watching how real estate collections are processing.”

The mayor’s 2024 budget does not forecast a drop in real estate tax revenue. This year’s budget plans for a number slightly higher than last year’s, and the city’s five-year plan projects increases each year.

George said the city is assessing new valuations and deciding whether to contest them in court. 

Peter McDevitt, the budget director for Pittsburgh City Council, said it’s too early and there are too many variables to “hit the panic button,” but the city could eventually be forced to find new revenue or cut services. “Raising millage is not the only avenue, but it’s the most viable one” to raise revenue, he said. 

The county’s $1.1 billion operating budget, which relies on property taxes for around 37% of its revenue, is not in danger of a shortfall, according to county spokesperson Abigail Gardner.

Reassessment vs. ratios

Experts including Briem and Gambino say the fix for the county’s assessment woes lies in conducting routine, countywide reassessments — a concept Innamorato has endorsed, as long as it can be done with new protections for vulnerable taxpayers. 

Gardner confirmed that Innamorato continues to believe “that a reassessment would be a more fair and equitable way to determine values,” adding that “there are no immediate plans to engage in a reassessment.” The real estate market is shifting, she wrote in response to questions, prompting “a reimagining of how to keep our Downtown thriving.”

The last time the county reassessed all its properties was in 2013,after a judge ordered then-County Executive Rich Fitzgerald to do so. Fitzgerald never did so again.

Pennsylvania allows counties to leave decades-old assessments in place, subject to appeals where there’s evidence of rising value. 

In counties that use this “base-year” approach, properties without improvements or recent sales generally keep the same assessments each year. Where there’s evidence of a change in value, the owner or a taxing body can file an appeal.

When an appeal is filed in Allegheny County, the Board of Property Assessment Appeals and Review assigns a new fair market value. That value is multiplied by the common level ratio [CLR] to come up with an assessment.

The CLR is meant to adjust appeal-generated assessments to resemble those last set in the base year. But a lawsuit revealed that the county submitted flawed data for the calculation of the CLR, and a judge forced its reduction. 

For appeals filed in Allegheny County this year, the fair market value will be multiplied by 0.545 to determine the assessment, meaning a property with a post-appeal value of $100,000 would be assessed at $54,500. By contrast, for appeals filed in 2021, the ratio was 0.875, meaning that same property would have been assessed at $87,500. 

Property owners whose assessments were boosted in prior year appeals may appeal now, and use the lower CLR to push their assessments down. The ratio, though, won’t help owners whose property values have soared.

Your tax depends on when you bought

Despite the change in the ratio, tax bills in Allegheny County continue to be driven less by the value of the property than the date of purchase. The wild variances in assessments are evident on the streets of the current and prior county executives.

Fitzgerald arguably benefits to the tune of thousands of dollars per year from his decision not to reassess.

He bought his house in Point Breeze in 1989 for $202,000. Because the county doesn’t regularly reassess, his tax bill has remained static, even as property values have soared.

A next-door neighbor bought a similarly sized house in 2021 for $970,095. That price drew an assessment appeal by the Pittsburgh Public Schools, and a resulting fair market value of $616,000.

The neighbor’s total annual tax bill — county, city and school district — is around $3,000 higher than Fitzgerald’s.

Innamorato could lose out financially under the scenario she proposed during her campaign for executive. She has said she'd like to reassess all properties, while increasing existing tax breaks for homeowners and seniors and adding protections for longtime owner-occupants.

Innamorato bought her row house in Upper Lawrenceville for $71,000 in 2015. On the same side of the same block is a house that’s around 20% larger (though it’s not a row house). Purchased during the Lawrenceville real estate boom, it is subject to a tax bill around five times higher.

Gambino said the current system, with no reassessments and one CLR for the entire county, is unfair because different areas have appreciated at different rates since 2013 — meaning homeowners in low-appreciation markets are subject to the same ratio as those in high-appreciation areas.

The base-year system is “something Robin Hood’s evil twin would condone,” Gambino said. “All this talk about reduction and refunds, these are all symptoms of a sickness called the base-year scheme.”

Plight of boroughs

Seth Abrams feels conflicted. On a personal level, a countywide reassessment would cost him money. He bought his home 13 years ago and said it has appreciated significantly since the last time the county assessed its value.

But Abrams is the borough manager for Munhall, a place that stands to lose a lot of money in pending appeals. Just one appeal, by the Lowe’s hardware store in the Waterfront, has already cost the borough $50,000 in annual revenue, enough to wipe out a cushion he had planned for the 2024 budget.

Now, the possibility of a millage increase weighs on him as more appeals, including some from U.S. Steel, are pending.

“If [U.S. Steel] got something along the lines of what Lowe’s got and they got their assessment cut in half, that’s another $60,000 or $70,000 loss that I’m trying not to factor into things right now,” Abrams said. “That would mean that we would have to dig into the reserves, we would have to look at all of our fees and our taxes.

“People will see increased costs if this trend of losing taxable value continues.”

Despite the implications to his personal tax bill, as a professional, Abrams wants to see a reassessment. 

“I need to look out for the needs of an entire community. In Munhall, I’m looking at 5,000 or 6,000 residences. For me, I’m looking at one.”

Assessed values dropped from 2022-2024 in numerous Mon Valley communities near Munhall, showing Abrams’ problems are shared by his peers in other towns. Many of those municipalities and the adjacent school districts already have some of the county’s highest millage rates, giving them less margin to raise the levy.

Clairton will have to deal with the outcome of 32 parcels under appeals filed by U.S. Steel, which operates the Clairton Coke Works there. Clairton Mayor Rich Lattanzi told PublicSource in April that the steelmaker accounts for about one-third of its tax base, and the revenue loss from appeals could “be catastrophic for the City of Clairton.”

Charlie Wolfson is PublicSource’s local government reporter and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.

Rich Lord is PublicSource’s managing editor, and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.

This story was fact-checked by Delaney Rauscher Adams.

The post Property tax appeals erode budgets as assessment burden shifts appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

This story was originally published by NEXTpittsburgh, a news partner of PublicSource. NEXTpittsburgh features the people, projects and places advancing the region and the innovative and cool things happening here. Sign up to get their free newsletter.

Pittsburgh’s Downtown will soon see an expanded space dedicated to starting and accelerating Black businesses through mentorship and networking.

The Greenwood Plan, a Black-founded and Black-led nonprofit committed to advancing economic justice for Black communities through education, networking and resources, recently acquired the Pitt Building on the corner of Smithfield Street and Boulevard of the Allies through Greenwood Smithfield LLC, its subsidiary company. 

Founded in 2021 by Khamil Bailey and Samantha Black, the Greenwood Plan developed from a one-week Black entrepreneurial conference called Greenwood Week. That program began in 2018 and brought local entrepreneurs together to share experiences and resources.

“People believed that, ‘If someone comes from the same place as me and had similar hurdles, I could also do that thing,’” says Bailey, the executive director. “From that, we decided to expand into year-round programming, and that’s how the nonprofit came to be.”

The Black Business Conference, Greenwood Week, occurs each October. The conference includes networking, performances and classes that fall under five pillars of health: environmental, physical, mental, financial and spiritual. 

“It’s almost our pep rally for the year,” Bailey adds. “Everybody gets riled up about starting a business, running a business and exploring business.”

The Greenwood Plan focuses on intentional resource redirection, economic justice, business growth and sustainment and socioeconomic guidance. The aim is to eliminate barriers for Black entrepreneurs.

In addition to its Greenwood Week conference, the Greenwood Plan hosts industry-specific summits and recently added an arts organizing program for creative entrepreneurs. It also provides $500 mini-grants to Black businesses to alleviate business costs.

It works with the state’s Department of General Services to help Black businesses win state contracts. It also collaborates with the Urban Redevelopment Authority and Bridgeway Capital.

Shannel Lamere first attended a Greenwood Week conference in 2019 and began doing film and photography for Greenwood. She now owns and operates Shannel Lamere Films.

“She has grown with us over the past four years,” Bailey says. “People will give their talent, their treasure and come to us when they need things that we can provide, which a lot of the time is audience.”

Permanent space for Black business acceleration

Bailey received a LinkedIn message shortly after founding the Greenwood Plan in 2021 from the manager of the America’s Club co-working space, formerly in the Pitt Building. The club was looking to bring in more diverse entrepreneurs. After a tour, the Greenwood Plan became a member.

“We found ourselves making coffee, straightening up and tidying the space, and just greeting people when they came in the door,” Bailey says. “So we took a bit of ownership in it.”

In November 2021, the Greenwood Plan took out a lease on the space, renaming it Emerald City Pittsburgh. The 12,000-foot co-working space is dedicated to boosting Black entrepreneurship and wealth. That is when Bailey learned of other vacancies in the building. 

“We thought if we’re going to fill up the vacancy, we probably should just own the building,” she adds.

The effort received $1 million from the state’s Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program. The space will become an incubation and accelerator space with commercial storefronts, mentorship programs and networking opportunities for Black business owners. 

Russell General Contracting, a Black-owned family business, is leading the consulting for renovating the building.

In addition to Emerald City, the three-story building has a Cricket Wireless store and a mutual aid nonprofit. The third floor, which is currently a gym, is slated to become an event and assembly space.

“It has vaulted ceilings and breathtaking skylights,” Bailey adds. “We always knew this would be the next space for the building because people need to get their eyes on it.”

Third-floor renovations are scheduled to begin in February. 

Pittsburgh has a rich history of Black entrepreneurship. Bailey says that is at the forefront of creating the new space and ensuring that business leaders get the support they need.

“We want to remind people of the history that has already existed here,” Bailey says. “Black entrepreneurship is not new. Out of necessity, Black entrepreneurship has thrived.

“We’re at a point now where it is necessary again for Black entrepreneurship to grow to be able to take care of the communities that exist here.”

Ethan Woodfill is a freelance journalist interested in telling the stories of people doing great things to build community and sustainability.

The post Greenwood Plan to bring business accelerator Downtown to aid Black enterprises appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Cate Guilfoyle, a senior at Allderdice High School, learned of Pittsburgh Public Schools’ gifted program when she was in second grade at Colfax K-8. Many of her peers attended the district’s Gifted Center at Greenway, once a week, to participate in accelerated hands-on courses. 

Uneven Scales
As PPS contends with a difficult budget season, PublicSource explores the balance of resources and its effects on students’ futures.

“There was a huge stigma around, like, everyone that went there was super smart,” she said. 

Guilfoyle was evaluated and identified as a gifted student a few years later. Like others, she attended the Gifted Center, which she believes offered more resources than Colfax. With that, Guilfoyle said, she also saw immediate disparities in her classroom. 

On the days when she and her classmates bussed off to the Gifted Center, she said, “Greenway would look like all white kids and then all of Colfax would have only African American kids.” 

The district’s Gifted and Talented program offers unique opportunities for students who are identified as “high-achieving.” However, students of color are highly underrepresented among students who are identified for the program. 

As the district works through a strategic planning process with a focus on equity, at least some board members say the time is right to rethink approaches to gifted education. 

Of the 18,650 students enrolled in the district, 1,315 were identified as gifted in 2022-23, according to the district’s enrollment dashboard. Of the students identified as gifted, 16% were Black and 66% were white. Black students make up 51% of the district’s student population. 

Schools with a higher share of economically disadvantaged students also had a lower percentage of students identified as gifted. Of all students with a Gifted Individualized Education Plan [GIEP], only 23% were economically disadvantaged, while districtwide, 70% of students are economically disadvantaged.

Statewide, 3.3% of all students were identified as gifted, according to the 2017-18 data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Less than 1% of Black students were identified. Studies have shown that gifted programs do not necessarily improve student reading and math scores. 

PPS spokesperson Ebony Pugh said the district follows state guidelines when evaluating students for gifted education, but did not substantively address questions about racial disparities in the program.

State laws contribute to disparities

State regulations define gifted education as individualized and specially designed instruction, delivered under a GIEP. 

Per state law, a “mentally gifted” student must demonstrate an IQ of 130 or more or

• Test at a year or more above achievement level 
• Show a high rate of retention in learning new skills 
• Demonstrate early skill development 
• Show expertise in one or more academic areas.

Advocates say, the definition of “gifted” may be a key driver of the inequitable access to the district’s gifted program.

James Fogarty, executive director of A+ Schools, a nonprofit supporting PPS in addressing equity issues, said key measures such as IQ, which is impacted by socioeconomic factors such as poverty and structural racism, skew the pool of gifted students. 

“It seems as if the current system … developed at the state policy level, lends itself towards identifying students as gifted as those who are also not economically disadvantaged,” he said.

Many students from low-income families are underrepresented and excluded from gifted programs because they do not have opportunities for enrichment and learning experiences outside school in early childhood, said Kristen Seward, associate director of Gifted Education Resource Institute [GERI] at Purdue University.

She said if students don’t have access to enrichment opportunities in early childhood, then they will not test high by the time they get to third grade, when kids are usually tested for gifted education.

Accelerated learning for the ‘gifted,’ free day for others

All gifted students in PPS – apart from those at Dilworth and Grandview where gifted instruction is offered on-site – go to the Gifted Center at Greenway every week, where they participate in project-based, accelerated courses. 

Beatrice Kuhn was in fourth grade at Colfax when she was identified as a gifted student. Once every week, she would go to the Gifted Center, where she took classes ranging from forensic science to ceramics.

“I took various art classes and those were really fun,” she said. “It was a very different environment.”

Kuhn’s friend, Alina Weise, also got evaluated in fifth grade but was not identified as gifted. She and others stayed at Colfax while their peers went to the Gifted Center. 

“I just felt down about myself. I started to feel like I wasn’t smart enough or wasn’t as high of a level as my peers were, especially my close friends,” she said. 

On days her classmates went to the Gifted Center, those remaining at Colfax were usually given a “free day,” where they could catch up on any previously assigned work, Weise said. 

PPS did not respond to inquiries about assignments for students not identified as gifted on days their peers are at the Gifted Center.

Kipp Dawson, a retired teacher from Colfax, taught at the school from 2005 to 2018. She said delivery of instruction for students who stayed behind on gifted days varied at every school and with every principal. 

For a part of her tenure at Colfax, those students were provided an enrichment day where they brought in artists to teach classes such as poetry, writing or painting T-shirts. However, most time was dedicated for students to prepare for standardized tests. 

“That was a day in many cases of dull, rote, uninspiring work,” said Dawson. 

Allyce Pinchback-Johnson, a founding member of Black Women for a Better Education, said apart from overidentifying white students as gifted, the district also misidentifies students because of inherent biases and standardized testing. 

“It’s just a very narrow and limited definition of giftedness,” she said. “We already know what the outcomes are going to be, based on just the racial distribution of how students fare on those tests that we know that it’s not a reflection of them as students as much as it’s a reflection of the bias that exists.”

Gene Walker, district board president, said the Gifted Center creates barriers for students by sending some kids there and leaving others behind. “I think we sometimes do ourselves a disservice by creating opportunities to segregate.”

The Gifted-to-AP pipeline

At Allderdice, Guilfoyle noticed the same disparities in her honors and Advanced Placement [AP] classes that she saw between Colfax and the Greenway Center. 

“I feel like Allderdice is very segregated in many ways,” she said. “I walked in my first AP class, and there were no African American students.”

Similar to gifted education, Black students are underrepresented in AP courses. A total of 1,660 students in PPS enrolled in at least one AP class in 2023. Of those, 29% were Black and 54% were white. 

Pinchback-Johnson said the overidentification of white students as gifted sets them up for automatic consideration in high school AP and Centers for Advanced Study classes.

“I view it as just a form of segregation,” she said. 

She added that white families use their social capital to get access to the district’s magnet programs.

The district’s arts magnet, CAPA 6-12, has one of the highest rates of students identified as gifted. This year, 31.5% of the student population at CAPA was identified as gifted. Neighborhood schools, such as UPrep Milliones and Westinghouse, have less than 4% of their students identified as gifted.

Advocates seek systemic changes

Nielsen Pereira, director of the Gifted Education Resource Institute [GERI] at Purdue University, said the district could implement models like total school cluster grouping to reduce inequities that might be caused by sending students to a gifted center. The model involves training teachers to identify students and implement gifted education strategies with all students in a school. 

Under the model, every teacher would be able to provide gifted education, and gifted students would be placed alongside other students instead of visiting a separate classroom or a gifted center. 

Fogarty said the district needs to think about fostering inclusivity and creating in-house gifted education supports, such as those at Dilworth and Grandview. 

“Setting kids aside and not providing support services that allow them to be fully inclusive, is problematic, whether it’s for a student with disabilities or a student with academic gifts,” he said.  

Walker said instead of referrals from parents or teachers, the district should implement universal testing to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to be identified as gifted and eliminate any personal and systemic bias. 

The district rolled out a pilot program in 2018 to screen all second-grade students in six PPS schools for gifted identification. It’s unclear what, if anything, came of that.

Walker said he’s keen to keep the dialogue moving. 

“I think it’s going to take more than policy change,” he said. “It’s going to take attitude change, it’s going to take priority change.”

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

This story was fact-checked by Delaney Adams.

The post Inequitable enrichment: How Black and low-income students are largely left out of Pittsburgh’s gifted program  appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Local leaders joined roughly 45 Chatham University faculty on Thursday evening to formally advance a union organizing effort that began this fall after the university made a series of cuts to trim a multimillion-dollar deficit.

The faculty met at Larimer’s East End Brewing Company to sign cards declaring their intent to unionize. If at least 30% of the university’s roughly 135 full-time faculty sign them, the National Labor Relations Board will hold an election. Chatham also has the option to voluntarily recognize a union, without an election, if there’s evidence that a majority of faculty want representation. 

About half of the full-time faculty had signed cards by Friday morning, an organizer told PublicSource. Roughly a third of the faculty were present at Thursday’s event.  

The event – graced by Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey and Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato – was one step forward in what could be a lengthy process. If successful, the faculty will be a local of AFT Pennsylvania.

“This is a really exciting night for us. We’ve been working up to this point for many months now,” said Jessie Ramey, an associate professor and organizer with Chatham Faculty United. “We’ve been working really hard with our faculty colleagues to make sure that everybody feels like they are a part of what we’re doing.”

The event was organized by Chatham Faculty United, which is seeking to achieve unionization for the full-time faculty. The group believes that unionization will allow faculty to have greater influence in university governance; protect their pay and benefits; and benefit from a formalized grievance process. 

This summer, Chatham reduced faculty benefits and cut some salaries to trim its deficit, which the university has said stands at $6 million. Professors told PublicSource in November that the university’s response to the deficit renewed a previously simmering interest in unionizing and “really underscored how powerless we are.” 

Much of the organizers’ work so far has focused on connecting with faculty and explaining the benefits they believe a union could bring. Jennie Sweet-Cushman, an associate professor and organizer said the group will visit Chatham’s three campuses after Thursday to ensure all interested faculty can sign cards. The organizers will contact the National Labor Relations Board soon, she added. 

“We’re hoping to have a really strong showing with the cards so that we can make that case for voluntary recognition,” Sweet-Cushman said. “We would really love it if that happened. Nobody wants this to be a contentious thing. Nobody feels like the university should be spending money trying to fight it.”

Bill Campbell, a spokesperson for the university, did not provide comment on the union effort to PublicSource by press time, and did not say whether the university would voluntarily recognize a union. 

Gainey said in an interview during the event that his administration would like to write a letter to the university’s Board of Trustees stating that unionization is “for the best interests of not only the school but the city.”

“I’ve said from day one, if you want to make the quality of your workplace better, it’s important that you’re able to collectively bargain,” the mayor said. “A lot of times what happens is, we don’t listen to our frontline employees. When you have a union, you don’t have a choice.”

Innamorato also voiced support for the nascent union effort. “We need to make sure that the people who make institutions like Chatham great are taken care of,” she said. Councilor Erika Strassburger, who represents Squirrel Hill where Chatham is located, also attended.

The union effort, if it advances, may be more challenging for the faculty than for workers in other industries. A decades-old decision from the U.S. Supreme Court determined that full-time faculty members at the private Yeshiva University were managerial employees; the case has made unionization very difficult for similar faculty at private universities.

A more recent ruling from the National Labor Relations Board, however, offered standards for determining whether faculty are managerial employees. A local victory that followed this ruling bodes well for the group. Full-time faculty at the private Point Park University reached their first tentative agreement on a union contract in 2017. 

Sweet-Cushman said the organizers have met with labor attorneys and feel strongly that they would not be considered managerial employees under the ruling. 

The organizers are optimistic that their effort will be successful. But regardless of the outcome, they’re committed to serving as “a forum where faculty can build community,” Sweet-Cushman said. 

“Our work doesn’t end,” she said. “We’re eager to keep building those bonds and being supportive for our colleagues.” 

This story was updated on Jan. 26 at 9:55 a.m. to reflect a final count of the cards signed during the event.

Emma Folts covers higher education at PublicSource, in partnership with Open Campus. She can be reached at emma@publicsource.org.

The post Gainey, Innamorato back Chatham faculty union push at East End card-signing appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

The 2024 election is coming, and Pennsylvania is once again at the center of the political universe. More than most other places, Allegheny County voters will have a say in what comes next at the White House, in Congress and in Harrisburg. 

The stakes are high. What do you want to know about the upcoming vote?

The presidential race, potentially a rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, is expected to hinge on just a few swing states. Pennsylvania is the largest. 

Not sure how important Pennsylvania is? Biden has already visited the Keystone State upward of 30 times since becoming president. He’s paid more visits here than to any state but his home of Delaware. 

Control of the U.S. Senate could hinge on Pennsylvania’s contest between Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and a to-be-nominated challenger. Control of the closely divided U.S. House could be tipped by the swingy 17th Congressional District, now held by Democrat Chris Deluzio of Aspinwall.

And the political order in Harrisburg would change if Democrats can flip three state Senate seats and control the upper chamber. One of their three targets is in Allegheny County — the 37th District seat held by Republican Devlin Robinson of Bridgeville.

With so much on the ballot, and so much at stake, things can get confusing fast for voters. PublicSource is aiming to keep readers informed on the 2024 election at a local level.

Tell us what you want to know using the form below. Check as many boxes as you want next to topics that interest you. Most important: Use your write-in vote to tell us what else you want to know about the 2024 election season in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

You can also find our stories on Facebook, X and Instagram. PublicSource will strive to meet your needs between now and November — and beyond.

The post Election 2024: What do you want to know? appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

This story was originally published by Kidsburgh.org, a media partner of PublicSource. Kidsburgh is an online resource for families that highlights stories about the people, organizations and events making Pittsburgh a better place to raise all kids. Sign up for Kidsburgh’s free e-newsletter.

At Belle Vernon Area School District, students in Daneen Watson’s Spanish 1 class use the words and phrases they’re learning to correct paragraphs written in the language they’re trying to master. Working in groups, they comb through Spanish sentences and find errors, discussing what they find and how best to rewrite it.

Students have used this method to learn a foreign language for generations. But something decidedly 21st-century is happening in Watson’s classroom: These paragraphs were written not by a human, but by the artificial intelligence system ChatGPT.

At New Kensington-Arnold School District, administrators and teachers observed a second grade lesson in reading comprehension in which teachers helped the class input their own text and artwork using ChatGPT and starryai. The ideas they developed, channeled through the quickly evolving tools of AI, allowed the students to produce a book they titled, “Miss Fabulous Loves Her Coffee,” about the day in the life of their teacher.

As OpenAI’s ChatGPT (which stands for Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer), Google’s Bard and other educational AI platforms become mainstream student tools, local educators navigate the waters of rapidly changing technologies each day.

Are there worries about students outsourcing their thinking and creating to a synthetic brain? Or does AI open new doors to student-driven creativity? How do school districts and individual teachers decide which tools to use and how their students are allowed to use them?

“It’s huge, and it’s very hard to wrap the mind around how many different ways this finds a place within our school environment,” says Tim Hammill, director of curriculum services for the Westmoreland County Intermediate Unit [WIU].

Through shared information and seminars from local experts, district leaders in Hammill’s network are working to understand and learn more about the pros, cons and appropriateness of educational AI.

Staying a step ahead – AI teacher training

Schools can’t simply opt out of interaction with AI, because the kids they teach have already begun accessing it. For example, Hammill says, students have figured out that they can use AI to do the standard homework assignment.

“That’s what drives the need for teachers to understand how their instruction needs to change and their assignments need to change,” he says. “We don’t have the option to turn it off and make it go away.”

At WIU training sessions, teachers and administrators learn how to create assignments that leverage AI’s capabilities in ways that teach. This might mean checking the accuracy of a ChatGPT-produced essay on Abraham Lincoln based on what a student has already learned about his life. Or it might mean giving a prewritten passage about Lincoln to students and asking them to rewrite it in the first person, as though they were Lincoln.

“We still need to put those critical skills and concepts that the kids need to learn in front of them; the system is only a part of the equation,” said Rebecca Henderson, curriculum services supervisor of the WIU.

At a recent district training event at New Kensington-Arnold School District, approximately 100 teachers were introduced to lesson-producing generative AI tools. They learned to use ChatGPT to create assessments. And using text-to-voice generating platform Uberduck and other history-focused programs, they discovered how to apply the sound of famous voices to quotes and even hold conversations — complete with AI-emulated responses — with virtual versions of historical leaders.

New Ken-Arnold’s superintendent Dr. Chris Sefcheck knows there are those who may feel students should only learn by taking pen to paper or using computers in the ways that we have for a generation. But he sees opportunity for students to build critical thinking and problem solving skills through these new tools.

“The biggest piece is that artificial intelligence has to be paired with human intellect,” Sefcheck says. “You have to be able to not only know how to use AI, but know how to use your brain for the critical thinking and problem solving that AI doesn’t do for you.”

At Burrell School District, middle school learning coach Courtney Barbiaux enthusiastically pursues AI training — then passes her knowledge on to teachers. She recently gave a presentation on educational platforms including MagicSchool, a free resource that creates lessons, generates questions, produces classroom stations and more on just about any topic.

Supporting classroom lessons in creative ways 

Although AI isn’t written into daily lessons, there are teachers in the WIU using AI to help with tutoring or offer guidance to improve students’ writing and math skills — all under teacher supervision.

In Burrell’s eighth grade classrooms, Barbiaux has introduced the concept of machine learning and how to appropriately use AI in ways similar to how students already use Google to do research.

“We talked about how you could use ChatGPT to search more information, but you’re not copying and pasting,” she says.

Meanwhile, in Burrell’s sixth grade reading classes, students summarize passages generated by ChatGPT at various skill levels. And though it’s not part of daily instruction, Burrell’s technology integration coach Melinda Kulick says the district is exploring AI as a personalized learning tool to increase student engagement.

One possible example, she says: “Taking things that are of interest to students, putting them into ChatGPT and asking for a lesson on fractions for a student who loves soccer.”

Watson, of Belle Vernon, learned about ChatGPT at a conference last summer and continues to increase her proficiency in other platforms like MagicSchool and Canva Magic Design. Once other teachers in her department are on board, she hopes to introduce her students to AI concepts in addition to the AI-generated lessons she currently uses.

“I have seen an increase in scores, and the students do love using AI,” she says, “even though I haven’t explicitly told them what it is.”

At Franklin Regional, students use the math platform ALEKS, which now includes an AI component that assigns assessments and evaluates next levels of instruction by tracking student learning and performance patterns.

Superintendent Gennaro Piraino says he’s mindful of kids – including his own, who are in the district – spending “hours in front of the computer.” But he sees value of programs like ALEKS.

“It has individual prescriptive instruction or remediation when you need it,” Piraino says. “It gets as challenging as the student can handle based upon the response.”

Groundbreaking tool or temptation to cheat?

Rules and policies regarding AI fall under the umbrella of academic integrity. But this is all so new and rapidly evolving. So, Piraino says, “I think people have different perspectives on it.”

He believes educators have the responsibility to understand their students’ needs while teaching ethical uses of AI. At Franklin Regional, some teachers are putting assignments through GPT Zero, a detector that can tell the likelihood or the percentage of a document produced through AI.

Teachers need to be in the business of verifying information, Henderson says. And if a student’s response is broader than what the assignment asks, that has to trigger a warning bell: Did the student really go above and beyond because they are that passionate about this topic? Or because the system went above and beyond?

Cheating is always a risk. But students need to understand the tools of the era in which they live and will one day work.

Students are “going to go out into the world and compete against people who are using it effectively and using it well — and sometimes, using it unethically,” Piraino says. “If we don’t utilize this opportunity in an environment where we know it’s safe, then we put them at a disadvantage.”

The post AI in Pittsburgh-area schools: How are districts handling this powerful new tool? appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Updated (1/25/24): The Pittsburgh Public Schools board on Wednesday passed a motion to table a resolution for appointing student board representatives, shelving it indefinitely.

Board member Jamie Piotrowski said she supports amplifying student voices and the board should create a consistent program through the policy committee instead of passing a resolution. She added that passing a resolution to appoint two students would not represent the whole student body, including many English language learners or students with disabilities. 

“This is a resolution that then becomes very difficult to find in Board Docs and then as the board changes, this program could essentially disappear,” she said.

Board member Sala Udin, who introduced the initial resolution and voted against tabling, said he made many changes to the resolution based on recommendations from board members, adding that the board would be “sending a very negative message to the students” if they tabled the resolution. 

“We need to be lifting them up, not muzzling them,” he said. 

The board plans to have conversations in the upcoming policy committee meetings to decide a plan forward.

Reported (1/23/24):

Pittsburgh school board considers adding student seats

Pittsburgh Public Schools is expected to vote tomorrow on a proposal to add two high school student representatives to its board. 

Those in support of the resolution, proposed by board member Sala Udin, include students who say they lack input in decisions about their education.

“We must ensure that the voices of students not only have room in the superintendent’s vocal point but also the actual policymaking body of this system,” said Allderdice High School senior Pavel Marin, during a public hearing on Monday night.

The resolution, if passed, would add two students from 11th and 12th grade to serve as liaisons between the board and the student body, and they will be required to submit a monthly report. 

Students would be selected by a committee of high school principals and the superintendent would make a suggestion to the board before the start of the next school year. The students would not be given voting power or access to executive sessions in which privileged information is discussed. 

During a public board meeting last week when the resolution was introduced, board member Devon Taliaferro urged the board to examine their governing process before adding student voices. She said the board should explore other options that involve more students such as the Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council [SSAC], a student-led panel that discusses school-related issues with the administration. 

School officials, while saying they support more student input, appear undecided on the proposal.

Board member Dwayne Barker said while he wants to prioritize student voices, he does not want to rush the process of adding student representatives to the board. The board could hold multiple listening sessions at schools, led by students, to increase student voice in the district, he added. 

“We know it’s long overdue,” said Barker. “Student voice is certainly important.” 

Board President Gene Walker said he supported the idea of student board members but the board should work to clearly define the students’ role to create a positive experience. 

“There’s some work that we need to do internally, from a governance standpoint, to put us in the right position to be able to do that effectively,” he said. 

In a written statement, former board member Pam Harbin said the resolution confines the district to a single method and the board should consider other ways, such as electing student representatives. She added that the board should take feedback from students to make the process meaningful and equitable. 

Last year, the PPS board gave itself a failing grade in a self-evaluation, as reported by WESA.

Za’Morrie Reeves, a junior at Allderdice, intends to apply to be a student board representative if the resolution is passed. 

Reeves, who is also part of the SSAC, said he believes student board members would involve students at policy-making and districtwide levels as opposed to SSAC’s work in individual schools. 

“I can help by just being a voice for those students who either don’t feel comfortable using their voice or don’t know where to use your voice,” he said.

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

The post Updated: PPS shelves proposal for student board appointments appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

A few months prior to my 20th birthday, as I was waiting and hoping that my younger brother would wake up from his cancer-induced coma, I found out I had been accepted at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia.

Since age 16, I had been working at a Giant Eagle to help support my family. Neither of my parents had bachelor’s degrees and there were zero expectations in my house that I’d go to college. I figured that if I didn’t go to college soon, I’d never get the hell out of that stock room and away from the chronic back pain it inflicted. I had applied to the only two colleges I knew anything about, WJU (now Wheeling University) and the later-discredited Art Institute of Pittsburgh, intending to enroll at whichever accepted me first, if either of them did.

I had missed nearly 115 days in high school, some of which were due to an emergency medical condition greatly worsened by doctors’ refusal to listen to my mum or me, resulting in an amputation. Other times I skipped because of how I was treated at school. I’d been tardy nearly 95 times, had countless detentions, and graduated with a 2.07 GPA and a 470 on my SAT.

A school staff member used to tell me that my “kind of people don’t go to college” and most of my peers at my suburban, Catholic high school either ignored me completely, called me and my family “poor white trash,” or mocked my appearance and heavy Pittsburgh accent. All throughout high-school, I was called lazy, stupid and ignorant by other students and even by several teachers. When I showed up for school, I’d sometimes deal with it by sneaking a swig of booze or popping Valiums that my mum gave me.

Fifteen years after that acceptance letter from WJU came through, I’m a data analyst, dedicated to understanding and addressing poverty, segregation, affordable housing and community violence.

On the way, I’ve developed a clear understanding that white poverty tends not to come with the additional, deep racism-based challenges that often come with Black poverty – though white poverty can be similarly grinding in places like rural Appalachia, the deep rural South and parts of the Rust Belt. But that understanding didn’t happen overnight. I’ve learned that while racial disparities are stark on their own, they’re often intertwined with class and other identities. 

Given this, when policymakers work to address challenges like poverty, they must be aware of the ways race, class, gender and other identities intersect so that they can tailor solutions to address the different challenges that tend to be experienced by different groups — including low-income white people.

A poor kid’s response to ‘white privilege’

My parents moved us from Carrick to Brookline when I was little, in hopes of keeping us away from gun violence. They sacrificed what little money they had, “robbed Peter to pay Paul,” and had us kids write letters pleading for financial aid to the Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh to attend Seton La Salle High School in Mount Lebanon. They wanted us to be safe and get a Catholic education, and had concerns about us going to Brashear High, which was Brookline’s Pittsburgh Public Schools feeder school.

Still, I didn’t always feel very safe at Seton or in my own home during much of high school. My parents did, and do, many loving things for me but also repeated the cycles of abuse they themselves were exposed to. Outside of the bullying and isolation at school, I was exposed to significant trauma in my home. As a result, our house was frequently visited by police. 

Police also had a tendency for following me around stores and harassing me. Once, an officer even kicked in a stall door that bashed into my head when someone falsely accused me of doing drugs in a carnival bathroom.

When the time came to start at WJU, my Pell Grant and other financial aid left a few thousand in tuition to pay. Around the same time, my dad lost his job and never regained full-time employment. We only hung on to the house because of Obama’s unemployment extension, my mum’s disability and my younger brother’s Supplemental Security Income from having cancer. But they didn’t have anything to help me, so I asked the priest who baptized me at the now-closed Saint Canice in Knoxville to lend me the money, and he did. My dad and brother dropped me off at WJU with a single pillow, my guitar and one backpack full of clothes.

Adapting to being a college student was hard at first. I spent the first few weeks trying to collect unemployment from the just-closed Giant Eagle where I had worked, and hearing about the problems at home on my flip phone. Academically, I didn’t know what paragraph breaks were, so my first submitted essay was a single wall of text. I went through college without a computer. 

But I made lifelong friends immediately. The son of an unemployed electrician, I felt included among classmates who were the sons and daughters of coal miners and tradesmen. Many of the professors were from Appalachia and cared deeply about first-generation college students. I had a bed again (my mattress at home got maggots, so I’d been sleeping on the floor) and a meal plan, which meant I didn’t have to worry about food stamps running out or having to steal food from Giant Eagle to eat lunch.

Given my life experiences and how hard (and lucky) my road to college was, when a middle-class white student in my psychology class said something like, “white people don’t experience real poverty,” I pushed back. And when they then told me to “check my white privilege,” I could barely keep from blurting out: “What the fuck did you just say?” Comments like that initially made me allergic to conversations about privilege.

Blaming poor people for poverty

I was slightly above, at or below the poverty line from birth until age 29, so my understanding of the advantages of being white came slowly and through meaningful exposure to people with different perspectives and life experiences.

It came through self-reflection on what I’d seen in my own life, a growing understanding of what many of my poor Black peers faced, and, importantly, an intersectional and non-shame-based approach to conversations about privilege and the history of discrimination in the United States. 

This all culminated in a major belief change in 2014, when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” which affected me because it was coming from a Black man who grew up poor and reflected data, plus experiences, that connected with mine. 

Building off much of the existing research cited in Coates’ essay, Opportunity Insights of Harvard released a landmark study on race and income mobility. It found that when accounting for race, class and gender, poor Black and Indigenous Americans had significantly lower average incomes in adulthood when compared to their poor white and Asian peers, and poor Latinos fell somewhere in the middle.

While the study shows that lower-income people of all races tend to do worse than their peers of the same race who did not grow up in poverty, it also makes clear that class alone doesn’t explain gaps between the outcomes of poor children of different races. The study proposed two primary factors: racial bias against Black people and the neighborhood context in which low-income Black children tend to grow up. 

Here in Allegheny County, 73% of poor Black families reside in our higher need census tracts, along with 22% of poor white families and 14% of poor Asian families. Poor white and Asian families mostly reside in lower-need working-class and middle-class neighborhoods, unlike their poor Black peers.

As I wrote in a previous essay for PublicSource, our neighborhoods look the way they do because of the causes (structural racism) and consequences of persistent racial and economic segregation, in addition to the massive impact of deindustrialization. While I grew up poor, I did so primarily in a low-poverty, working-class, relatively safe neighborhood. Most of my poor Black peers are disproportionately exposed to concentrated poverty and gun violence and I strongly argue we cannot ignore them. Exposure to gun violence may be one of the most important factors that explain why neighborhoods matter in affecting life outcomes.

Despite being low-income, and after moving us from rental to rental, my parents were able to get a mortgage for our house in Brookline, an easier lift because they are white. Government programs kept the family afloat. Additionally, attending a college like WJU and meeting mentors there who held me to high expectations and supported me undeniably helped me eventually rise out of poverty. While the classism I faced throughout middle and high school was challenging (and would have been even harder if I was poor and Black), getting to attend a low-poverty school was still of huge benefit to my social mobility. 

While it took tremendous efforts to go from lifelong poverty to middle-class researcher, I rose out of poverty not because I worked any harder or was any smarter than poor peers, but because I was exposed to enough protective factors and got lucky at various points in my life.

With all this context in mind, I still think it’s important to talk about and understand white poverty in its own right and in a way that doesn’t invalidate and dismiss its challenges, especially in the current political reality. 

In my experience, politicians on the political right — from former poor people like Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance to generationally wealthy people like Donald Trump — tend to exploit poor white people when they are politically useful, but otherwise demonize them and do little to address poverty. And people on the political left tend to acknowledge the systemic drivers of poverty for every marginalized group except poor white people, but at least they tend to support the social safety net more broadly. 

Recent research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that social liberals, when prompted to reflect on white privilege, had reduced sympathy for poor white people and were more likely to blame them over external causes for their challenges. Liberals showed higher levels of sympathy for other poor groups. On the other hand, conservatives expressed low levels of sympathy for all low-income people. My experience is that neither political conservatives nor liberals tend to look at the very real external causes of white poverty. They blame poor white people for supposed personal failures.

Addressing learned biases and better understanding privilege, call for an intersectional approach that acknowledges how different, intersecting identities shape our experiences and outcomes. If a conversation or research study doesn’t minimally include the intersecting realities of race, class and gender, then that conversation or research is insufficient and incomplete. Just as poor Black people tend to experience additional hardships to those experienced by upper-income Black people, being poor and white is incredibly distinct from being upper income and white, so looking at race alone is not enough.

There also is a lack of understanding of the volume of white people who experience poverty. Here in Allegheny County, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the white poverty rate in 2022 was 8% and the Black poverty rate was 31%, which reflects the realities of structural racism. At the same time, there are more poor white people in the county than any other group: more than 73,000 poor white people and around 43,000 poor Black people. Nationally, most poor people are white, with over 17 million white, non-Hispanic people living in poverty. 

Policymakers have to understand the full scope of poverty and how it intersects with race to properly address disparities across groups and serve all those in need. 

Closely intertwined with the enduring reality of racism in America is the enduring reality of classism, reflected in the slur “white trash.” As documented in Nancy Isenberg’s book “White Trash,” people coming to the New World from England during the colonial era weren’t primarily escaping religious persecution and the monarchy, but rather shipped over because British elites saw America as a trash bin for England’s poor when starvation, incarceration or war didn’t dispose of them.

Surrounded by populations of white people brought over as indentured servants and Black people transported into slavery, wealthy whites, terrified of a united rebellion, have exploited the construct of race to divide and control poor people since the colonial era. According to Isenberg, the general landlessness of America’s white rural poor, meanwhile, led to a series of slurs that are still openly used to this day: waste people, redneck, hillbilly, white trash, clay eater, cracker and trailer trash, as just some common examples. Given how often I still hear them used, they seem to be considered acceptable, even on the political left. 

Throughout America’s history, poverty has been wrongly viewed as hereditary, not the result of structural barriers. As part of the eugenics movement of the early 1900s, forced sterilization was used to control “undesirable” populations, which included women of color and poor white women. And while discriminatory voting, housing, lending and land use laws throughout U.S history took clear aims at disenfranchising Black people, they also impact poor people of any race, though not equally.

Such thinking has seeped into political discourse on all sides, with poor white people viewed as part of a group of deplorables. Even today, most of the discourse on the 2016 election results blames poor and working class white people for the election of Donald Trump, even though exit polls show he was mostly elected by middle- and upper-income white people.

Statistical truths, individual experiences

In 2022, West Virginia — where my classmate had denied white poverty — was 90% white and the third-poorest state. Its second-poorest county, McDowell, is 90% white and has the state’s highest suicide rate, America’s highest opioid overdose rate among counties according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the nation’s lowest county life expectancy, the latter statistic on par with Iraq. 

Here in Allegheny County, most Black people live in our higher-need neighborhoods, which is not true of any other racial or ethnic group. At the same time, there are nearly as many white people in our higher-need neighborhoods as Black people — around 76,000 white people and around 82,000 Black people. While need is most concentrated in our Black neighborhoods,  there is also high need in mixed-but-majority-white neighborhoods in Pittsburgh’s South Hilltop, McKees Rocks and steel towns throughout the Mon Valley. These are neighborhoods where low-to-moderate-income people of different races are exposed to challenges like gun violence,  pollution, economic isolation, food deserts, transportation barriers and more, a fact that may get overlooked. 

I was poor or near poor from birth until about six years ago, when I landed my career as a researcher after graduating from Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College (an aggressive culture shock for me given that two-thirds of students come from the top fifth of the income distribution). Despite my own economic mobility, the consequences of poverty and trauma still impact me to this day. I also have had to deal with years of people invalidating my experiences or demonstrating a lack of empathy toward poor white people. 

This approach didn’t work in teaching me about the reality of racism, and it doesn’t help build coalitions across race and class to abolish structural racism, classism and other forms of discrimination. But exposure to intersectionality and approaches that combine empathetic listening with highlighting our shared humanity did and do work, and as a result, I’ve dedicated my adult life to addressing the causes and consequences of persistent racial and economic segregation.

We need to recognize and separate statistical truths from individual ones. One should never assume what someone’s life experience is without getting to know them. Individual experiences can and do stray from statistical averages. If someone has a bias or a lack of understanding about how intersecting identities tend to shape outcomes, we should educate in a way that acknowledges these identities and expose people to these ideas in ways that are effective, not confrontational.

We should care about eradicating poverty for people of all races, with an understanding that individuals from different groups tend to require different levels of support, given the reality of structural discrimination. To do that, we need diverse anti-poverty coalitions across race and class, not silos. 

Nick Cotter is a researcher with Allegheny County and the creator of the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project. He can be reached at pittsburghneighborhoodproject@gmail.com. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone. This piece does not reflect official views of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. You can follow the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project here.

The post From poor white roots to intersectional anti-poverty solutions for all appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

This story was originally published by Technical.ly, a news partner of PublicSource. You can sign up for their newsletters at technical.ly/subscribe.

In the final weeks of 2023 and first weeks of 2024, Technical.ly asked Pittsburgh founders and execs what trends they were anticipating for the local tech space.

Some leaders expect regulatory bodies to emphasize cybersecurity, while others anticipate more students considering their sector as a career possibility. Now, two weeks into this new year, here’s some of what Pittsburgh founders are thinking (or hoping) will happen next.

Cybersecurity will be prioritized across industries

In 2023, cybersecurity experts told Technical.ly that even when the worst happens and companies have to downsize, they usually don’t cut corners in the area that keeps company secrets safe.

For Vigilant Ops CEO Ken Zalevsky’s part, he anticipates that regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration would take an increased interest in cybersecurity. Having worked in the field himself, Zalevsky said being vulnerable to attacks can be costly in any industry — and when it comes to healthcare, a lack of cybersecurity can compromise patient safety. The FDA requires cybersecurity measures to be built into medical devices; Zalevsky expects other industries will follow suit.

“We’re already seeing that energy and others who are trying to look at legislation and ways to make their products within their industries more secure, requiring security documentation, like the software bill of materials and others,” Zalevsky said. (Vigilant Ops makes an automation platform for the generation, maintenance and authenticated sharing of certified software bill of materials.) “I think we’ll just kind of see that trend continue as the year [progresses].”

The commercial space industry will expand

Away from healthcare and into galaxies far away, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton told Technical.ly in December that 2024 could bring the commercial space industry more NASA collaborations. He cited NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative as one indicator — especially because it’s a program the North Side space tech company is participating in via its Peregrine Mission One, which launched on Jan. 8. The team’s efforts to gather payload data have been fruitful, but due to a propellant leak on Jan. 9, the spacecraft is now expected to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

Additionally, Thornton imagined that companies might be willing to take more risks — but if the payoffs weren’t worth it, this could lead to fewer successful missions.

“One risk I see to this model’s success is that companies may be willing to bet everything on an opportunity to participate in the burgeoning space industry,” Thornton said. “If companies do this by underbidding future commercial contracts without having a strong financial footing, we may see a decline in mission success that could affect the industry as a whole.”

Robots will aid the manufacturing workforce, in more ways than one

Even when the world is in turmoil, things still need to be made. Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute Senior Outreach Manager Livia Rice said she believes the need for manufacturers will remain — yet robotics will be increasingly incorporated into the sector to fill workforce gaps. In addition to the ARM Institute’s outreach efforts, Rice expects robotics will be used to do the more dangerous parts of a given job, which will further incentivize young people to consider manufacturing as a viable career.

“I think that’s going to be a huge trend in really trying to influence the next generation of people to consider careers in manufacturing,” Rice said. “I’m sure when we were kids, no one was talking to us about manufacturing … but it really is a very vibrant career. So focusing on that, and then the integration of AI into robotics and manufacturing, I think that’s going to continue to be a very important trend.”

Autonomous ground vehicles will be used in government defense efforts

For Neya Systems Division Manager Kurt Bruck, the theme of 2024 is speed. The Warrendale-based company develops advanced autonomous solutions for unmanned systems and was recently selected for part of a $14.8 million U.S. Army contract along with Carnegie Robotics and Robotic Research Autonomous Industries. The Department of Defense, Bruck said, often needs its vehicles to go 80 miles per hour to effectively navigate jungles or forests.

Additionally, he thinks navigating with cameras as opposed to LIDAR-based navigation will become a trend due to the expense and the fragility of night vision cameras. He also imagines that drones and autonomy will become a priority in the name of speed and creating fewer risks for soldiers.

“The Department of Defense has been fielding drones for a decade, but ground vehicles have never been fielded. I’ve never seen autonomous ground vehicles actually working with soldiers, because it’s just more of a difficult, different challenge,” Bruck said. “But fielding these systems for the first time [will be] a key trend and overarching trend. I think in the next three years, we’re going to start to see many, many more autonomous brand vehicles working with soldiers and various missions being kind of like a tool in the toolbox that they use daily.”

Atiya Irvin-Mitchell is a 2022-2023 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Heinz Endowments.

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