This year’s race for Allegheny County executive — in addition to swaying key policies around the jail, economic development, taxes and the environment — will provide the clearest picture yet of where the county and region are headed politically.

Is this a moderate county, as GOP executive candidate Joe Rockey says it is, hearkening back to the county that elected Republicans as commissioners and then as its executive in the 1990s despite overwhelming Democratic registration numbers? Or is the county leaning further to the left, reflective of the recent string of progressive election wins?

“This election will tell us how centrist the county is,” said Joe Mistick, a Duquesne University law professor who worked as an aide to former Pittsburgh Mayors Richard Caliguiri and Sophie Masloff. 

A county where Republicans regularly won elections and even led the government just two decades ago is now a place where Democrats have fully taken the reins and Republican wins are few and far between.

Rockey has set out to prove that the county can still swing red for the right candidate. He has spent the past six months saying he’s a moderate’s moderate, and he insists that’s the lane most county voters want to occupy.

Former state Rep. Sara Innamorato, the Democratic nominee for executive, is trying to extend a progressive winning streak to the countywide level, while proving the movement appeals to voters outside of ultra-liberal enclaves.

Election Day is Nov. 7. 

A Republican victory in Allegheny County wasn’t always such a tall task. County voters elected two Republicans to its three-member commission in 1995, Republican Jim Roddey was elected as the first county executive in 1999, and seven of 15 county council members were Republicans for part of the 2000s.

Republican Gov. Tom Corbett carried the county in 2010 en route to winning the governor’s office.

“When Jim Roddey was elected as a Republican, we were more Democratic than we are now,” Mistick said. “But people weren’t foreign to voting for a Republican.”

Dems’ recent dominance can be traced to a reduction in voters crossing party lines, another expert says. 

“The hyper-polarization that we’re experiencing at the national level has been trickling down and creating a sense of tribalism among voters,” said Jennie Sweet-Cushman, a political science professor at Chatham University, “so that where they might normally have looked more carefully at who the candidates were at the state and local level, what the issues were, and decided based on personality or a specific issue position, now it feels like there’s so much at stake that voters are in one camp or the other.” 

A recent poll showed a majority of Allegheny County voters identify as either liberal or conservative, and some who were interviewed for this article said they are suspicious of candidates who call themselves moderate. Even some who do think of themselves as independent said they would scrutinize a candidate’s record to see if the candidate is truly moderate.

WESA and PublicSource reached out to voters via social media and face-to-face interviews in Downtown and McCandless in early October, seeking urban and suburban voters with diversity roughly mirroring that of the county. The interviews solicited a spectrum of liberal, moderate and conservative voices, while avoiding participants professionally involved in politics. The voters shared nuanced views of what it means to be a moderate and what they look for in a candidate.

One of the voters, Joe Smetanka, is a property manager from Hampton Township. He said he doesn’t like party labels such as Republican or Democrat. But he also doesn’t like politicians who call themselves moderate.

“I’d prefer to have the candidate being more aggressive and more different than just being moderate there,” he said. “I think we need more change, more progressiveness, more futuristic and strategic-type thinking.”

Smetanka is leaning toward voting for Rockey.

Pearlina Story of Wilkinsburg, who plans to vote for Innamorato, said she thinks candidates who self-identify as moderate may not be strong enough to follow through on their commitments. “I like somebody to stand firm on what they say.”

In about five years, left-wing candidates have supplanted moderates as the local Democratic Party’s power center, taking over key offices and all but ending an era for the region where moderate Democrats — mostly white men — dominated elections through the 2000s and early 2010s.

Innamorato herself was at the vanguard of the movement when she and Summer Lee won state House seats in 2018. Lee went on to Congress last year, and their ally Ed Gainey became Pittsburgh’s mayor in 2021. Progressive judges, magistrates and council members rose with them. Now, Innamorato is trying to cement the group’s political heft, proving that its candidates don’t just win in low-profile races or with favorable district lines.

Mistick said the surge of left-leaning Democrats is more a product of moderates campaigning ineffectively than voter sentiment shifting significantly.

“Regular Democrats stopped doing the organizing they need to do to win elections and progressives started doing them,” he said. Moderates “were not prepared.”

A public opinion poll published in September by the pro-industry group Pittsburgh Works Together asked voters if they consider themselves conservative, liberal or moderate. The results offer a muddy picture: The largest group of respondents answered ‘moderate’ (40%), but a collectively larger group chose an ideological side: 34% answered ‘liberal’ and 25% ‘conservative.’ 

At a deeper level, among those who said they identify as liberal, more respondents said they are ‘very liberal’ than ‘somewhat liberal.’

The poll doesn’t quite match Rockey’s claim that “the vast majority” of the county’s voters reside in the middle. 

What’s more, experts say voters tend to overstate their own moderation and independence.

“Everyone’s independent except when you actually look at how they vote, no one’s independent,” said Chris Bonneau, a political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “People who are truly independent don’t vote.”

Sweet-Cushman of Chatham University said voters could shy away from terming themselves liberal or conservative, despite their actual beliefs, because of their negative connotations. 

“Voters who don’t know too much about politics — which is virtually everybody, especially in a general election — they say they don’t want to be pigeonholed into this thing that has been categorized as being ugly or attached to some figure on the left or the right whom they don’t admire,” said Sweet-Cushman, who specializes in political psychology.

 “And so it’s a lot easier to think of yourself as a moderate than to identify with one of those extremes.”

Wes Wright, a liberal architect who lives in Greenfield, said he would like to support moderate candidates, “But in practice, I think it’s difficult for people to actually be moderate, especially on cultural and social issues.”

The same poll that showed a healthy but minority segment of the county identifies as moderate may show that national political affiliations are seeping into local issues, with basic perceptions of reality taking partisan tilts.

Asked about the state of the county’s economy, 48% of Democrats said it was excellent or good, compared with just 12% of Republicans. On the subject of air quality, 42% of Democrats said the county’s air quality is getting worse, compared with 17% of Republicans.

Rockey’s campaign has tried to tie Innamorato to the “Defund the Police” movement, saying her views are extreme and out of step with county voters. Innamorato has not called for defunding or shrinking the county’s police force during the campaign, though the Pittsburgh Works Together poll shows there is a significant amount of Democratic support for the idea.

Voters were asked to choose between two statements, one centered around “We need to support our police” and the other focused on redirecting financial resources away from policing.  Of respondents, 29% favored diverting resources from the police — 42% of Democratic respondents and 2% of Republicans. 

Joe Miller, a building supply seller from Avalon, said he believes local politics has skewed too far to one side. “We either go too far left or too far right. Right now we’re too far left,” he said. “And you can see the result.” He said crime Downtown was keeping office workers out of the city center.

Each candidate has spent time on the campaign trail accusing the other of being much further to the left or right than they let on — effectively trying to tap into voters’ distaste for both extremism and the political party they do not belong to.

Rockey’s campaign has frequently tied Innamorato to her past involvement with the Democratic Socialists of America and used terms such as “extreme” and “radical” to describe her. Innamorato’s backers have sought to tie Rockey to the national Republican party, associating him with former President Donald Trump and anti-abortion elements.

What could conceivably tie a county-level post with a largely administrative role to presidential politics?

The issue of election administration encapsulates the nationalization of local politics and the distrust between partisan sides: The county executive sits on the county’s Board of Elections, which is responsible for certifying election results. The outcome of this election will decide which political party holds a majority on that board ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

The board received little attention until 2020, when Trump and his backers tried to pressure jurisdictions across the country to nullify election results. The board ended up voting 2-1 to certify the 2020 results, with the board’s one Republican member voting against. 

Democratic nominee Sara Innamorato at a campaign press conference (left) and Republican nominee Joe Rockey at a meet-and-greet event. (Photos by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)

Rockey has said in recent interviews that the 2020 election was conducted fairly, with Biden the rightful winner — and he’s called Trump “incredibly divisive” and said he won’t support him in the future. The local Democratic party is telling voters not to take him at his word, saying in a September press conference that he is “working with MAGA allies who want to take over the county election board.”

For all the jockeying among the candidates over ideology and messaging, the election results will still depend mostly on which voters turn out, Sweet-Cushman said. 

“Most people are not following,” the candidates or their pitches, Sweet-Cushman said. “So they’re not going to be able to distinguish between whether someone with an ‘R’ next to their name is a MAGA Republican or whether they’re someone who is advocating for more moderation, because they’re not paying attention.”

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

Oliver Morrison is a general assignment reporter at 90.5 WESA and a former environment and health reporter at PublicSource. He can be reached at omorrison@wesa.fm. 

This story was fact-checked by Emily Briselli.

This reporting was made possible with financial support through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership.

The post Is Allegheny County politics going tribal? Centrist traditions to be tested Nov. 7. appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

In the race to succeed Rich Fitzgerald as Allegheny County executive, Republican Joe Rockey has cast himself as a moderate. Democrat Sara Innamorato, by contrast, has cast herself as a progressive. The county has a long history of electing both Democrats and Republicans, but it’s been nearly a quarter-century since a Republican was elected to the county’s top office. Rockey’s campaign will be one test of whether county voters will support a candidate who says he wants the votes of conservative voters but who is focusing his campaign messages on appeals to moderates.

Executive Decision
For the first time in 12 years, Allegheny County voters will elect a new county chief executive.

WESA and PublicSource reached out to voters via social media and face-to-face interviews in Downtown and McCandless in early October, seeking urban and suburban voters with diversity roughly mirroring the county’s. The interviews solicited a spectrum of liberal, moderate and conservative voices, while avoiding participants professionally involved in politics. The voters shared nuanced views of what it means to be a moderate and what they look for in a candidate.

Read more: Is Allegheny County politics going tribal? Centrist traditions will be tested Nov. 7.

Many of the voters said they didn’t know anything about Rockey or Innamorato, but they did have opinions about whether a candidate pitching themselves as a moderate would work for them.

Some voters said that a moderate candidate is appealing to them, although they would want to look more closely to see if the candidate is truly moderate. On many of the issues the voters cared about most — such as abortion or homelessness —– those voters disagreed about what being moderate means.

Read more: Allegheny County executive election puts environmental decisions up in the air

Other voters worried that candidates who described themselves as moderate wouldn’t be bold enough to take meaningful action. 

Some self-professed liberals said they thought the word “moderate” had become a cover for conservative candidates who wanted to seem more appealing. One liberal voter who moved from Alabama to Allegheny County three years ago said there isn’t a single way to be moderate: In Alabama, being moderate means being anti-union, he said, but in Pittsburgh being anti-union would be a liability.

There are still some undecided voters out there. One voter in her 20s who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2016 said she had come to regret the decision, and now the most important issues to her are the environment and animal rights. Rockey might have a chance to persuade a former Trump supporter, but Innamorato’s campaign has focused more heavily on tightening environmental enforcement.

Joe Smetanka, of Hampton, manages a retail property in McCandless, where he spoke to WESA. He doesn’t like political parties and believes all candidates should be independent. But he also doesn’t like politicians who say they are moderate.

Smetanka votes in every election and says he is leaning toward voting for Rockey because he seems to be the more pro-business candidate. He didn’t realize that Rockey was trying to position himself as the moderate candidate. “I think he’s got to be a little bit more aggressive and progressive there,” Smetanka said.

Pearlina Story of Wilkinsburg spoke to WESA Downtown. She says she believes candidates who say they are moderate will not be strong enough to follow through on their commitments. 

“That means you might say that you’re going to do something and we vote for you because you promised. You’re going to do that, then turn around, do something else,” she said. “So I like somebody to stand firm on what they say.”

Story works with homeless people Downtown and says homelessness and abortion are the most important issues to her. “I don’t believe in abortion, but I believe that a woman should have a right to say what she wants to do with her body,” she said.

Story plans to vote for Innamorato. She liked Innamorato’s political advertisement more than Rockey’s advertisement, she said. Rockey “was talking about almost the same thing, but he didn’t seem like he was as secure in his feelings,” Story said. “He just sounded like he was just being political and not being specific.”

Nancy VanSickel of Gibsonia spoke to WESA in McCandless. She prefers to identify with issues rather than a political party. She is strongly opposed to abortion rights and says she believes taxation and the proper size of government are key issues. She likes moderate candidates, in theory, but also wants to see for herself what they stand for.  “People can say anything,” she said.

VanSickel said former Republican state Rep. Mike Turzai was one of the candidates she was most proud to vote for, but she didn’t know anything about either of this year’s candidates for county executive.

Sylvia Combs, of Sewickley, spoke to WESA in McCandless and is a strong Democratic voter. She said she would worry about any candidate who calls themselves a moderate because she wouldn’t know where they stand on the issues she cares about, including schools and vaccines. She said it seems to her that self-described independents and moderates in the past few elections take conservative positions rather than liberal positions. “It doesn’t seem like they’re actually independent,” she said.

Combs moved to the area two years ago and says she isn’t familiar with many local political candidates, including those running for county executive. Combs is energized about voting for more liberal school board members this year: She said she believes the old school boards made conservative choices about mask mandates and vaccines.

Beth Schongar, who lives in the Central North Side neighborhood of Pittsburgh, responded to a callout on social media and is a member of the Green Party, said many people are confused about what being moderate means. “A lot of people think moderation means you just aren’t going to change much. To me, that’s conservatism,” she said. “I’m looking for someone who is looking reasonably at the situation we’re in and realizes where there’s urgency.”

Schongar is hopeful about Innamorato but worries that the pressures she’ll face running a large organization for the first time could undermine her effectiveness.

Julia Spitak just moved to McCandless from the Detroit suburbs as part of her rotations in her nurse-practitioner degree program. She said she would like to vote for candidates who are moderate because she believes it means they would look at all sides of an issue. For example, she says, she thinks many people worry about trees only when they kill spotted lanternflies but she also feels bad for the insects. 

“It kind of becomes a really good debate because it’s like: Do we save the trees or do we save these insects?” she said. “I don’t know.”

The environment and animal rights are two of the issues most important to her. She voted for Trump in 2016 but came to regret that decision. “I had thought some of his views were interesting, and I thought maybe he had some good ideas for America,” she said. “But then once he actually became president, I think there was a lot of controversy. And I didn’t agree with everything that he said or did.”

Spitak won’t just vote by party line. “I tend not to think in terms of Democrat or Republican,” she said. “I tend to kind of just look at what they’re talking about and then decide how I feel based on that.”

Wes Wright is a liberal architect who moved from Connecticut to The Run section of Greenfield in Pittsburgh two months ago, and he spoke to WESA Downtown. He thinks most Americans are closer politically than the media sometimes portrays and ideally he would support politically moderate candidates who are willing to work with everyone. “But in practice, I think it’s difficult for people to actually be moderate, especially on cultural and social issues,” he said.

Civil rights, biking infrastructure and climate change are some of the issues most important to him. He voted for Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama but says he doesn’t yet know which local political candidates he’ll vote for in November.

Joe Miller of Avalon sells building supplies, such as soap and paper towels, and he spoke to WESA Downtown. He says office workers are staying away from Downtown because of crime. He thinks that’s because local politics has skewed too far to one side — liberal.

He thinks government intervention leads to problems. He doesn’t understand why some people, in his observation, choose to be homeless. “When I see more tents go up, that’s not how I live. Maybe camping in the woods. That’s fun. But then get home to bed,” he said. “Full time? I just don’t get it. I don’t.”

Miller has come to support more Republicans than Democrats lately. He supports Rockey in part because Rockey seems more supportive of businesses and because he seems more moderate than Innamorato. “Moderate is — I want some enforcement of the laws,” he said.

Bobby Hillman of the Arlington neighborhood in Pittsburgh responded to our callout on social media. He moved to Pittsburgh three years ago and began volunteering for the Democratic Socialists of America. He believes candidates who claim to be moderate are just skirting the issues. “They’re trying to be able to say as little as possible and appeal to as many people as possible without potentially offending anyone,” he said.

Hillman is originally from Alabama, and in that state the moderate position is to be anti-union but in Pittsburgh it’s the reverse, he says. He believes Innamorato won her primary race because she focused on issues rather than responding to attacks about her previous affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America. “Regardless of what anyone else is saying, her campaign has been focused on, here’s what the issues are. Here’s what we want to do around them,” he said.

Mitchell Nagy lives in the South Side Slopes and responded to our callout on social media. He said he leans pretty far to the left and wants a working-class candidate who will support labor, the environment, criminal justice reform and urbanist issues. But he said that popular discourse has pushed what it means to be a moderate rightward. “You’ll see Joe Biden get called a leftist extremist,” he said. “He’s about as right-down-the-middle as it could be.”

Nagy would support a moderate candidate with consistent views, he says. But he worries that moderation prevents them from living up to their views. “You say, ‘Hey, we’re not for racism and bigotry,’ but then you don’t do anything to address the systemic causes and sources of that kind of discrimination, then it’s just kind of doublespeak.”

Nagy says Rockey does seem pretty moderate, but he’s been turned off by Rockey’s tough-on-crime rhetoric. “I think that we can address our problems without trying to throw more people in jail,” he said “We’ve already got the world’s highest incarceration rate in this country. We don’t need to be any tougher on crime.”

Nagy believes Innamorato is liberal but not extreme. She wants to help people with addictions rather than throw people in jail, he said; she’s not calling to abolish police or abolish prisons. “She’s not out there at the Democratic Socialist rally,” he said, “chanting to seize the means of production.”

Oliver Morrison is a general assignment reporter at WESA who focuses on coverage of education, politics, environment and health.

This reporting was made possible with financial support through the Pittsburgh Media Partnership.

The post Allegheny County voters share how they feel about ‘moderate’ politicians appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

When Aaron DeLeo bought his house in Verona in October 2020, he thought he’d lucked into a great deal.

Unbalanced
How property tax assessments create winners and losers

DeLeo had been looking for months and hadn’t found anything suitable. But the owner of the house in Verona was in a hurry and accepted DeLeo’s offer at the asking price, even though many other homebuyers at the time found themselves in bidding wars. 

The house had everything DeLeo wanted. Close to work, with a fenced-in backyard and an extra garage, it featured cherry kitchen cabinets, hardwood floors and a gazebo in the backyard.

For a decade, DeLeo had been trying to put himself in a position to buy a house. He worked in a science lab and made an extra $100 a pop leading local trivia games at night. He even sold some of his oldest and most valuable Magic: The Gathering game cards to pay the down payment. 

His monthly payment would be just under $1,000, and he thought he could handle it. He didn’t factor in Allegheny County’s property assessment system.

Soon after moving in, DeLeo started receiving letters from lawyers offering to help him appeal his tax bill. He didn’t know what they were talking about until he received another letter saying that the Penn Hills School District believed his house should be valued for tax purposes at $126,000 — a 64% increase – if he didn’t challenge the new valuation. 

DeLeo expected his monthly payment to go up, maybe by $100 a month or so. Instead it jumped by $400 a month, a 44% increase. 

“The value of my house is more than when the last person lived here. I get that part of it. So, yes, I think the taxes should go up partially,” he said. “But not that outrageous amount.”

DeLeo received a new letter in the mail last year from a lawyer letting him know that after a lawsuit ruling, he would be in a good position to lower his tax bill by well over $1,000 per year.

Things are looking up now for DeLeo and potentially thousands of other homeowners like him across the county, after a lawsuit last year changed how some properties are assessed. DeLeo and people like him have until March 31 to appeal and potentially lower their tax bills by hundreds or thousands of dollars per year. If many of them do appeal, school districts and municipalities could be facing a major shock to their finances.

A generational change in property taxes

A judge ruled last year that the county had skewed a calculation known as the Common Level Ratio [CLR], meant to roughly equalize assessments determined through appeals and those the county assigned a decade ago.

As a result, a home that sold for $100,000 — if it became the subject of a property tax appeal — would likely have been valued at around $81,000 in 2022 for taxing purposes. But after the judge’s ruling, it would be valued around $64,000 this year. For a house in Penn Hills, that would mean a savings of more than $700 per year.

“It’s like a generational drop” in the ratio used in assessment appeals, said Jason Yarbrough, a Pittsburgh lawyer who has worked on real estate appeals for more than a decade. “I don’t think there’s ever been as significant of a drop year-over-year than what we are seeing in 2023 as we try to catch up to years of adjustments that should have been made.”

DeLeo is one of many new homeowners across Allegheny County who had been paying what is sometimes referred to as the “newcomer tax” in recent years. 

The average home price in the county has increased by more than half since the last time the county conducted a full reassessment of properties in 2012. The ratio applied in appeals did not keep pace. So it had become increasingly lucrative for school districts to appeal the assessments of newly sold homes in order to tax them at higher values. Between 2015 and 2021, school districts across the county tripled the number of assessment appeals they were filing on homes in an attempt to collect more tax revenue.

The lawsuit has reversed that calculus. Tax experts say that many people who bought their homes in the past couple of years will have an opportunity to appeal their assessments and reduce their taxes. 

“Most people in the real estate world are predicting there will be many fewer school district or municipal-initiated appeals in 2023 and many more property-owner appeals,” said Michael Werner, a lawyer who has been working on appeals for two decades.

In a more typical year, most property assessment appeals would target properties sold in the previous year. But Werner thinks that homeowners who have bought in the last several years — and saw their assessments increase through appeals — might be in a position to appeal this year. It will be more difficult for people who purchased homes five years ago, when prices and resulting assessments were lower, he said.

The new math will be especially beneficial for commercial property owners, which have more ways of appealing their property values than relying on a recent sales price, Yarbrough said. For example, commercial properties may be able to use a loss of revenue since the pandemic to argue that their properties are not worth as much now. Some of his larger corporate clients could save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year with an appeal. 

But both commercial and residential owners have one thing in common, he said: “I think some people believe that this will happen automatically,” he said. “It won't, and it will require them to take some kind of an affirmative step and filing an appeal if they think that their number is wrong.”

Who is most likely to win a property tax cut?

People who bought houses in the last two or three years could have an easier time winning an appeal, according to Werner. That’s because it will be easier to show that their house now is worth a similar amount to what they paid for it. And then they could get their tax bill reduced by applying the new, lower CLR.

Owners of property in areas that have had more real estate transactions in recent years and have seen a lot of appeals will tend to benefit the most.

“You have to look at Lawrenceville. You have to look at Squirrel Hill. You look at probably Point Breeze, Highland Park, Morningside,” said Michael Lamb, the City of Pittsburgh’s controller. “The Strip District would be probably the biggest one: People who bought homes or condos in the Strip during the pandemic paid top price.”

The more expensive the home, the more savings potential. For example, the owner of a home that sold for $700,000 in Pittsburgh and saw its assessment hiked to that level through an appeal could save about $6,000 per year in taxes by appealing and applying the new CLR.

Lamb warns that people need to carefully look at their own situation before deciding to appeal. 

“This could backfire on you,” he said. “You can go in and come out of there with a bigger valuation.”

County Controller Corey O’Connor’s office held meetings last year about changes to property tax assessments. O’Connor said the most well-attended meetings were in the North Hills. His office has created a calculator to help residents decide whether or not to appeal.

Longtime homeowners could benefit, too, if they live in an area where prices have remained flat or have been falling through time. But if they purchased their home five years ago or more, they may have to get an appraisal or research sales of similar houses during the appeals process to prove how valuable their home is now.

The biggest losers? Governments, especially schools

School districts and other taxing bodies, which have relied on property appeals to increase tax revenue in recent years, could lose out on millions of dollars in the coming years. They may have to pay refunds to people like DeLeo, and they won't reap new revenue because the appeals they file won't be as lucrative under the new ratio.

The sticker shock that homeowners like DeLeo have been hit with in recent years will instead fall on municipalities and school districts. Ira Weiss, whose law firm represents a half-dozen school districts in the county including Pittsburgh Public Schools, said this has “put every school district and every municipality in Allegheny County on knife's edge.”

“They're going to have to wrestle with the fact that they're going to lose real estate tax revenue” when they set their budgets in 2023, he said.

Appeals filed by owners of commercial and industrial properties alone could reduce tax collections across the county by tens of millions of dollars, Weiss said.

“We have told clients that they have to be very conservative in their budgeting for next year,”  he said. 

Many school districts will have to raise their tax rates to make up the difference, he said.

“I'm not saying they're all going to do it,” he said. “But if they don't do it, many local governments — that is, municipalities and school districts — will have to cut programs.”

Lamb, the city controller, said he’s not sure how many individuals will end up appealing, so it’s difficult to say how big of a hit Pittsburgh’s finances will take. But he said he expects most longtime residents will not appeal and some newer homeowners will. 

“I don't know that we have a sense of the full impact of it, but it could be a pretty major hit to what is our biggest revenue source,” he said. 

The city's $686 million budget relies on $159 million from the property tax.

The county’s current property value assessment system has led to stark inequality. Owners of similar homes in the same neighborhood and even on the same block can be charged radically different tax bills, largely depending on when they bought their houses, or in some cases, when they did serious renovation work. Neighborhoods like Lawrenceville have become centers of inequality, where some homes are still valued at 2012 prices and others are taxed at much higher rates.

The current system also has led to inequalities between municipalities and neighborhoods. Areas with depressed home values should have seen their tax bills go down, as richer areas take up a larger share of their tax bills, according to Lamb. But this hasn’t happened. 

“Generally what you see is that you've got very wealthy communities that are assessed at a fraction of their value, and you have poorer communities that are assessed at most of their value,” said Lamb. “So it's unfair.”

The lawsuit that changed everything isn’t over

The lawsuit that brought property owners the new ratio and the opportunity to lower some tax bills continues. The Pittsburgh Public Schools have appealed the finding that compelled the new CLR. The plaintiffs, meanwhile, have filed motions alleging that the county's newly hired chief assessment officer fails to meet a requirement in the county code that demands 10 years of property valuation experience.

The case started in the summer of 2021, when a group of residents and a property investment firm filed a lawsuit challenging the county’s assessment practices.

The plaintiffs had recently purchased properties in Wilkinsburg, McKeesport, Pittsburgh, Forest Hills and Franklin Park. Not long after, local school districts or municipalities had appealed their property values.

The lawsuit alleged that the county had submitted incorrect real estate data to the State Tax Equalization Board in a way that “artificially overstates, or inflates” the Common Level Ratio.

Plaintiffs claimed that sales records sent to the state board weren’t an accurate sample of arms-length transactions between buyers and sellers, but instead were chosen because the sale prices were close to the assessments, according to John Silvestri, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. Because the data was skewed toward properties with sale prices that were close to their assessments, the state board calculated a CLR that didn’t reflect rising property sale prices. That kept the CLR high and exposed new homeowners to much higher property taxes than neighbors who purchased their houses years ago.

At stake were millions of dollars’ worth of property taxes. With an increased CLR, the county, school districts and municipalities were able to increase revenues without increasing the tax rate by filing appeals against owners of recently sold properties.

Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Alan Hertzberg ultimately ruled that the county “failed to administer the property tax assessment appeal system in a just and impartial manner” and ordered officials to send new data to the state.

Evidence showed “there could be no doubt that Allegheny County’s Office of Property Assessment had been ‘cooking the books,’” Hertzberg wrote in his opinion. He ordered a CLR of 63.53% instead of 81.1%.

A spokesperson for the county declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Lawmakers push for reforms — but not mass reassessments

The litigation also spurred lawmaking efforts that continue, and that could further improve the landscape for property owners.

Last year county council President Pat Catena created a Special Committee on Assessment Practices to hear evidence from the lawsuit and gather information about county assessments in the past.

In January, council passed an ordinance to create a second-chance window for taxpayers to challenge recent property assessments. Those who want to appeal their 2022 property assessments now have until March 31 to do so.

If a court orders a change in the 2023 common level ratio, the ordinance would also give homeowners a second chance to appeal assessments from this year.

Two additional pieces of legislation were introduced but are still sitting in a county council committee.

If a court adjusts the CLR again, one proposed ordinance would direct the county Office of Property Assessments to identify affected properties and recalculate their assessed values. It would also direct the office to alert property owners, municipalities and school districts to any such change and require that the county issue refunds for taxes it collected based on appeals decided using any incorrect assessments.

Another ordinance would allow council to appoint a candidate to the post of chief assessment officer if that position is ever vacant for 90 days or more.

The litigation and legislation are altering a system that has frozen many property owners’ tax bills for a decade. But so far, the changes do not entail the kind of full reassessment of all properties that has proved contentious in decades past.

Oliver Morrison is a general assignment reporter at WESA and can be reached at omorrison@wesa.fm.

Julia Zenkevich is a general assignment reporter at WESA and can be reached at jzenkevich@wesa.fm.

This story was fact-checked by Sophia Levin.

This package was produced in a partnership between WESA and PublicSource.

The post Tables turn on Allegheny County assessments, as new math favors owners over tax collectors, schools appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

The emergence of the Black Women for a Better Education political action committee in 2021 has changed the political dynamic shaping Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Schools. The group endorsed three school board candidates who went on to win and one of those board members, Sala Udin, was elected board president. The PAC was the most outspoken critic of former superintendent Anthony Hamlet, who resigned after the release of an ethics investigation last year.

The PAC joins three other groups in actively driving agendas in the state’s second largest urban school district: The Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, A+ Schools and OnePA’s Education Rights Network. Each of the nine current district board members was endorsed by at least one of the four groups.

As Pittsburgh Public Schools [PPS] prepares to make some of the toughest decisions it’s had to make in more than a decade about staffing and school closures, these four groups are likely to have outsized influence.

Although the groups share more in common than they sometimes admit, they also have profound differences about what education should look like in the city. Some believe the district has the resources it needs but would like to radically transform how they’re being managed, while others are advocating to add more resources overall to create change. Most of the groups have vowed to work with each other but that would require setting aside their differences to come to a collective vision for the district.

A+ and Black Women

Although none of the groups are completely aligned, there are clear factions. A+ Schools and Black Women for a Better Education [BWBE] both invoke the need for a radical transformation of the district’s status quo. James Fogarty, the director of A+, said the current split between magnet schools and neighborhood schools has created a two-tiered system of education, where some schools’ populations are nearly all Black and brown students. He wants the district to do more to spread economic privilege around and spend more district resources on the students with the most need. 

But the two groups are structured differently. A+ Schools does advocacy work on issues to try to influence the administration and board, but not political advocacy. “We’re trying to be an informer of a great school board but not a creator of it,” Fogarty said. BWBE has primarily done political advocacy so far, although it recently held several information workshops. 

Both groups take an open-minded approach to charter schools, pointing out that some charter schools are doing better than district schools and others are doing worse. BWBE believes parents should have the right to choose what school is best for their own children and doesn’t think Black parents should have to continue to shoulder the burden of a district that isn’t working for many.

LaTrenda Sherrill, one of BWBE’s leaders, said the group is trying be open-minded rather than ideological. “Much of the politics in the region is guided by super black-and-white thinking. Either you’re for charter schools or for traditional public schools; either you support teachers or you don’t,” she said. “And we have so many young people that live in the gray.”

A+ Schools spends between $800,000 and $1 million per year, according to its most recent tax filing, and has seven staff members. BWBE, on the other hand, doesn’t yet have a full-time staff member and is largely sustained by donations from about 30 of its members that have not yet totaled $100,000, according to its most recent public disclosures.  

Both groups have been criticized by OnePA, a social justice advocacy group, for relying on foundations that support charter schools. But Fogarty said the large foundation community in Pittsburgh should be considered an asset, not denigrated. 

Tracey Reed, both a PPS board member and BWBE member who works for the Grable Foundation, said the focus on ties to local foundations is typical but unjustified.  “You can look in the news and see when Black women get together for whatever reason, especially in education, then the question always becomes: Who is supporting them?” she said. “Like we can’t support ourselves or have ideas that can stand on our own.”

Both groups say the district has the resources now to be able to turn itself around if it spends more wisely. They note that the district has one of the highest per-pupil funding levels in the state.

“We are not a poor district. We are a district that has mismanaged the funds,” Sherrill said. “Let’s stop believing the hype that we can’t do what’s right for Black children.”

OnePA and the teachers union

OnePA’s vision for the district, by contrast, is to invest in neighborhood schools and provide wraparound services, like health clinics and dentists, which would help meet students’ basic needs and allow them to focus on their classes. Rather than a dramatic reimagining of the district, they think the district needs more resources to offset the challenges students in poverty face.

OnePA has also focused on trying to change the district’s approach to discipline and special education. The group successfully lobbied to eliminate suspensions of students in grades K -2 and hopes to incrementally add more grades, although an attempt to expand the suspension ban to grades 3 to 5 failed last year. 

OnePA takes a hard line against charter schools — although some of the group’s parents do enroll their children in charter schools. The group’s leaders argue that there should be a moratorium on additional charter schools until the state funding formula is changed, so charter school enrollment doesn’t come at the expense of local district budgets. Its leaders say that charter schools, which are publicly funded but run by private boards, are not as democratic as districts with elected school board members.

OnePA spent about $2.2 million in 2019, according to its most recent publicly available nonprofit tax records. But the group’s education work is only one of several campaigns. In Pittsburgh, OnePA has two staff members now devoted to education advocacy, including former PPS board member Moira Kaleida. 

The group’s funding largely comes from national sources, said Angel Gober, OnePA’s Pittsburgh director.

“I would never ever take money from a foundation that is pro-charter. Never never never, not one dollar. I would never take money from a union, so they can’t control us,” she said. “We don’t get any local money.”

OnePA emphasizes problems with the charter school funding formula and a lack of resources to address the growing demands to serve special education students. Kaleida has criticized A+ Schools’ goal of redistributing resources between schools, saying it undermines the union contract that spells out where teachers are placed. 

“The answer isn’t attacking teachers, the answer is adequate funding from the state/feds and charter reform,” Kaleida wrote in a tweet last week. 

Fogarty disagrees with this premise. “The reality is the current system is inequitable. If you add more money, you are just going to create greater divergence of inequity,” he said. “If I put $1 million more into a system that already gives $2,000 more to students at CAPA than at Perry, I’m just going to exacerbate the inequity.”

The Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers [PFT] has endorsed many of the same school board candidates as OnePA. For example, both endorsed board member Jamie Piotroski in 2021. The PFT also takes a hard line against charter schools.

“I am so anti-charter,” said Nina Esposito-Visgitis, the PFT president. “But some parents have a different view of them, like they’re safer.””

The PFT has the most resources of any of the four local education groups, spending around $2.6 million per year, according to its most recent tax filing. Not surprisingly, the PFT continues to emphasize the need for substantial resources to attract the best teachers. 

“They say I’m trying to get every penny,” Esposito-Visgitis said, “Yeah, I am. We have a lovely contract.” 

The PFT has also clashed on some issues with OnePA, most notably on whether the district’s police officers should be allowed to carry weapons in the schools. 

Esposito-Visgitis said she has worked with A+ on areas where they agree but declined to comment when asked about her opinion of BWBE. The new PAC has publicly criticized the union, accusing it of prioritizing salaries over students and for pushing a contract that is inflexible to reform.

But Esposito-Visgitis said she thinks the union contract provides sufficient options for restructuring schools and encouraged critics to read the contract more closely.

School closures

One of the most volatile issues that could come before the school board this year is whether to close schools and, if so, which schools to close. The four groups are already staking out positions.

Last year, Hamlet proposed closing seven schools. The plan was quickly defeated after it was criticized for being rushed without community input. 

But as the district looks to cut its growing budget deficit, school closures could come up again. District officials have said they are using federal COVID relief money to try to be more strategic and careful about what layoffs or school closures they propose this time around.

Esposito-Visgitis said if the district is going to close schools, it should prioritize increasing the size of schools to support its teachers. “I know there needs to be some consolidation because some of our schools have gotten so small,” she said.

Both OnePA and A+ Schools agree on a proposed red line for school closures in Pittsburgh: no closures in predominantly Black communities.

“They better not close one Black school in one Black community. I’m telling you that right now,” said Gober. “They can close white schools in their neighborhoods.”

Community members and educators still cite the negative impact of moving the CAPA 6-12 magnet school out of Homewood and into downtown in 2003. And Esposito-Visgitis said she still hears complaints from community members about when PPS left the Hazelwood community without its own school in 2001, which some believe cleared the way for Propel to open a charter school in the neighborhood in 2013.

“Black neighborhoods faced the brunt of school closures last time. I think they are off limits,” Fogarty said. “You really have to give those neighborhoods and schools that need investment additional supports.”

The union is tired of hearing delays from the school district and wants to know soon which schools will close and how many furloughs there will be, so it can prepare its members.

Leaders of BWBE have said the district continues to spend more money on educating fewer students, without improving its results. To turn itself around while also spending less money on schools and staff, they say the district needs to rethink its approach.

“The best hope for stemming this decline,” according to the group, “is to create compelling, high-quality options that help attract families to the city.”

Correction: The district’s police were erroneously characterized in an earlier version of this story.

Oliver Morrison was PublicSource’s K-12 education reporter. He can be reached at morrison.oliver@gmail.com or on Twitter @ORMorrison.

The post Where is Pittsburgh Public Schools heading? These four groups want a say. appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Sean Russell lined up for the 200-meter dash in the outside lane.

That meant that Sean, a senior at Westinghouse Academy, stood a few meters in front of the next runner to account for the track’s curve. 

His position in the April 7 race is an apt metaphor for the position in life Sean finds himself in. At a school known for its low rate of alumni going on to graduate from college, Sean has been accepted to Yale, Harvard and Stanford. He’s one of only 300 students across the country to win a full-tuition Gates Scholarship to a school of his choosing. 

News of Sean’s college acceptances was shared on Pittsburgh Public Schools’ Facebook page 1,500 times, more than any other post this year. He didn’t celebrate right away because of his track meet. But after posting some good times on the track, his coach bought him pizza — the kind of indulgence Sean might not have allowed himself if that week hadn’t turned into such a victory lap.

Extra credit

Antawn James, Sean’s best friend at Westinghouse, said Sean will ask for extra credit work in classes where he’s already earning 100%. In track practices, Antawn and Sean often run at a pace much faster than their coach would like because they get so competitive. Sean pushed Antawn in the offseason to run workouts up a steep hill in Frick Park, even on days Antawn felt lazy. 

Sean’s effort has had a similar impact at school, according to social studies teacher Sean Means, pushing teachers to work even harder to find new challenges. Sean’s hard work, Means said, pushes other students to think more deeply and stay focused.

In Means’ class the day of the track meet, discussion turned toward civil rights history. “Malcolm X thought war was the right way, and Martin Luther King thought peace was the right way,” one student offered.  

Sean responded: “Malcolm was more about separation and Martin more about unity and working with both sides.“

Sean Russell ran the 800 meters, earning second place, and then set up to to run the 200 meters, which he won. Antawn James and Sean (bottom right) are in advanced classes and run track and cross country together. (Photos by Oliver Morrison / PublicSource)

Sean’s contributions in and outside of class are a frustrating reminder for Means of what Westinghouse could be like. Students like Sean often transfer out of neighborhood schools — like Westinghouse in Homewood, where most students are Black from low-income families — to attend more prestigious magnet schools in other neighborhoods. 

“For us to have him here has been game-changing,” Means said. “They take those students, and it hurts the neighborhood schools.”

In fact, Sean had applied to get into Obama Academy, where he would’ve been able to take advanced international baccalaureate classes. Sean thinks he made a mistake on the application and was told he was ineligible. His sister, who is 11 months older and in the same grade, was accepted.

Sean’s life began to diverge from his sister’s. And yet he believes now that staying at Westinghouse was the best thing that could’ve happened to him.

Splits

At 6:30 a.m. the morning of the meet, Sean had snuck out the back door of his house in Homewood to avoid waking up the dogs, four siblings, his dad and stepmom.

He started listening to an audiobook about Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. His teacher Angela Flango had recommended it to him. 

Flango tells her students that, as hard as she is asking them to work, she will be working just as hard. But she said this is a challenge with Sean. She can’t outwork him.

“Within the classroom, he is laser focused,” Flango said. “You can see it in his posture. He doesn’t lean back against his chair. He sits up ramrod straight.”

Earlier in the year, Sean had enjoyed reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and he asked Flango for recommendations of other memoirs he could read. He responded to her email of recommendations with a detailed analysis of one — “Between the World and Me,” written as a letter between a Black father to his son. It was, she said, one of the most eloquent emails she’d ever received from any person let alone a student. He had signed off with a pithy summary.

“Awakening. Awareness. The truth.”

“Within the classroom, he is laser focused. You can see it in his posture.” (Photos by Oliver Morrison/PublicSource)

Sean’s dad, Sean Russell Sr., was making $8.50 an hour when he bought their house in Homewood for $10,000 in 2014. 

He couldn’t get a loan, so he came up with a $1,000 down payment and created a contract to pay the rest. It took months to install new plumbing and electricity, drywall, paint and put in ceiling fans. Neither of Sean’s parents graduated from high school, but his dad believed in hard work.

Sean’s early years were split between the small rural community of Muse, where his mom lived, and his dad’s home in the city. Half the time, he attended school in the largely middle-class Canon-McMillan School District, which currently serves fewer than 4% Black students. In Pittsburgh, his schools were more than 90% Black and most of the kids were from low-income homes.

Sean preferred attending schools outside of the city, even amid setbacks. For example, he was assigned to the regular math class in 7th grade at Canonsburg Middle School, even though he thought he should have been placed in the honors class. Sean used the snub to motivate himself. By the end of the year, he said, his teachers had begun assigning him work from the advanced class anyway.

Sean loved his mom and all he knew about her was that she loved him and looked after him. But around that time, her use of opioids had become more regular and then someone she gave drugs to overdosed. Before his 8th-grade year, he and his siblings were removed from their mom’s home. 

Sean didn’t want to leave. 

“He was crying,” said Tina Gardner, his maternal grandmother. “It was terrible.”

Sean remembers the neighbors down the street all came outside to stare at the commotion. He had to quickly pack up his things but he left his favorite chair for video games because he thought he would be back.

“It was just so quick,” he said. “It was like one minute you’re like this and one minute your whole life is changed.”

Sean and his two sisters moved in with his dad, and Gardner adopted his mom’s three other children. 

Gardner was worried for Sean and his siblings. “Going to a city school from a little country town,” she said. 

But Sean thrived. In 10th grade, he led Westinghouse in the district’s African American History Challenge Bowl. He learned from his mistakes the previous year, he said, and studied for months in advance. In the championship round, he beat the students from Obama.

In 11th grade, he joined a new, advanced program at the school called the Justice Scholars.

Identification and concentric privilege

During lunch, Sean’s teacher, Sean Means, drove Sean to the DMV to pick up his first official photo identification. Sean needed an ID to board a plane the next day, his first flight: he was flying to California during spring break to visit Harvey Mudd and Stanford and then flying to Boston to visit Harvard.

Back in September, Means had encouraged Sean to think bigger. Sean’s dream school was the University of Pittsburgh. But then he scored higher than a 1400 on his SATs. “If Mr. Means sees this in me, maybe it’s there,” Sean thought. He began his application to Harvard that very night.

Means was one of 10 Black men recruited into Westinghouse about 10 years ago to become mentors and earn their teacher certifications. The school was struggling with a radical effort to transform itself at the time, back in 2011-2012. Means stayed at Westinghouse at the end of the two-year program, although six of the others are involved in education elsewhere.

A professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Esohe Osai, showed up in 2016 trying to address one of the city’s biggest educational challenges: Black students in Pittsburgh are not graduating college at the same rates as white students. When Osai went to the school to find out why, she was told that part of the reason was that the students didn’t have access to a challenging curriculum. 

She started the Justice Scholars Institute with just a single advanced class. Westinghouse students weren’t passing their AP tests but by bringing in a “College in High School” class, the students could earn college credit. The program also provided after-school enrichment, college application help and campus visits. 

Sean’s teachers guided him through his college application process. 

And he wasn’t alone. His teachers say that about 16 seniors this year are unique in their academic prowess and drive to succeed.

Vince Werling teaches statistics, a fourth class that was added to the Justice Scholars program this year. He said he’s seen the culture at the school start to shift over the last four years. 

“It’s pushing an academic focus that we didn’t have before,” he said. “It’s the beginning of something.”

What happens when you remove the Sean Russells from class?

Pittsburgh schools with high concentrations of low-income students seem to be struggling with just getting kids to school, according to last year’s report by A+ Schools. Once the percentage of low-income students exceeds 80%, chronic absenteeism appears to skyrocket.

So, are Westinghouse students hurt by losing more privileged students to magnet schools? 

The data isn’t clear, according to Roslyn Mickelson, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Mickelson has reviewed studies that tried to isolate the impact of having more or fewer low-income students in a school. While the studies clearly show low-income schools struggle, they don’t make clear at what point the proportion of low-income students makes the challenges for students in poverty even more severe. 

According to some recent high-profile studies, the magnet system in Pittsburgh could actually be contributing to Sean’s success.

Brian Gill, a senior researcher at Mathematica who studies education policy including in Pittsburgh, said there is a growing body of evidence that students choosing to go to charter schools actually improves the outcomes of the students left behind. 

Schools in Washington, D.C., for example, improved across the board with the addition of charter schools. Although magnet schools and charter schools are not exactly the same thing, he said they both separate out students who chose an alternative to their local school.

“The results aren’t totally definitive but I would characterize them as encouraging,” he said.

Sean Russell’s bedroom walls are filled with inspirational quotes, accolades and goals that he sees before he walks to school every day. (Photos by Oliver Morrison / PublicSource)

What the research is suggesting is that the magnet system in Pittsburgh could be creating competition among educators and students that helps bring about programs like the Justice Scholars.

The success of students like Sean in the Justice Scholars program could help pave the way for more students to sign up and show teachers what is possible for their students with the right supports, Osai said.

“Eventually it begins to impact the school as a whole as teachers begin to acknowledge their potential academically,” she said. 

Another viewpoint

After the track meet, Sean met with a mentor who he is working with to raise awareness about water quality issues in Pittsburgh. And then he walked home to prepare for a scholarship interview with Harvey Mudd. Late that night, he packed a duffel bag for his trip to California the next day, paid for largely by the Justice Scholars program.

Sean Russell visited Harvey Mudd, Stanford and Harvard over spring break and took his first plane ride. (Photos courtesy of Sean Means)

Sean also learned about the opioid crisis in his social justice class and on some level, he said, it helped him understand that the loving mom he remembered from his childhood was suffering from a disease.

When she called him just after she got out of prison in February, he picked up the phone for the first time in four years. His voice had changed. “He was a grown man and he was talking so intelligent,” she thought.

Sean thinks they are making progress. “Relationships that go down such a dark turn need time to get back to where they were,” he said. “We’re working at it.”

For now, he said, he’s trying to show her that he’s proud of the progress she’s making. He sends her inspirational quotes that the other women she’s in recovery with are amazed by. “He’s really inspiring, he inspires me every day,” she said. “That’s why I’m trying so hard.”

After spending the day at Stanford the next week, Means took Sean to an overlook where he could see the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. The wind was gusting as the sun set.

Sean was video chatting with his two sisters, one a 10th grader at Westinghouse, the other a senior at Obama. 

He held his phone’s camera up to the horizon for them to see.

Oliver Morrison is PublicSource’s K-12 education reporter. He can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ORMorrison.

The post How did Sean Russell become one of the great hopes of Pittsburgh Public Schools? appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Pittsburgh Public Schools spent at least $288 million on salaries and other kinds of pay, like overtime, during the 2020-2021 school year.

The 4,485 salaried and non-salaried employees earned a median of roughly $61,000. Of those employees, 724 made more than $100,000. 

Aggregate data provided by the district revealed gender and racial wage gaps among the workforce. White employees made around $19,000 more than Black employees on average, and men earned about $2,000 more than women on average. The biggest discrepancy was between white men, who earned an average of about $71,000 per year, and Black men, who earned an average of $49,000 per year. White women earned an average of about $68,500 and Black women an average of $50,500.

The largest contingent of the workforce — teachers — is predominantly white, with salaries set according to a pay schedule negotiated between the district and the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers.

Who got paid how much?

The former superintendent was joined on the list of the district’s highest paid by other central office staff and several employees in the maintenance department.

Former Superintendent Anthony Hamlet earned $229,473. Kyle Vogt, an administrator for the maintenance department, was the second highest paid employee at $158,396.

Overtime pay contributed significantly to the maintenance department employees who show up in the top 25. The district paid out $9.4 million in overtime and supplemental pay in 2020-2021. 

There were about 250 substitute teachers last school year who earned $15,000 on average. A lack of substitute teachers has become a nationwide problem during the pandemic.

Search how much teachers, administrators and staff at your school earned in 2020-2021. Type in the name of the school in the search field below.

*An earlier version of the chart below showed some people’s earnings to be higher than they were. A PPS spokesperson said the reason for this discrepancy was some data was entered by hand and then added twice.

Most teachers earned between $90,000 and $100,000

The district employed 1,814 K-12 teachers in 2021:

• 86% of the teachers were white
• 71% were identified as female
• 57% earned between $90,000 and $110,000 per year.

The students in the district are 69% students of color and predominantly low income.

Most teachers (64%) had been with the district since at least 2010. According to the union-negotiated pay schedule, it takes about 11 years to start earning the maximum base salary ($99,000). 

Other incomes are more spread out. For example, PPS employed just under 500 classroom aides, 53% of whom are Black, the vast majority of of whom earned between $26,000 and $53,000.

Where do PPS teachers live?

PPS teachers are allowed to live outside of the city, unlike PPS paraprofessionals who have been advocating for a change to their contract on that point.

Map of where teachers live: 

At least 58% of teachers live outside of the city of Pittsburgh. At least 15% live in the city. And for 27% of teachers it’s unclear from their ZIP code.

Staff diversity varies widely across the district. 

For example, five schools in the district have a majority-Black staff that closely mirrors the district’s diversity, including Westinghouse Academy, Lincoln K-5, Faison K-5, Weil K-5 and Miller K-5. By contrast, four schools have less than 10% Black staff, including Phillips K-5, South Brook 6-8, Banksville K-5 and Carmalt K-8.

Which schools have the least well paid teachers (i.e the least experience)?

Teachers at some schools earn significantly less because they are newer teachers. Teachers at Schiller, for example, made an average salary of $65,000 per year, the lowest in the district. Arlington K-8, Montessori K-5, Spring Hill K-5, Sterret 6-8, Westinghouse 6-12, Allegheny 6-8, King 6-8,  and University Prep at Milliones had the lowest salaries in the district aside from Schiller. 

Teachers at Roosevelt K-5, the most experienced staff at a school that serves the general population, has an average of 21 years of experience, about three times as much as the least experienced staff at University Prep at Milliones. 

Only 3% of teachers left the district after the 2020-2021 school year. The district administration, by contrast, saw an exodus in 2021.

Correction (4/26/2022): The original data provided by PPS was incomplete and contained errors. This article has been updated to reflect corrections in the data provided by PPS.

Oliver Morrison is PublicSource’s K-12 education reporter. He can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ORMorrison.

This story was fact-checked by Charlie Wolfson.

The post Pittsburgh Public Schools’ employee salaries show disparities between Black and white staff appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Two 17-year-olds were killed and several more injured during a shooting at a large party in an Airbnb early Sunday morning in Pittsburgh’s East Allegheny neighborhood.

The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s office identified Mathew Steffy-Ross, of Pitcairn, and Jaiden Brown, as the victims.

Steffy-Ross had been enrolled at Propel Braddock-Hills, according to Sonya Meadows, a spokesperson for Propel. He was in a placement program for students who run into legal problems, she said, so he hadn’t been attending the school. On March 31, he was withdrawn from Propel and enrolled in a non-traditional Christian academy, she said. Propel students are currently on spring break until Wednesday, but Meadows said supports would be in place for students and staff when they return.

Brown was set to graduate from Woodland Hills High School next month, according to KDKA. Woodland Hills says it will be reaching out to those impacted by the violence and will be providing additional counseling supports on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Around 200 people, most of them underage, were reportedly attending a party in a unit rented through Airbnb in the neighborhood, also known as Deutschtown. Gunfire erupted around 12:30 a.m. Pittsburgh police have said there was likely more than one shooter and between 50 and 90 rounds discharged during the event.

“It was mayhem,” one witness told The Trib. No arrests have yet been made.

Allegheny Health Network has reported it treated seven victims and UPMC reported it has treated two additional victims. One of the victims at AHN remained in serious condition as of Monday morning; four victims were discharged, according to the Post Gazette. Some of the injuries were sustained while trying to get away from the gunfire; some jumped out of windows.

There have been more shootings this year in Pittsburgh than last year, according to a Pittsburgh-Post Gazette analysis. The Post-Gazette also reported that, based on video footage nearby, Pittsburgh police appeared to have been at the scene of the party earlier in the night.

“At least 10 gunshot victims, two lives lost, and hundreds of lives forever changed, because we have yet to pass meaningful legislation to lessen the amount of guns in our streets or provide the much-needed resources to communities desperately need,” Mayor Ed Gainey said in a statement on Monday. Gainey said he would be calling a meeting to unveil his administration’s new “All In Citywide” approach to gun violence. Gainey’s campaign emphasized the need for reducing gun violence.

A Pittsburgh Public Schools spokesperson said four of the injured students attended PPS schools and that the district would be in modified lockdown on Monday, only allowing visitors who have been scheduled in advance. In January, a Pittsburgh student was shot outside Oliver Academy. 

“We know that incidents like this can cause residual pain and require ongoing healing,” said Wayne Walters, interim superintendent of PPS, in an emailed statement. “If your child requires services, grief counseling, or assistance, please contact your school’s social worker.”

Michelle Porter, the director of One Northside, told PublicSource in an interview Monday that she had just met with the Zone 1 police commander last week and they had commented on how “things had been pretty calm.” One Northside had implemented a new safety program at Perry High School after a large fight at the beginning of the school year.

“The mass shooting that occurred last night at an Airbnb party in East Deutschtown does not reflect that neighborhood at all,” said City Councilor Bobby Wilson in a statement.

Airbnb violence

In 2019, State Rep. Jessica Benham, then the secretary of the Zone 3 safety council on the South Side, talked about the problem of shootings and parties at Airbnb properties in the city. There were two shootings at Airbnb properties in the summer of 2019. During one of those shootings, a 17-year-old and a 20-year-old died. 

Benham said at a 2019 meeting in Brookline that a South Side Slopes Airbnb party near her house included a $20 entrance fee, about 50 people drinking outside and strippers. The guests were taking up scarce parking spots on her street. Benham said at the meeting that one legislative option for the city could be to limit how many properties a person could list on Airbnb to prevent absentee landlords. Benham said she called the property owner of one of her nearby Airbnb nuisance properties and said the owner was unaware of the problem because it was a tenant who had made the Airbnb listing. 

Airbnb has been criticized by former employees for not doing more to limit violence at its properties. Parties are prohibited but enforcement is limited. Airbnb said it would ban the person who rented the venue for life and said it is cooperating with the Pittsburgh police investigation. 

The owner of the property at Madison Avenue and Suismon Street is 900 North Group LLC, which is registered to a Whitehall residence 10 miles away. 

According to Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, 18% of homes in the Deutschtown neighborhood are owner-occupied and 58% are rentals and 24% are vacant.

Oliver Morrison is PublicSource’s K-12 education reporter. He can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ORMorrison.

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The future of the Sto-Rox School District lies in the hands of students like Tristin Dean and Pernell Benning. 

Dean attended the district for seven years but three years ago left to attend 7th grade at Propel Montour. Her mom thought Sto-Rox was too violent. A student was shot in the arm in 2016 and, in 2018, an 18-year-old graduate was shot and killed.

Benning, an eighth grader at Propel Montour, left the district two years ago because his mom was concerned about fighting at Sto-Rox. In the 2019-20 school year, there was a fight in the district’s schools more than once every two days. Propel, which has about two-thirds as many students, reported fewer than one fight every two months.

Sto-Rox has been running budget deficits for so many years that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania finally stepped in last year to put the district back on sound financial footing. On Thursday, the school board passed a sweeping 80-page plan with dozens of changes to make over the next five years, by an 8 – 1 vote. But because the district is already so strapped for funds, the state’s recovery plan doesn’t include many budget cuts and, in fact, includes increases in spending to improve its schools. 

To balance the books, the plan relies on luring 110 charter school students like Dean and Benning back to the district. Those students represent more than $4 million in lost state and federal revenue that the district wants back. Of the 1,800 school-age children in the district’s area, roughly 600 attend charter schools.

Some teachers are skeptical that the district can sustain new programs envisioned by the plan because they remember similar programs in the past being cut for financial reasons. Even some board members who voted for the plan on Thursday have voiced doubts about the odds for its success. 

“I don’t see us recovering as quickly,” said board member Tyler Kochirka at a March 24 board meeting. “My concern is we are putting too much assumption that the next two and a half years are going to work really, really well and all these kids are going to pour back from the charter schools.”

But John Zahorchak, the official appointed by the state to oversee the district’s financial recovery, said there is no other option at this point. He pointed to the Duquesne City School District, which lured back 27 students in one year while under state oversight.

“If we can’t bring kids back from the charter schools, there’s going to be trouble,” he said. “By years four and five, by that time if the initiatives have failed, then the district has failed.”

If that happened, the district could decide to close its high school, like Wilkinsburg, or, if insufficient progress is made, the state could take over nearly every aspect of control from the school board.

As they set out on this sweeping plan, school officials hope it could instead spell the beginning of a brighter future.

“I think we are all on the same page that things need to change around here, so this plan could actually be a positive thing for us,” said School Board President Cameron Culliver.

“You have to spend money to make money.”

What’s in the financial recovery plan?

The district has a $4 million deficit, about 13% of its yearly expenses. If nothing is done, the deficit is expected to balloon to over $15 million over the next five years, according to state projections. 

The state’s recovery plan has many parts that will be unpopular to get costs in line. It asks staff and roughly 110 teachers and classroom aides to pay more for their health insurance and gives principals power to make staffing changes. It has incentives to get a handful of teachers to retire early. And it requires significant increases to local property taxes, increasing from 25 to 27.5 mills in the first year alone. It also includes cuts to the transportation and special education budgets.

Kochirka, a board member, argued against the plan to cut transportation because the district suffered from bus breakdowns when it went with a cheaper company, which meant buses were crammed full of too many students. “I don’t want to go back to that cheapest option and Monday morning, there are four kids to a seat,” he said.

But there isn’t much else to cut, the state concluded. In 2018, PublicSource reported on how the district lacked basic supplies, like books and reliable Wi-Fi, its buildings suffered from leaks and a lack of staffing required programs to shut. And, in 2020, the district gained notoriety for running out of paper and having to rely on community donations.

Residents in the district have one of the lowest average incomes in the state. And the district’s tax base is so small that tax raises won’t generate enough revenue to recover. So even if everything goes to plan, at the end of five years, the district will still be running a budget deficit, albeit smaller. That optimistic outcome is only possible because of the $13 million windfall in federal COVID relief money.

Gov. Tom Wolf’s new proposed budget would, if passed in full, provide $4 million to the district if it’s not whittled away by state Republicans. And a lawsuit on education funding that has been working its way through the courts for years could eventually provide substantial resources to the district if it succeeds. 

The state recovery plan for Sto-Rox recognizes that any additional cuts in most areas would make a dire situation worse. The average student already misses more than 17 days of school per year. 

Fights are frequent, and the district’s test scores have put the elementary and junior/senior high school on state lists of schools that require serious interventions. The plan allocates money for security guards, for math and literacy coaches and department chairs. It also includes significant investment, like salary increases for such hard-to-fill positions as classroom aides and substitute teachers. 

No substitute teachers at the high school has meant teachers routinely spend prep periods covering for other teachers or combining classes of up to 40 students in the room at a time, said Carrie Palermo, longtime teacher and union rep. 

The recovery plan calls for the district to raise test scores for five years up to the state average. But the state recovery officer, Zahorchak, has already begun considering amending the academic goals around growth goals after teachers raised concerns about how much students fell behind during the pandemic. 

Zahorchak said if the district can pull itself together, he hopes it will be making a powerful argument for what could be done with more funding from the state. None of the other six districts in Pennsylvania that have been put under state oversight have yet been able to pull themselves out of financial distress. 

What went wrong?

While the towns of McKees Rocks and Stowe have suffered steady disinvestment, population losses and rising poverty rates since their school systems merged in 1967, the Sto-Rox district remained solvent until relatively recently. 

In 2012, for instance, Sto-Rox ended the school year with a $3 million surplus. Just three years later, the district was $1.5 million in the hole. By 2020, audit results show, the deficit had climbed to $6.5 million, about 20% of its total budget.

Without intervention, the outlook is only expected to worsen.

“We cannot sustain the basic model that we have,” Zahorchak said while presenting the data to the school board on March 10.

Explanations for what went wrong and who’s responsible vary among teachers, school officials and students and families. Many school officials blame charter schools.

Charter enrollment among district students has nearly doubled in the last seven years at the same time the fund balance has plummeted.

Public districts are responsible for paying charter students’ tuition and transportation fees, which average around $14,000 per student in Sto-Rox. District Business Manager Paul Sroka said whenever students leave the district for charter options, they rarely recoup what they’re billed for because costs for teaching staff, building maintenance and other resources can’t always be cut in proportion. 

Financial mismanagement has also played a hand in the budgetary crisis. According to an October audit report, the district didn’t pay $900,000 of tax bills, which, compounded by penalties and interest, had simply piled up without explanation.

Right around the time the audit surfaced, former superintendent Frank Dalmas went on leave. He will retire in January 2023. School officials did not disclose why he left, and Dalmas didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The business manager responsible for billings during this period had by then resigned from the district after slightly more than a year on the job. Sroka — who joined the district last July — said the bills represent a broader state of chaos in the business office he inherited, which he believes is the result of years of poor hiring.

“Part of it was having the business manager as the lowest common denominator, and that coming back to hurt you,” Sroka said. “You have to have stability and accountability in the business office.”

Jacky Hardiman, a previous business manager who left the district in November 2019, insists all billing was up to date when she departed. Deflecting blame from the business office, Hardiman said Dalmas and former board president Samantha Levitzki-Wright repeatedly dismissed her concerns about the spiraling deficit when she raised them during board meetings.

Levitzki-Wright, now a regular board member, recalls this differently.

Long-time Sto-Rox teachers Denise McMichael (left) and Carrie Palermo showed up at a school board meeting with other teachers on March 24 to raise concerns after learning the details of the district’s new financial recovery plan. (Photos by Oliver Morrison/PublicSource)

“We told her to not keep reminding us of the deficit because that was her excuse for everything,” she said. “We know we’re in debt. The question is what to do with that.”

Levtzki-Wright’s successor Cameron Culliver said he’s trying to use his position as board president to encourage better relationships with school administrators and to increase oversight of district operations. 

“There are a lot of things that haven’t been going right, between relationship-building, between different leadership positions throughout the entire district, that we’re trying to rebuild,” Culliver said. “So far, I would say it’s working.”

What will it take to get the charter students back?

In November, Hasson Shackleford, a high school student at Sto-Rox was shot and killed on his way home from school. Raynell Jean-Baptiste, an eighth grader at Sto-Rox, was cousins with Shackleford and said she feels sad when she walks by spots in school she used to see him. Her mom is thinking about moving near Hazelwood to get away from the violence that pummeled Sto-Rox worse than anywhere in Allegheny County in 2021.

Because of students like Jean-Baptiste, student safety is the most urgent need of the district, according to district committee members in charge of implementing the state’s recovery plan. Some of the district’s first steps are likely to be hiring security guards and visiting nearby districts, like Penn Hills, that have implemented behavioral intervention programs.

“Making schools safe is much more than a plan on a wall and a couple of people who carry a gun,” said Megan Van Fossan, the assistant to the superintendent as of this school year, at a March 31 meeting of the committee. “We’re really trying to go to the root cause of every negative behavior so we can address it proactively.”

Dean, a ninth grader at Propel Montour, says her mom thought she would be safer at the charter school. But violence still found her after school. Dean and her friends were hanging out on the steps of an empty school building in March, when the owner of the building drove after them in his truck, threw Dean to the ground and pinned her.

“I was scared, so scared,” she said.  

Dean says she is less distracted at Propel, too. Most of her friends attend Sto-Rox, leaving her to focus on schoolwork.

Before the pandemic, students at Propel Montour, the closest charter school to Sto-Rox, were outperforming Sto-Rox students on state tests. Nearly twice as many elementary students were on grade level in English and four times as many in math. But Propel educates fewer special education students and students with financial challenges. And the latest test scores show Propel Montour’s elementary students have fallen behind during the pandemic to the point where their test scores are nearly identical with the district’s.

“Given the unique and unprecedented learning conditions over the past few years, it is challenging to interpret PSSA results or to compare schools based on those results,” said Sonya Meadows, a spokesperson for Propel.

Shallegra Moye, a doctoral student studying urban education at the University of Pittsburgh, was sending her child to a charter school before she moved into the district and has continued to do so. Moye believes education funding isn’t meant to save the Sto-Rox district but instead is intended for the education of the students of Sto-Rox. “Families want their children to be safe, psychologically safe, physically safe. They want them to have an opportunity to excel academically,” she said. 

In 2018 there was renewed enthusiasm in Sto-Rox after the community raised funds for a new football field and hired a new superintendent. But since then the district’s financial challenges have become more severe. (Photos by Ryan Loew/PublicSource)

Sto-Rox is starting to reach out to former students to try to understand why they left and is already trying to draw students into its newly created cyber school. In addition to trying to improve its own offerings, it is putting a staff member in charge of recruiting charter students. It also plans on increasing funding for the career and technical education program it sends students to at Parkway West Career and Technology Center, where students can earn college credit and trade certifications.

But Moye said the district should be looking to the state for help. “Instead of using your energy to fight against a charter school,” she said, “we should be batting down the doors of Harrisburg and D.C. for fair and equitable funding for all students.”

Correction (4/12/2022): This article was corrected to show the current status of Frank Dalmas’ employment.

Oliver Morrison is PublicSource’s K-12 education reporter. He can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ORMorrison.

Jamie Wiggan is the editor-in-chief of Gazette 2.0 and can be reached by email at jamie@gazette20.com.

This story was fact-checked by Sophia Levin.

This story was co-published by PublicSource and Gazette 2.0.

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Caroline Johns, the superintendent of Northgate School District, saw a presentation about a new behavioral support program back in 2019.

The program, called The Chill Project, is run by The Allegheny Health Network, and is premised on the idea that early life traumas can lead to long-term chronic health problems. So intervening early, in schools, can help improve health outcomes in adults.

Johns was excited. But Northgate didn’t have the money for the program. Then, after the pandemic struck, Congress passed three rounds of funding to help school districts across the country recover. That amounted to $190 billion of support, the largest single federal infusion into schools ever, including more than $420 million for public schools in Allegheny County. Some districts have begun reporting challenges in spending some of the money as they struggle to hire additional staff.

With that new funding, Johns committed $800,000 to the Chill Project over four years. It was the largest commitment of relief dollars of any district in the county to additional mental health resources from the first two rounds of funding despite Northgate being one of the smallest districts. Now each of the four schools in the district has its own full-time behavior specialist and its own licensed clinician.

The behavior specialists teach lessons on mindfulness, stress reduction and emotional regulation in a special “Chill Room” where kids can drop in. The number of kids receiving counseling has increased from 20 or 30 before the pandemic to 60 or 70 now, Johns said.

Like many districts, Northgate saw mental health challenges when students returned to school after a long hiatus. But it hasn’t persisted, Johns said. “We’ve seen that really settle down. And I would attribute that to the supports we put in place.”

This is the kind of outcome that lawmakers had in mind when they passed the additional funding for schools: help students recover from additional challenges posed by the pandemic. The choices Johns and other district leaders across Allegheny County are making with their COVID relief funds could have a big impact on students and the future of the region. Education researchers estimate that the learning loss during the pandemic could cost the country more than $3 trillion in lost productivity over the next three decades if nothing is done to catch students up.

While districts have set distinct priorities, there are some common themes. Most districts have been spending the early funds on some combination of laptops and iPads for students and teachers, extra learning over the summer and after school, additional staff and repairs to HVAC equipment. The next few years could be a massive experiment in the effectiveness of additional funding if some districts are able to recover more quickly than others.

Johns said she thinks some districts may not do as well if they don’t invest in professional health staff.

“A lot of districts are trying to put in social-emotional learning and teachers are having to pick that up,” she said. “That’s admirable, but having trained professionals right on site is the more optimal way to go.”

The chill room at Bellevue Elementary School, where students come for behavior lessons or help calming down. (Photos by Oliver Morrison/PublicSource)

A breakdown of Allegheny County COVID relief spending

Some early reports suggested school districts across the country were wasting the relief money on things like athletic fields. But an analysis of thousands of districts by FutureEd has shown that the money is largely being spent on the kinds of things it was intended for: teachers, after school and summer remediation and HVAC improvements.

This is also true in Allegheny County. 

PublicSource has compiled the proposed budgets for COVID relief funds among the 43 school districts in Allegheny County, which included 1,100 different line item proposals.

We found one instance where a district proposed spending money on its athletic facilities: Bethel Park School District budgeted more than $850,000, part of which was set aside for a gym floor replacement. Bethel Park’s finance manager, Douglas McCausland, responded to an initial inquiry about how the district spent its money and mentioned some of the typical expenses other districts are spending money on, such as technology and HVAC. But McCausland didn’t respond to an email asking about the gym floors.

PublicSource’s analysis includes the first two rounds of relief funding for all 43 public school districts in Allegheny County, totalling about $160 million. The plans for the third round of COVIDrelief funding have not been approved by the state and published on its website.

Some highlights of the first two rounds of spending across Allegheny County include:

• $42 million budgeted for staff salaries and benefits 

• More than $28 million on tablets and laptops

• $15 million on fixing or replacing HVAC systems

• $12 million on summer school salaries and costs, half of which is being spent by Pittsburgh 

• More than $4 million on social workers, psychologists and therapists, and $2 million for nurses

The last and biggest round, about $262 million, will be focused more on learning loss and mental health issues. Pittsburgh Public Schools [PPS], for example, has budgeted $13 million for new instructional materials and $5 million for additional tutoring. 

James Fogarty, the executive director for A+, sat on an advisory committee of administrators, parents, teachers, students and parents who debated how to spend the final $100 million. Fogarty wanted to put more money at the discretion of individual school principals and said he thinks the district probably allocated too much for instructional materials. But he was happy that the district put more than $5 million toward community partnerships and $5 million toward tutoring.

“We wanted transparency and we got transparency,” Fogarty said.

Low income first

The relief funds are targeted toward districts with low-income and disadvantaged students. That means PPS, which serves a majority of low-income students, received a large share. PPS enrolls about 15% of the students in Allegheny County but is receiving 37% of the total COVID relief dollars.

PPS budgeted $33.7 million to retain staffing at its current levels. PPS has been running multimillion dollar budget deficits the past few years, and the school board is using a third of its final round of relief money to reduce the deficit rather than make cuts or close schools.

Ebony Pugh, a PPS spokesperson, declined to make anyone available for an interview until after the state approves the district’s plan for spending the third round of relief funding on March 24.

Districts in financial distress, including Penn Hills, Sto-Rox and Duquesne City, also included significant federal relief funding to retain staff. Sue Mariani, the superintendent of Duquesne, said without that funding, class sizes would’ve had to increase “dramatically” from around 21 students up to 29.  She said the district will likely have to raise taxes after the federal money runs out.

“We are going to have to do something to maintain, unless we can get students back from charters and cyber charters,” she said.

Why are they spending so much on air conditioning?

HVAC expenditures are one of the ways districts are encouraged to spend their money, because the increased ventilation can reduce COVID-19 transmission. For Penn Hills, HVAC repairs were already a pressing issue: The district has had to cancel classes for students at times because of heating and cooling problems.

This spending is typical of districts like Penn Hills that serve a large number of low-income students, according to Phyllis Jordan, the associate director of FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. She did a large-scale analysis of COVID relief spending across the country and found that HVAC repairs were the No. 1 priority of districts with the highest poverty levels. Typically, low-income districts don’t spend as much on capital projects, Jordan said. 

“So they’re not only spending this because they can, they’re spending it because they need to,” she said.

Penn Hills’ delay in HVAC upgrades was caused, in part, by a dispute on its board about which vendor to hire. But districts across the country are having trouble spending their COVID relief money fast enough as they struggle to hire the additional staff they budgeted for. Penn Hills was able to hire eight reading specialists but has struggled to fill its paraprofessional and school nurse positions, according to Superintendent Nancy Hines.

Gateway School District spent two-thirds of its first two rounds of funding on a new HVAC system at its middle school and is now installing HVAC at its two elementary schools. Part of the reason districts like Gateway are investing in HVAC is because of the way the funding is structured: The money goes away after two years. 

Krissy Rohr, behavioral health school educator at Northgate High School, stands in front of a student painting in the chill room as students walk by in the hallway. (Photos by Oliver Morrison/PublicSource)

Any new staff a district hires might have to be laid off when the money runs out. But the HVAC improvements will last. William Short, the superintendent of Gateway, said you have to be careful with federal funds, “especially when talking about funds that are one and done.”

Johns, the Northgate superintendent, said she hopes to keep the Chill Project at Northgate schools after the funding runs out and hopes to apply for new grants to pay for it. 

Carlynton School District also has invested in health staff from The Chill Project, and its superintendent, John Kreider, said the investment is partly paying for itself: Some students that previously had to be referred to outside specialists have not had the same issues because of early interventions from the Chill project and the district was able to cancel some of its other contracts. 

Kreider said the relief money not only has helped the district recover, but also “puts ourselves into a better position than going into the pandemic.”

Oliver Morrison is PublicSource’s K-12 education reporter. He can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ORMorrison.

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Nancy Hines, superintendent of the Penn Hills School District, didn’t have a scheduled meeting until lunchtime on Jan. 20, but by 10 a.m., she had already met with a half dozen people.

The common denominator across many of her morning interactions was the previous night’s board meeting. Several senior staff walked into her office to talk about the committee meetings. Their mood was upbeat: Eileen Navish, the business manager for the district, had given the most positive report in years. 

When Hines took over as superintendent in 2015, the district was around $19 million in the hole. But Navish reported that the district now had a positive balance of $7 million, an amount that could increase as the district receives additional COVID relief funds. 

The state auditor general first called out the district for financial mismanagement in 2016. Then, after two additional reports highlighting mismanagement, in 2019, Penn Hills was placed into financial distress by the state Department of Education, giving the state additional oversight.

The district’s property tax rate — above 30 mills —  is now the second highest in the county after six years of tax increases. The district has rebuilt its finances by refinancing bonds, securing grants from the state, selling old school buildings, raising taxes and cutting staff. It then received an additional windfall in the form of COVID relief funds.

Penn Hills has scrapped its way back to solvency and found itself with savings that would’ve taken much longer to accrue if not for the pandemic.

But signs of its financial past are still evident among staff: teachers have missed out on the typical annual raise on their salary schedules. Some furloughed staff have had to change the subjects they teach to find a permanent position within the district. And class sizes have increased — a symptom of the staffing cuts they’ve made to try to balance the budget. And the district will have to raise taxes or make further cuts to balance its budget once its federal relief money is spent.

Hines said she believes the district has finally achieved the kind of stability that will allow it to focus on some perennial problems — changing its approach to discipline and improving its academics, especially at the middle school.

The reasons for the district’s financial problems are clear now but it’s not clear who was really responsible. The previous administration blamed the old board and the board blamed the previous administration. Now Hines said she sends detailed weekly reports to the board and has tried to change that dynamic.

“I’m going to tell them the good, the bad and the ugly and going to have a record that I told them,” she said. “That’s painful at times. That’s how you have to do business.”

How they got into this mess

Back in Hines office, she took a moment to review some checks that were being issued in the afternoon before signing off on them. She looked to ensure there were three signatures and flipped through the pages of detailed explanations of what the money was for and who had approved it.

This kind of scrutiny was missing from the district when she arrived, Hines said. She said she realized early on she didn’t know who she could trust from the old administration. She would have to scrutinize every aspect of the district’s operations. 

Hines didn’t realize what she signed up for when she took an assistant superintendent job in 2014. She had previously worked in the district as a teacher and later as a principal before departing for jobs elsewhere. She thought the focus of her return would be improving the district’s academics. She took over in 2015 after the previous superintendent resigned and learned in her second month that the district had about $10 million less than had been reported.

She had to make an unusual plea to a judge to take out an expensive loan without collateral because otherwise Hines didn’t know how the district would meet its payroll. The judge scolded her for being so irresponsible, even though she’d only recently taken over. A year later, she found herself standing next to the state auditor general at a press conference as the district was excoriated for financial mismanagement and serious ethical lapses. 

“I just wanted to hang my head. It was just so shameful,” she told PublicSource. 

Lisa O’Connor waits for more first graders to show up on the video screen for her next lesson. Gisselle Perez Montoya works on a phonics lesson, while half of the class works on the same lesson from home. (Photos by Oliver Morrison/PublicSource)

Soon after, the Allegheny County District Attorney’s office convened a grand jury and, in 2019, issued two scathing reports about the district’s financial practices and conflicts of interest. 

The reports revealed ethical problems, such as staff using district credit cards for personal items and board members getting jobs through connections to firms that the district hired. Many of those staff are no longer with the district, and the previous board members are all gone except the current board president, Erin Vecchio.

And then there was the big structural problem: The district had borrowed money to build two large new school buildings without properly accounting for where the money would come from. And then the board let the costs of construction balloon. 

The consolidated elementary school was unpopular with just about everyone except the board who voted for it in 2011. Many parents and staff preferred the smaller, neighborhood elementary schools. The oversized new high school that opened in 2012 didn’t draw back students from charter schools like the district had hoped. The district had been losing students without cutting back on staff for years, raising taxes or cutting other expenses, leaving it with multimillion-dollar budget deficits. And just as Hines took over, the district was facing large debt payments to pay for these elaborate buildings.

The mega-elementary school

The pandemic has eased the immediacy of the district’s financial challenges. But Daniel Matsook, the district’s financial recovery officer, said the COVID relief money is papering over the fact that the district’s regular income still doesn’t cover its regular expenses. It will be up to the board, over the next few years, he said, to pass budgets that finally put the district on a path to long-term solvency.

Hines has had to walk a fine line of dealing frankly about the district’s problems, she said, but also not highlighting them so much that it loses more students to charter schools. 

Although the pandemic helped speed up the recovery financially, it also took a lot of attention away from basic academic improvements, the job Hines originally returned to the district to do in 2014. 

“Now my focus is to get back to the academics,” she said.

Cathy Ekis reads a book about penguins and kindness to her kindergarten class. Ekis’ pre-K classes were cut four years ago when the district ran into financial trouble. COVID protocols meant the children are spaced farther apart and sometimes Ekis uses a microphone so the whole class can hear her. The teachers told the district young kindergarteners need iPads, not laptops. But the large class size and lack of an aide means Ekis has to do things like untangle headphone wires while her students wait. (Photos by Oliver Morrison/PublicSource)

Kristin Brown, the principal of Penn Hills Elementary School, said that over the years, she has tried to block out the background noise caused by the district’s financial turmoil. She has been with the district since 1992 and previously served as the principal of one of its neighborhood elementary schools. 

When the consolidated elementary school opened in 2014, she had her work cut out for her, building a sense of community among more than 1,300 students.

“Everyone loved their neighborhood schools, so it wasn’t wildly, excitedly received to be coming into this new building,” she said. “So there were a lot of naysayers and challenges to coming here.”

By one measure, she’s had some success. The elementary school students showed growth in math, reading and science scores on their state exams between 2015 and 2019 even as the district lost staff. The middle and high school test results were more mixed.

A new approach to behavior

Mental health challenges during the pandemic have exacerbated behavioral issues across the country. One counselor stopped Hines early in the fall semester and said, “These kids have to relearn school.”

Hines has been slowly rolling out a new approach to discipline, replacing security guards with counseling staff and trying to drive the number of suspensions down.

This year, the elementary school added a team of counselors trained in restorative practices. They have a special room where kids go to practice how they can avoid problems in the future.  “We may not see a change today, next month, next year even,” said behavior management specialist Ruston Brown, who works with the counseling team. “But we know if we continue this, we know the changes will be made.”

Penn Hills suffered more from violence in 2021 than most districts its size: three students were murdered in shootings, another died of an overdose and another died of an accidental shooting. Although the violence occured off campus, a shooting in the fall required the district to play a football game without fans.

Hines said she believes the district needs to figure out what’s driving student behaviors. “It’s time-consuming,” she said. “There are people who feel you are being too soft, you need to set an example and publicly shame kids and that will be a deterrent. And the research says that’s definitely not the case.”

Stephanie Cucunato took over teaching a room dedicated to helping K-2nd grade students with autism after her previous job as a reading specialist was eliminated by the district during the district's financial problems. Cameron Mackey finished working on a word building puzzle while the other students started their choice activity time. (Photo by Oliver Morison / PublicSource)

Not everyone is fully onboard. Jackie Blakey-Tate, the school board’s vice president and a former principal in Pittsburgh Public Schools, used to work with students with behavioral challenges. “You can’t just smack a kid on the wrist and say don’t do that again,” she said. “You have to have consequences, especially for things putting others in danger. So, for me, the jury is still out.”

At 12:30 p.m. Jan. 20, Hines finally had her first scheduled meeting of the day: a Zoom with a group of local ministers who are hoping to work with the district to create “safe spaces” for students to go after school. It would be funded by a county health department grant. Although details of the program are still being developed, Hines said the plan would provide a space for students to complete homework, get a snack or meal and eventually offer additional enrichment off campus.  

“When kids feel alone, they’re scared,” Hines said. “That’s when things happen.”

Oliver Morrison is PublicSource’s K-12 education reporter. He can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ORMorrison.

This story was fact-checked by Dalia Maeroff.

The post Penn Hills superintendent looks to academic growth after seven years of financial calamity and controversies appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.