Woodland Hills looks toward the future

3,600 students from home environments that are radically different, especially so for a district of modest size. It has fewer than 50,000 residents spread over roughly 13 square miles.

A place like Rankin, where nearly four in 10 residents live below the poverty line, co-exists in the district — and its households shoulder the same millage rate — as families in a community like Churchill, whose median household income approaches $90,000.

Once in the classroom, student trajectories are divergent, too. Many follow a collegebound path with advanced placement credits and experiences worthy of the district’s core values statement, as seen on its website: To offer a “safe and secure environment,” a “challenging curriculum” and a “permission to dream.”

Others like Antwon, who had aspirations and a talent for poetry, but also felt the tug of the streets, travel a more precarious path.

Antwon was a passenger in a car stopped by East Pittsburgh Police on June 19, minutes after the car was reported to have been involved in a drive-by shooting in North Braddock. Antwon, who was not armed, fled and was shot in the back, arm and face. Officer Michael Rosfeld was charged in the shooting and faces trial next year.

The difficult lessons still being learned in Woodland Hills date to the district’s creation in 1981 by federal court order after a lawsuit filed a decade earlier.

Parents of black students asserted that the state had created a racially segregated district by organizing the General Braddock district to serve Braddock, Rankin and North Braddock. Their class-action suit said General Braddock amounted to a “dual system” of inferior education for blacks.

Ten years later, the late U.S. District Judge Gerald Weber ordered creation of Woodland Hills by merging General Braddock with the predominantly white districts of Churchill Area, Edgewood, Swissvale and Turtle Creek.

Now clear from court supervision, it still struggles with issues like unequal disciplinary practices for minority students and a disproportionately low share of minority students in higher level courses. It also is a place of activism and parents and employees seeking to make the district a better place.

That spirit was evident in April during a trip to Harrisburg by Woodland Hills students. They attended a rally about gun violence and spoke with legislators about its toll, including the loss of 16year-old Jerame Turner, whose memory was invoked by his twin, Ciara, 17. “I love you forever J.”

Said Woodland Hills senior Kiondre Tibbs: “If we can save even one life, that makes all the difference.”