PPS board makes 2 big decisions

Superintendent’s contract renewed

Superintendent Anthony Hamlet will remain the chief administrator in the Pittsburgh Public Schools for an additional four years.

The city school board Wednesday, by a vote of 7-2, awarded Mr. Hamlet a contract that will last until the end of the 2025 academic year.

In a statement released after the vote, Mr. Hamlet thanked the school board and said he was looking forward to working with the district staff and community partners in the months and years ahead.

“Even in the midst of a pandemic, we are committed to the work we have begun through Imagine PPS; our strategic plan for the future,” Mr. Hamlet said. “Now more than ever, we must make the changes to our system necessary to get the results we want for our students. I take this charge as superintendent as my No. 1 priority.”

Mr. Hamlet’s initial five-year contract, which began in 2016, will expire on June 30, and the new one will take effect the next day. Details of the contract, including salary, have not been finalized.

The board members who voted to retain Mr. Hamlet were Kevin Carter, Cynthia Falls, Veronica Edwards, Devon Taliaferro, Pam Harbin, Terry Kennedy and Sylvia Wilson. Voting against the contract renewal were Sala Udin and Bill Gallagher, who said he did not have sufficient information and wanted to postpone the vote.

School board members had not previously discussed Mr. Hamlet’s contract in public, calling it a personnel matter. But they spoke about it for more than an hour at Wednesday’s legislative meeting.

Multiple school board members noted that the district has seen modest improvement in student performance and graduation rates as well as a lowered suspension rate during Mr. Hamlet’s tenure.

“Change and evolution takes time,” said Ms. Wilson, the school board president. “Dr. Hamlet did not bring his magic wand to accomplish this.”

Some in the community, though, strongly opposed Mr. Hamlet’s renewal over what they believe are leadership and organizational flaws.

Mr. Hamlet’s critics said student success rates have not improved significantly enough during his tenure and point to the major achievement gap between Black and white students in the district.

Mr. Udin, a frequent detractor of Mr. Hamlet over student achievement issues, once again bemoaned the poor performance in reading and math among the district’s Black students.

“When I look at the record of failure, especially in reading and mathematics for African American students throughout the entire Pittsburgh Public Schools district, it is abominable, it is unforgivable,” Mr. Udin said. “It is inexcusable that we have not found a way to significantly improve the performance scores of Black children in this school district, and we are forced to brag about incremental, tiny improvements that really do not improve their ability — it only improves the statistics.”

Mr. Udin urged the board to delay the vote to give the public more time to comment and wait for the results of two ongoing investigations involving Mr. Hamlet. The state Ethics Commission is investigating the superintendent over issues with financial disclosures in 2017 and 2018, and the city controller’s office is auditing the district’s supply of devices for students and staff.

Several other board members immediately attacked Mr. Udin’s depiction of Mr. Hamlet and the district.

“What does transformation look like?” Mr. Carter asked. “Mr. Udin talks about transformation, he talks about metrics, but has offered no solid plan for what that looks like, no solid goal that the board could coalesce around.

“When we talk about transformation, what is transformative?” Mr. Carter continued. “When you look at the achievement, and you look at the numbers, the numbers are up from where they were at five years ago. Are they up significantly? No. But what does significant look like? It’s a subjective term that I may define one way and Mr. Udin another.”

Ms. Falls said Mr. Udin has not participated in efforts by his board colleagues and other district partners to improve student performance.

“We had asked you time and time again: ‘Join us, join this team, and let’s work together. Let’s get the African American [student] scores and whatever else up,’” Ms. Falls said. “Have you? No. And why? Your answer was what? I don’t want to. Well, Mr. Udin, what if the rest of us said we didn’t want to? What would be accomplished here?”

Ms. Wilson said performance among Black students in Pittsburgh mirrors what is happening at other schools across the country following years of bad policy decisions at various levels of government. Under Mr. Hamlet’s leadership, she said, the district has made gains in that area, although she acknowledged that the pandemic will likely cause a setback.

Ms. Wilson also identified other accomplishments Mr. Hamlet has made during his tenure.

There is a nurse for every campus, additional social workers and counselors, and career and technical programs have been expanded to include more students and provide more opportunities for career options, she said. Additionally, she added, there has been a reallocation of resources to schools with the most needs, attention has been given to average class sizes, community schools have been expanded and relationships continue to develop between the district and community partners for out-of-schooltime programs.

Ms. Wilson said board members made the decision to vote on Mr. Hamlet’s contract Wednesday because of the urgent need to focus on the challenge of starting a school year with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Under state school code, the board had until Feb. 1 to vote on the contract.

Supporters of Mr. Hamlet have said they believe renewing the superintendent’s contract would bring muchneeded stability to the district, especially amid the pandemic.

Mr. Hamlet’s detractors have blamed the superintendent for what they believe to be the district’s bungled response to the COVD-19 pandemic, citing a lack of communication, the fact some students are still waiting to receive devices for remote instruction and other issues.

Administrators have held numerous webinars for stakeholders in recent weeks to explain the district’s approach to resuming school during the pandemic. The district’s efforts to get an ageappropriate device to every student for remote learning has been complicated by a national backlog of laptops.

Those in the community who wanted Mr. Hamlet to be replaced also noted controversies during his tenure that have brought bad press to the district.

In addition to the Ethics Commission’s inquiry, the school board investigated Mr. Hamlet in 2019 after he and several administrators took an unauthorized trip to Cuba during professional development training in Florida. The investigation has since ended, and the results were never released. Before being sworn in as superintendent, questions arose about inaccuracies in his resume about student progress data from his previous job.

But Ms. Kennedy, second vice president of the board, said many in the community who formed negative opinions of Mr. Hamlet did so because they were looking at single instances — and sometimes provided with incomplete or wrong information — instead of examining the superintendent’s work as a whole.

“I believe some of the people who provided testimony or email [to the school board] based their opinion on inaccurate information,” Ms. Kennedy said. “It is my opinion they used information provided to them that shined the light on specific issues without being provided the full picture.”