School board candidate brings entrepreneur’s mind, dissent
When Khamil Scantling was an elementary student in East Orange, N.J., her school district changed the name of its buildings from presidents and other historical figures to influential Black people from the area.
The Knoxville entrepreneur, who works to help Black-owned businesses succeed, said she didn’t realize how important that was until she moved to Pittsburgh for college.
“My school went from being Lincoln Elementary to the Dionne Warwick Institute of Economics and Entrepreneurship. It literally changed my life,” Ms. Scantling said in a recent phone interview. “That’s the power of education and the power of a district on how it shapes people, and I took it for granted when I was a kid. It took me coming to Pittsburgh to see that people don’t get to see those images of themselves in their education system.”
Ms. Scantling, 32, is running for the Pittsburgh Public Schools board seat being vacated at the end of the year by retired teacher Cynthia Falls. Ms. Scantling faces Carrick social worker Jamie Piotrowski in the May 18 Democratic primary, which will likely decide the next District 7 school board member because no Republican candidate has emerged. The winner will represent the city’s Hilltop neighborhoods, including the South Side, Overbrook, Carrick and part of Brookline.
Though Ms. Scantling is not urging the district to change the name of its schools, she said she believes it is important for the district to reflect the students it serves. The student body is more than 50% Black, she noted, but the percentage of Black teachers is much lower. She said she would work to improve the ratio of Black teachers.
“The cultural differences between the educators and the students absolutely makes a difference,” Ms. Scantling said. “There are certain miscommunications that happen that are totally cultural. There are certain biases — inherent biases — that our staff, administrators and our educators may have that hinder them from fully educating the children. Those are things that need to be adjusted.”
Ms. Scantling founded Cocoapreneur Pgh LLC, a Blackowned business consultancy organization, and co-founded Greenwood Week Pittsburgh, a nonprofit that guides entrepreneurs through the obstacles of
business ownership.
She said she aims to fill gaps and build bridges with her business, and she wants to do the same thing for the city’s schools.
“I connect dots, more or less, and that’s what I want to do for Pittsburgh Public Schools,” she said. “My philosophies and my values in my professional life, in my business life are the same ones that I’m bringing to this school board run and what I want to bring to Pittsburgh Public Schools.”
Ms. Scantling said she believes the district could do a better job of leveraging the resources in the city, including the universities and philanthropic organizations. By not doing so amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, the district “dropped the ball.”
“We have resources in this region, like the Pittsburgh Technology Council. We have Neighborhood Allies. We have a huge philanthropic community. We have Google headquarters in Pittsburgh, and we were not able to get students devices or access to the internet in order to get online before three months had passed,” she said. “That’s a failure of leadership.”
That’s only one of the leadership and accountability issues Ms. Scantling said she sees with the district, and she places some of the blame on the school board.
“I think we have a board currently that is packed with, dare I say, yes-men,” she said. “They kind of want to go with the flow; they don’t want to rock the boat for fear of not being on board with everybody else, but that’s literally the job of the school board: to hold the school administration accountable.”
Ms. Scantling said she would be willing to be a dissenting voice when necessary and would not be afraid to speak out if she felt as though other board members or administrators were not acting in the best interest of the students.
She said she’s against closing schools — including those the district recently proposed to shutter for building age and underutilization — because it historically impacts Black students and communities disproportionately. Schools in the district would be better utilized if more children enrolled, she said, adding many students have left the district due to dissatisfaction.
Ms. Scantling sends her 7-year-old daughter to Urban Academy, a charter school in Larimer — and plans to do so with her 4year-old son — because she felt the district would provide an inadequate education.
“I send my kid to a charter school because she was not going to get what she needed out of the Pittsburgh Public School that was closest to us,” she said. “There’s this argument about how charters are more or less destroying the [district] budget, but kids are going to charters because they’re actually educating and enriching the students. There would be no space for charters if they weren’t actually filling a need.”
Ms. Scantling said she wants to help shape the district into what Pittsburgh’s children need it to be.
“When I don’t like things, I fix them or I reimagine them altogether, and that’s what I’m looking to bring to this particular role,” she said. “I think you need bold people on the board to say, ‘This is not OK.’ PPS’s motto is ‘Expect Great Things.’ These are not great things, so what are we going to do to actually live up to this motto?”